There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider life and interests. Toby Ferris will certainly not have seen this as in any way an autobiography, but what it essentially does is use a quest for the 42 surviving paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder as a starting point for an exploration of anything and everything, from the death of a friend to art history, family history, philosophy, anthropology, mathematics, music and paragliding.
The result of this — what Ferris calls his Bruegel Project — is an intricately plotted book that is by turns stimulating, moving and sometimes mildly pretentious. The 13 chapters are organised not in chronological order of the paintings, nor geographical order of the author’s visits, but relate either to objects and events in the paintings — gallows, beggars, bears, fire, census, massacre —or to qualities such as ‘cold’ that license the author to cut loose.
Take Chapter XII for instance, entitled ‘Crowd’. Ferris starts with a visit to Budapest with his brother to see ‘The Preaching of John the Baptist’ in Buda Castle. Another half dozen paintings are considered in detail. He discusses crowds of tourists, crowds in galleries, the psychologist Robin Dunbar’s theory of numbers in the context of social relations, the significance of hats, the persecution of gypsies in the second world war, a study of the flocking behaviour of birds and fish, the career and experiments of the art historian Hans Sedlmayr, the quality of uncanniness in Bruegel’s work and the little we actually know of Bruegel’s life. On to lunch in the canteen of the Ministry of Justice in Vienna, military uniforms, Bruegel’s placement of groups of figures in or on landscape, Ferris’s brother’s book on Beethoven and much more.
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