How long is long enough to look at a work of art?

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.