The figure of the fool walking along in the centre of the
picture reveals that Brue-gel's interests lay beyond a mere
depiction of communal life or carnival amusement. Some
interpreters deduce from such pictures as this one that the
painter was primarily a "teacher of the people". They look
for the didactic message in every one of his works, treating
each picture as a moralizing treatise. Thus, in the case of
the painting portraying a winter-bound village on a frozen
river with ice-skaters, Winter Landscape with a Bird-trap
(1565), they are of the opinion that the
blindness to danger of the birds under the converted door
must be seen in connection with the foolishness of the
people on the ice. It is surely not by chance, they argue,
that the two birds on the bush in the foreground, or the one
in the top-right corner, are as big as the people on the
ice: the picture must surely be intended as an admonition to
general prudence.
Would the painter have hidden his warning so discreetly,
however, if it had been so important to him? Or was it
perhaps meant by the painter as a little game for those who
are constantly seeking some prescription for life in every
picture? Or, again, could it be that what we see here is
merely the chance product of perspective?
The fact that so much has been pondered and written on moral
messages in Bruegel's pictures is presumably due not least
to problems of communication: it is easier to talk about
morality than about art. That which renders a picture art
cannot be described in words. The interpreter can give some
indication regarding the selection of colours, for example,
or the aesthetic function of some undergrowth in the
foreground. He is unable to explain the artistic process -
how the painter succeeded in conveying the variety of
information contained in an actual winter landscape onto a
piece of wood 38 by 56 centimetres large, in such a way that
the colours and shapes give us the impression of a landscape
spreading out quite naturally before our eyes -and,
furthermore, how the painter uses his colours and shapes to
produce a feeling of happiness in the observer.
Instead of attempting an explanation, van Mander, Bruegel's
first biographer, cites a drastic comparison, transferring
the artistic process of transformation into a bodily one.
The comparison was prompted by Bruegel's mountains, van
Mander writing that people said that Bruegel, "when he was
in the Alps, swallowed all the mountains and rocks and spat
them out again as painting boards."
