Art: Man for All Seasons: A Bruegel Calendar

IF there is a still point in the turning seasons, it is probably about now. Astronomers put it sooner—when the sun starts north, but before Christmas. Gardeners might date it later on, when the ground begins to thaw. But since 45 B.C., most people have gone along with Julius Caesar, who with more psychological insight than astronomical accuracy placed it at the day now called January 1.

No man observed the revolving seasons more intently than the painter known to posterity as Pieter Bruegel the Elder. He died just 400 years ago in Brussels. His death was attended by due ceremony and the admiration of his peers. But few of them recognized that the world had lost its first major, and arguably the best, landscape painter in all history. Artists before him, in other centuries and other countries, came out of the countryside to paint vignettes of their memories, almost obsequiously, in the background of their portraits of princes or courtiers, martyrs or saints. Bruegel made the unprideful countryside central, something that was not merely an area for foreground drama but was itself an event.

Irreplaceable Treasures

About 40 of his paintings survive, and though the anniversary of his death was widely memorialized, no major exhibition was mounted, for the simple reason that few if any curators cared to risk the loan and shipping of such irreplaceable treasures. Among the best are a series of The Seasons, originally commissioned by a Brussels merchant. Only five survive, and these have been dispersed. As a memorial to Bruegel —and to year's end and year's beginning—TIME here presents four of these paintings. The originals are each roughly 4 ft. by 5 ft. But Bruegel's fabulous command of scale made every small part a picture in itself. In the following pages half a dozen details —chosen by Author-Critic Alexander Eliot after a long study of the paintings in Vienna and Prague —are reproduced in exactly the size they take up in the original'paintings. They are in themselves landscapes many a lesser painter would be proud to sign.

Bruegel makes one peer down through winter dusk like some half-frozen bird upon the wing. He gives the March floods room to rise, roaring about the dikes of Flanders in time of carnival and willow pruning on the dark, hard-budded land. He shows the earth veiled in blue boundlessness at haying time. Then in the fall comes the sacrifice of her apples, her grapes and human fruits as well. The herd plods home. A body dangles from a gibbet on a hill. Reality was his subject, and truth his object. Yet these paintings are not finickily meticulous, as are those of Burgundian miniaturists. Rather, they are painted with a panache and freedom that, centuries later, the Impressionists were to rediscover.