Pieter Bruegel the Elder,Google Art Project
"Hunters in the Snow," 1565.
When I was a kid growing up in Australia, a print hung in the living room of my parents’ house for as long as I can remember. It depicted a winter scene—all muted whites and grays—in which three hunters and a pack of dogs plod down a slope towards a frozen village. A single, small animal—a rabbit or fox, perhaps—hangs over one hunter’s shoulder, and something about the scene tells you the hunt hasn’t been successful. Perhaps it’s the way the hunters’ heads and the dogs’ heads hang low. Or maybe it’s the dark birds perched in the trees overhead, but although the wintry village scene teems with life, you are left with an ominous sense that trouble lies ahead. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a print of “The Hunters in the Snow,” which a Dutch artist named Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted in 1565. If that seems a peculiar thing to find in a suburban Melbourne household during the 1980s, consider that the household was run by a couple of English expats surprised to find themselves living in Australia and experiencing unexpected nostalgia about dark, cold European winters. Nine-year-old me never wondered what “The Hunters in the Snow” was doing in our living room. In the way that kids will, I accepted this strange part of my surroundings, and remember gazing at it often, darkly fascinated with the glimpse it gave into an alien place and time.
"Good art does more than just depict people, places, and things. Good art encodes memory, illuminates perspective, and invites us into the consciousness of other people, opening windows through which we are offered chances see the world differently—more broadly and richly, perhaps, than the way we perceive it ourselves."
Why am I telling you this? Since this issue of Country Roads considers the visual arts, and since I possess as much innate artistic talent as a plate of beans, my plan is to tell you about my wife and my anniversary. As a reward for putting up with one another for thirty years, in May we spent a week in Vienna, Austria—a city we had come close to as twenty-something backpackers, but never actually visited. Vienna is a gob-smackingly beautiful city, bristling with Baroque palaces and Gothic cathedrals, grand avenues lined with mansions, monuments, and parks. The Austrian capital since the 1150s, Vienna was shaped by the Habsburgs, who, as one of Europe’s most powerful (and inbred) ruling dynasties, established the city as the seat of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, spent three hundred years building astonishing architectural monuments to themselves, then proceeded to fill them with exquisite art, statuary, and furniture. Many now serve as museums, making the inner city not only one of the most beautiful sites in all Europe, but also one of the best places to see art in the world.
See art we did. During the week we lost ourselves amid the soaring halls of former imperial palaces filled with works by giants of the western artistic canon—Leonardo da Vinci to Michaelangelo; Raphael to Rembrandt; and hundreds more. At the majestic Upper Belevedere Palace, home to the world’s largest collection of works by Gustav Klimt, we elbowed through hordes of visitors for a glimpse of his iconic “The Kiss,” (suitable for a thirtieth anniversary, don’t you think?). At the Leopold Museum we came under the spell of pioneering Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele, who left behind hundreds of works of remarkable and disturbing beauty when he died at just twenty-eight.
And then there was the Künsthistoriches (Art History) Museum, which was built to house the vast collections of the Habsburg monarchy and today represents one of the world’s most extensive art collections. Its domed exhibition halls are festooned with Rembrandts and Michaelangelos and Caravaggios … and the world’s largest collection of work by one Pieter Bruegel the Elder. While drifting through one such gallery I found it. A familiar wintry scene, the trio of failed hunters. Transfixed with recognition and flooded by childhood memory, I sank onto a nearby bench, where I remained for a long time.
Good art does more than just depict people, places, and things. Good art encodes memory, illuminates perspective, and invites us into the consciousness of other people, opening windows through which we are offered chances see the world differently—more broadly and richly, perhaps, than the way we perceive it ourselves. After so many years, the jolt of recognition that came upon encountering that painting unleashed a torrent of reflection: on the passage of time, on how my life has changed, and what I’ve learned along the way. That’s what keeps us looking.
