Welcome to the madcap world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where a giant disembodied head has a right eye like a smashed window, a gaping mouth full of people and a screaming man in a boat emerging from the bridge that has been hollowed out of its ear. Meanwhile, a monster fish balances on its bandaged forehead with people doing acrobatic, or maybe sinister, stuff inside its excavated stomach. This is just one phantasm in Bruegel’s drawing The Temptation of Saint Anthony, a homage to his Netherlandish predecessor Hieronymus Bosch who had also turned Anthony’s plight into a carnivalesque romp of outrageous creatures and absurd incidents. The difference is that he brings a more saddened, accepting eye to this world’s insanity.
Bruegel is in the title, and on the poster and catalogue cover, of the Ashmolean’s survey of Renaissance and baroque drawings from … where exactly? Today Flanders is a region of Belgium. In the 16th century it was part of a much more vaguely bordered Netherlandish region ruled by Spain; what is now Holland successfully rebelled against Spanish rule while the southern Netherlands, including the great cities of Brussels and Antwerp, stayed colonised and Catholic. There’s a panoramic drawing here of Antwerp, the key North Sea port where Portuguese merchants rubbed shoulders with artists fascinated by the monkeys and coconuts they traded, alongside locally caught fish. Maybe that material abundance of a burgeoning Atlantic economy is actually what makes the art here so characterful.
It certainly stimulated the genius of Bruegel, who painted monkeys in Antwerp harbour and was as familiar with ocean-going vessels as windmills. But be warned, he’s only got a couple of works in the show and at first glance his visionary drawing of Saint Anthony’s demons may seem an outlier. Other artists look more classically minded. Which for some people reads “dull”. This was an age when money and power were moving from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, yet Italy exerted vast cultural charisma. The show even includes a cast of the ancient Belvedere Torso, in the Vatican, to ram home the idea that many artists from northern Europe were trekking to Italy by the 1500s to study antiquities and Renaissance masters. One of them, Jan van der Straet, settled in Florence, frescoing its palaces, under the Italianised name Giovanni Stradano: his drawing of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf brings a lovely Flemish realism to a mythological scene.
Bruegel, by contrast, has traditionally been seen as a peasant painter, untutored and raw. That’s not true. His Landscape with a Village and Cattle at the start of the show is not a peasant’s view of the countryside. It’s a pastoral, a city dweller’s idyll of a peaceful hamlet in the woods. You could dream on this little drawing for hours.
In fact, Bruegel also made the journey to Italy. And his son Jan, who added an “h” to his surname, followed in his footsteps. Jan Brueghel’s sketch of the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, hulking, overgrown, eerily magnificent, is the most captivating souvenir of Italy here. Beside it you can see a fleshy, rippling portrait of the ancient Roman emperor Galba by Peter Paul Rubens which turns the stern busts and profiles of classical portraiture into a swarming, scary physicality. Rubens, who lived for years in Italy, brings the same crazed, manic muscularity to drawings of male backs and limbs from ancient statues.
And this is the point: you can take an artist out of Flanders but you can’t take the earthy eye for almost edible detail out of these Flemish drawings. The beery humour that bursts out of Bruegel’s art is also there in his contemporaries’ efforts, even when it’s disguised as a classical Bacchanal. A 1540 drawing by Lambert Lombard shows women ecstatically worshipping the Roman fertility god Priapus. Sebastiaen Vrancx, in 1621, depicts a village where everything looks normal, except that among the trees and thatched houses towers a statue of the god Saturn eating one of his children. The design is shown with the painting Vrancx made from it, which is even stranger. Could the statue’s violence be a comment on the peasant’s lot, producing food for all, but always being victimised by lords and pillaged by armies?
Outside an inn, Bruegelesque beggars booze in a drawing by David Vinckboons. One of the best and most fleshy artists in the exhibition, Jacques (aka Jacob) Jordaens, depicts the topsy turvy revels of Twelfth Night in his 1640 work The King Drinks, or The Bean King. Nature abounds in these little masterpieces, delineated with a mixture of lush sensitivity and prosaic precision. You can’t get more down to earth, literally, than a portrait of an earthworm that an unknown artist drew on an otherwise empty sheet of paper. A drawing of a woodland by Rubens is astonishingly factual and unhurried for this artist who can seem so frenetically baroque.
These lovely drawings take you on rich and strange journeys where chalk and pen lines twist like Flemish butter curls to bring bodies to life and fix faces in memory. But they always come back to the humble and the real. On 1 October 1659 – he noted the date on the sheet – Jordaens spotted five women in the street talking politics, and straight away sketched them. Here they are, still engrossed in their conversation after four centuries.
• Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings is at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford from 23 March until 23 June 2024. Jonathan Jones’s talk, Earthly Delights: A History of the Renaissance is at Oxford literary festival on 22 March 2024
