Dream of Plenty The High Art of the Low Countries

Welcome to the Low Countries - a vast flatland

where continental Europe threatens to slide into the North Sea.

If it weren't for the dikes and the continual pumping away of water,

thousands of square miles would simply be washed away.

The region of the Low Countries has always been

a place of shifting borders and uneasily coexisting tribes.

It can't be pinned down to a single nation

or even a particular mother tongue.

Labels like Dutch, Netherlandish, Flemish, Walloon,

they're nebulous, they meant different things at different times.

And there's the paradox.

This place, which sometimes seems

as difficult to grasp as water itself,

has exerted an enormous tangible influence

on the whole course of Western civilisation.

And if you want to understand how this watery world has

shaped our modern world in terms of politics, science,

the advancement of learning, economics, history, I think there's

no better way to begin than by exploring the rich story of its art.

Behind the obvious cliches - the beer and the moules frites,

the chocolate and waffles, the windmills and clogs,

lies a vivid, complex tale

encapsulated in some of the world's most compelling works of art.

From the world of medieval Flanders, rich and poor,

sacred and secular...

to the glories of the Dutch Golden Age...

to the somewhat tortuous emergence of modern Holland and Belgium.

It's the art of an Atlantis in reverse,

a land that rose from beneath the water

to reach the pinnacle of civilisation.

The Zwin Estuary - this is the spot where modern day Belgium

and the Netherlands meet each other, and the sea.

Despite thousands of years of human presence here,

it still feels uncanny - a strange, shifting land.

To the Romans, this coastline was frontierland,

the uncouth edge of Empire, the arse-end of the world.

The Roman historian Tacitus described this tidal,

watery region as "a place somewhere between land and sea,

"inhabited by wretched natives leading primitive lives."

For heat, they burned clods of dried earth,

and for sustenance they had little more than this...

Modest beginnings, perhaps, but the marshy mix of water and land

that disgusted the Romans

was the very thing that the "wretched herring-eating natives"

would eventually turn to their advantage.

By the 10th century, they were building dikes,

man-made humps to fence off parcels of land from the sea.

Bit by bit, the threat of floods was replaced with stable farmland,

then towns, then cities.

Through sheer hard graft,

the Lowlanders created a sophisticated society from almost nothing.

But I think what made the whole culture of the Low Countries

unique was that this really was a civilisation built on a network,

a trading network, and a network of canals,

the gentle terrain of the Lowlands,

the fact that it was a civilisation

that had been conjured from water, against all odds,

was also the thing that enabled it to become

a great flourishing civilisation.

From the late Middle Ages on well into the Renaissance,

Men from Flanders were known for their skill at managing water.

It's nice to see the city from the water, because you can feel

how the houses actually face this way.

Naturally, these beautiful little gardens all facing on to the water.

Location was crucial - canals connected the Low Countries

with sea lanes north to the Baltic,

west to the British Isles,

south to Iberia and the Mediterranean.

By the 1300s, the Low Countries

dominated trade in Northern Europe, and this city, Bruges,

was at the heart of one of the greatest trading centres in the world.

It was the economic powerhouse of a place known as Flanders,

part of a Low Countries patchwork of mini-states.

Low Countries success was founded, above all, on cloth.

As these people had woven land and sea to create the world

they lived in, so they wove their identity into their fabrics.

And when does it really start to get busy? About midday?

Flanders became an international byword for quality textiles -

none brighter or finer.

So it's entirely fitting that Lowlanders found their first

great artistic expression not in paint,

but in cloth -

threading vivid images into the medium of tapestry.

A little to the east of Bruges in the Belgian town of Mechelen

is the De Wit Royal Manufacturers of tapestry.

Housed inside a 15th century building is a truly superb

collection of these Flemish masterpieces,

displayed just as they might have been by their original owners.

Now this room is where they keep some of the very earliest

tapestries in the whole De Wit collection,

including this one - it's perhaps the smallest piece in the collection

but it's one of the most important because it's phenomenally early,

it's possibly as early as the 1430s, certainly no later than the 1450s.

It was created in Tournai in what is now Southern Belgium.

It's an object of immense preciousness.

We know from inventories of the time

that something like this would have been valued far more highly

because of the sheer amount of labour that went into it,

than a painting or a sculpture,

even objects made of gold or silver - tapestry was number one luxury item.

So here we've got this image of Christ on the cross.

Wonderful details - here's the bad thief with his lost soul

on its way to hell at the moment of his death.

This character was a centurion who's said to have pierced Christ's

side with his sword, and as the blood gushed forth -

look at that wonderful red blood - some of it

went in Longinus' eye and he was miraculously cured of his blindness.

If you look in close detail, and this is very, very rare to have

survived, you can see that there are gold threads in the haloes.

I think it reminds us that this was a culture simultaneously

in love with luxury and wedded to a profound sense of piety.

The tension between piety and luxury

had its origins in the very creation of the Low Countries.

This was a society ultimately built and owned by merchants

and businessmen - secular people.

But the foundations had been laid by monks and nuns.

The ruins of the 13th century Cistercian Abbey at Orval,

in what is now the French-speaking part of southern Belgium,

might seem to evoke the otherworldly nature of the monastic life.

Yet it was the practical know-how developed in monasteries

that first made possible the region's rise from mud and poverty.

It was monks who first reclaimed the land,

and harnessed water for human use.

In a society with no social services,

monasteries were at the forefront of public health and welfare.

And part of that was turning water into beer.

Today, a community of Trappist monks continues Orval's brewing tradition.

In some respects, the methods and ingredients are unchanged,

but they also use state-of-the-art equipment, making them

every bit as progressive as their 13th century predecessors.

'Brother Xavier is the manager of Orval Abbey's brewery.'

IN FRENCH:

-Hops!

-Special aromatiques.

Mmm!

Du pain liquide! That's a great phrase!

Liquid bread, they called it because it had this sustaining ability.

The monks of medieval Flanders

only brewed enough beer for their own use.

But the entrepreneurial Lowlanders knew how to turn monastic

ingenuity into commercial success.

By the 14th century, the Low Countries were the continent's biggest exporters of ale.

Entrepreneurs also turned monastic art into big business.

The illuminated manuscript, for centuries

made by monks in the sanctity of their abbey scriptoria,

was taken to a height of sophistication by secular

Flemish artists whose workshops were in Flemish town centres.

By the 1400s, all of Europe's ruling elite were commissioning

manuscripts from Flanders -

portable luxury objects even more precious than tapestries.

The Mayer van den Bergh Museum in Antwerp houses what I think of

as the single most brilliant illuminated book ever created.

It was made in around 1500,

probably as a wedding gift for the Queen of Portugal.

Now, Claire, I think of this as possibly the finest

illustrated manuscript produced by the whole Flemish tradition

and I have to admit that when I put in a request that we might

actually look at it, I didn't imagine that you would get it out

and that we would actually be allowed to turn the pages.

And you've started with an image of Christmas?

Yes. It is one of the most beautiful illuminations

here in the manuscript but there are lots of miniatures like this

because it's a prayer book, a book of hours.

Normally it was made for monks to use during the year.

-Well, that's, that's where it began, isn't it?

-Yes.

But by the time we get to an object such as this,

-these books are being distributed to very rich people...

-Yes, it is.

..across Europe to aid them in their personal prayer.

-Yes.

-And it's interesting to me that the faces seem very Flemish.

It's that medieval or late medieval habit of imagining the scene

as if it's happening in your own time.

-Yes, it is because it doesn't look like Jerusalem or Bethlehem.

-No.

-Not at all.

It's happening in Bruges or Flanders.

I can see down here exactly what you're saying because this is...

I think this is Mary and Joseph being told there's no room at the inn?

-Yes, it is, yeah.

-But it's a Bruges inn.

And these buildings are built of brick and they've got those

very, very characteristic Flemish windows.

Yes, you even can see here at the background a tower,

which could be a church in Bruges.

Can we look some more?

Where are you going to take us now?

I can show you this one.

-It's just a decoration for...

-Just a...

-..a normal page, just decoration.

-Yeah.

-But it's so beautiful because it's jewellery

with beautiful gems hanging here on hooks.

It's an amazing thing, isn't it,

cos it's almost like an imaginary jewellery box.

The new queen of the King of Portugal.

Nothing's too good for her, is it?

-And we have here a very beautiful...

-Wow!

..illumination where you can see all the apostles

and Holy Mary with the blue...

There again with the blue.

..gown looking at the clouds where you can see disappearing just...

and only the feet of Christ.

There he goes, up to heaven.

-And where...

-His feet.

..he started you can see but very, very little one,

his two feet.

Ah!

-In the rocks.

-His footprints.

His footprints, yes.

No-one can imitate this quality now

because we don't have the, the art and also not the materials...

It's a sobering thought that yes, I think you're exactly right -

no-one will ever perhaps draw with that fineness...

-No.

-..ever again.

Flemish illuminators achieved unsurpassed levels of immediacy

and imagination.

It's often hard to know who the artists responsible were,

because their names are rarely recorded.

But throughout Flanders during the 15th century, the skills

developed within the borders of a book's page would increasingly

be applied to the more public medium of painting.

And the first great painter to translate Flemish illumination

on to this far grander scale would have such an impact on the whole

course of Western art that we most certainly know his name.

Jan van Eyck.

Van Eyck may himself have started out as an illuminator.

He lived and worked in Bruges,

but it was another nearby city that he created his most spectacular work.

Well, I'm in Ghent and it's raining.

It's another grey day

in the Low Countries, but then again who needs sunshine when there's

so much light and colour in the art, and in the church behind me,

there is, for my money, the most radiant Flemish masterpiece of the lot.

In 1432, Jan van Eyck completed a commission for this cathedral -

possibly begun by his brother, Hubert, but essentially his work.

It was a chance for van Eyck to show off his breathtaking discovery,

something never seen before - a way of applying layers of translucent

oil paint to create astonishing illusions of depth and light.

This work is now so cherished it's kept behind bulletproof glass

under carefully controlled climate and lighting conditions.

So here it is - van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece,

one of the very greatest paintings in the whole world.

And what does it represent?

Well, essentially it's a vision, it's a fantasy,

it's a dream of what might happen at the end of the world.

Everything converges on a sacred centre,

here the sacred centre is that astonishing solemn, severe hieratic

figure of Christ the judge and God the father rolled into one.

And at the extreme edge on either side we have Adam

and Eve represented with tremendous lack of idealism -

these are real human bodies.

And that's the whole point

because it is their sin that has condemned us to live in a world of

mortal time and that is what in this moment is being redeemed by Christ.

This is the moment when all of the blessed, as described in the Book of

Revelations, gather to enter the New Jerusalem, paradise, eternal life.

They're all converging on that central mystical vision

of the lamb of God, symbol of Christ, shedding his blood

on an altar while angels bear the symbols of his Passion.

It's like a church service taking place in a garden of utter beauty and delight.

But what makes this picture truly extraordinary?

What makes it one of the great works of art ever painted?

I think it's partly to do with van Eyck's sense of composition

and the way in which he's imagined heavenly perfection as this

perfectly symmetrical universe of form.

You can almost imagine the picture having just been painted one half

and then folded over and the other half mirrors it perfectly.

And yet when you look more closely into the picture,

there are these wonderful lightning flashes of realism,

these faces that jump out at you,

beards that you feel you can touch, flowers that you feel you can smell.

And how did van Eyck achieve this?

Well, Giorgio Vasari, the great Italian art historian, tells us

he invented a new form of art, it was called oil painting.

Now, generations of modern art historians have said that

that's a myth, of course van Eyck didn't invent oil painting,

it was already around.

But the fact is that van Eyck DID in effect invent oil painting -

certainly he discovered the things that could be done with pigment,

when it was suspended in this medium of oil.

And this picture is a kind of encyclopaedia of his talents,

"Look!" he's saying, look what I can do with oil paint.

I can paint ermine-trimmed robes, I can paint each separate

hair in a horse's mane, I can paint geology, architecture, I can

paint the reflection in somebody's eye - it all started here.

Now the first people who saw this picture were so stunned by it,

so taken aback by it,

they could not believe that an image that was made of nothing

but paint applied to boards of wood could seem to them like life itself.

So much so that the rumour was put about in Ghent, in Bruges,

van Eyck's home town, that this painter wasn't just an artist,

he was a magician, some kind of necromancer.

Van Eyck's innovations would be enormously influential.

Oil painting, the medium that he had pioneered, would be taken up all

over Europe, from Venice to Northern and Central Italy, to Spain and beyond.

And as generation after generation of painters

explored its effects, art itself would be transformed forever.

Van Eyck's mastery of oil paint made him one of the richest,

most highly respected artists of his day.

But where he used the medium to conjure up an entire world of vivid detail,

it was another great Flemish artist who went beneath that

glistening surface, to explore the far depths of human emotion.

Brussels-based Rogier van der Weyden,

believed to have portrayed himself here as St Luke,

patron saint of artists, was described by his contemporaries

as "the greatest", "the most noble" of painters.

In his almost unbearable portrayal of Christ's Descent from the Cross,

van der Weyden explored every last trick of oil paint -

above all its ability to capture tears, and blood - to render

the full horror of Christ's death immediate and shocking.

This is pain, grief and sorrow made visible - almost tangible.

In 1443, the founders of this hospital commissioned

Rogier van der Weyden to paint what would be one of the great

jewels in the crown of Flemish art -

a consolation, or was it perhaps a warning, for those who lay sick

and dying in a world of barely imaginable harshness and hardship.

Smallpox and cholera were endemic, plague a regular terror.

Monks who tended the sick were themselves at constant risk.

But this wasn't just a hospital for curing bodies,

it was a hospital for saving souls, and its focal point,

placed at the end of the room of the sick,

facing all of those beds, was this great picture, a Flemish altarpiece.

It was painted by Rogier van der Weyden about 11 years after

van Eyck painted the Ghent altarpiece

and what it shows us is in effect the prequel to the Ghent

altarpiece, because this is the moment of the Last Judgement.

Christ sits in majesty over the world in a cloud of gold.

In the centre, Saint Michael, depicted as a pale-faced Flemish

prince of Justice, holds up the scales with which

he will weigh the souls of all mankind.

The heavier of the two souls represents sin -

"peccata" is written on the painting.

And he screams because he knows he's going to hell forever.

Whereas the soul on the right looks almost complacent, kneels

in prayer, rises up, he's a light soul, on his way to heaven.

And as the four angels blow the last trump, the earth cracks open

and the dead rise from their graves to discover their fate.

Those on Christ's left are dragged vomiting, screaming, wailing,

weeping into the flames of hell.

On the right-hand side, it's all rather more tranquil.

We can see, here, they troop off towards the heavenly city.

I like this detail here - as the angel ushers them through the door,

we know where they're going.

They're going to that heavenly paradise garden depicted in van Eyck's altarpiece.

It's, so to speak, "This way for the Ghent altarpiece".

Now to a superstitious Christian in the 15th century,

the purpose of this picture would have been eminently practical.

Most of the people in those beds, in times of plague for sure,

were going to die.

Before they did so, each one of them would be

instructed to come forward into the chapel at the end of the room,

and to contemplate this picture.

And the picture basically is there to give them a choice -

where do you want to end up?

To Christ's left, down in the flames of hell, or Christ's right,

on your way to paradise?

Makes the choice pretty unambiguous, I'd say.

Having seen it, you're filled with terror.

It's a cinemascope vision of what might happen to you.

So you go back to your bed, you call the confessor,

you confess your sins, and if you confess all of them, you're saved.

It's an astonishing picture,

it's one of the great masterpieces of Flemish art,

it absolutely represents that great flowering of painting that

took place in Flanders in the first half of the 15th century.

And yet, and here's the sting in the tail, it's not actually in Flanders.

It's hundreds of miles south, in a country we now call France.

Our modern borders bear little relation to 15th century geography.

This hospital, known as the Hotel-Dieu de Beaune,

once stood at the heart of the powerful Duchy of Burgundy.

The ambitious Dukes of Burgundy coveted the great

riches of Flanders to the North.

Through strategic marriages and clever alliances,

they began to extend their power into the Low Countries.

It took the Dukes of Burgundy a few generations to take over.

They had to absorb each independent mini-state, one by one.

By the mid 1400s, Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck

and all their fellow Low Countrymen had become the subjects

of the most illustrious Burgundian Duke of them all, Philip the Good.

In fact, Philip wanted culturally rich Flanders so much that he

even relocated his ancestral court 300 miles north, to Brussels.

Philip the Good was good news for Flemish art.

He was an enthusiastic patron,

especially of great talents like van Eyck and van der Weyden.

And he was no oppressive autocrat -

he pretty much gave the Low Country states freedom to

conduct their business and their lives the way they wished.

Flemish society revolved around the upwardly mobile merchant classes.

They'd grown used to the finer things in life,

and they wanted their art to reflect that.

They commissioned portraits of themselves,

immortalised in all their finery, as evidence that they had made it.

The most extraordinary portrait of all is also the oldest.

Painted by none other than

the first great Flemish pioneer of oil painting,

it's the secular counterpart

to his Ghent Altarpiece -

not a vision of heaven, but a depiction

of an inscrutable man and his wife in the comfort of their bedroom.

Painted in 1434, this entrancing picture by Jan van Eyck opens

the door to the private world of the wealthy Flemish merchant class.

It used to be called The Arnolfini Wedding.

It used to be thought that it depicted Giovanni Arnolfini,

a wealthy banker from Lucca based in Bruges, and his wife.

That's by no means certain,

but I think we can say that these people were extremely well off.

They were representative of this new upsurge of Flemish wealth

and prosperity.

But it would be a mistake to see this picture,

for all its realism, as some kind of snapshot of their domestic world -

it's a highly charged, symbolic, ritualised depiction of two people.

There's something extremely solemn about it.

If Jan van Eyck was a necromancer, a magician using paint,

I think of this portrait very much as a kind of spell or

incantation designed to bring good fortune on this couple.

The dog stands at the couple's feet, stands for loyalty,

for obedience, for fidelity.

Behind the bride hangs a broom - symbol of purity, cleanliness.

And around that beautiful convex mirror,

there are painted scenes of Christ's passion,

as if to indicate that this is a union blessed in the eyes of God.

A single candle burns in the chandelier,

emblem of the love that shall never be extinguished.

And just above that pair of clasped hands,

van Eyck has intruded another significant detail -

a grinning, gurning gargoyle

carved into the arm of the chair

at the back of the room.

And I think that gargoyle

is here to do exactly the same job

as gargoyles on the fronts of churches -

namely to scare off evil spirits.

To ward off all evil from damaging this union.

Look on the window ledge, and look on the sideboard.

A little cluster of fruit.

Her belly is round - not because she's pregnant,

because she's wearing a stomacher,

but I think the hope is

that this union will itself bear fruit.

And on the back wall, Jan van Eyck has signed the picture

in wonderful curlicue script.

The inscription says, in Latin, "Jan van Eyck was here."

And if you look just below it, if you look into that reflection

in the convex mirror, so beautifully painted, what do you see?

You see the couple from the back.

And if you look closely enough, you can see a shadowy figure,

perhaps two figures.

I wonder if one of them is not meant to be Jan van Eyck himself.

The painter, preserving forever this moment when he looks at them

and they look at him.

I wonder if this picture wasn't his wedding gift

to the couple in the painting?

If so, I do hope they were grateful.

Flemish art's change of focus from sacred to secular

was part of a seismic shift taking place across all of Europe,

but especially in the Low Countries.

Even under Burgundian rule, Lowlanders clung fiercely

to their localised customs and independent ideas.

Far from the shadow of the Vatican, there were religious

movements - like the Brethren of Common Life - who were not afraid to

criticise the Church, to challenge authority they saw as corrupt.

This was a strange, unsettling time, especially when seen through

the eyes of a medieval man of faith - like the artist Hieronymus Bosch.

As far as we know, he spent his whole life in and around the small

Dutch town from which he took his name - 's-Hertogenbosch.

Yet his most famous work - known to us as The Garden

of Earthly Delights - includes some of the weirdest objects

and creatures, from worlds both known and unknown, ever seen in art.

Painted around 1500, its meaning seems at first sight

disturbingly obscure - and may never be fully explained.

On the left we see Christ with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,

but it's an Eden unlike any other.

There's a giraffe and an elephant -

but also some rather frightening hybrid animals.

On the right, some of art's most inventive

impressions of the fate that awaits the damned.

A pot-headed bird eats sinners and excretes them into the abyss.

Instruments and forms of torture scatter the blackened landscape.

But what does the central panel show us?

The corruption of our earthly world?

If so, what do the outsized fruit and birds represent?

And why is it filled with the bizarrest of rituals?

Might it be significant that Bosch painted this claustrophobic enigma

just a decade after Columbus discovered the riches of America?

One of my favourite details in Bosch's strange teeming

panorama of a picture shows a little group of people holding up

a gigantic strawberry - almost like the cult devotees worshipping

this object, this exotic thing.

And I think when you look at Bosch's painting,

it's important to remember this was the first time anyone in Europe

had ever seen a strawberry, it was an object of wonderment to him.

It was as if the world that they'd known for

so many centuries had suddenly been changed - they suddenly realised

there was another whole universe out there, a new world.

And I think Bosch's picture is in part an attempt to imagine

what that new world might be like,

this is a Pandora's box moment in the history of human civilisation.

Bosch lived at a great turning point in history -

a moment when the medieval mind, obsessed with the terrors of hell

and damnation, was giving way before a modern world of rapidly

expanding horizons,

of science and knowledge,

a world where the old order was being challenged

by dangerous new ideas.

These were the things made flesh as the beasts of Bosch's imagination.

In his own highly original way, Bosch expressed

both the fascinations and the anxieties of his age.

And if you want to see his own solution to those anxieties,

I think you have to turn to one of his simpler, least cryptic pictures.

A work that hangs in the Fine Arts Museum in Ghent.

This fairly small, fairly dark image of Christ carrying the cross

is one of Bosch's cruder pictures,

but I think it takes you right to the centre of what he has to say.

It takes you to the centre of his vision of the world.

Here, he sees the world as a kind of sea of malevolence,

weirdness, evil, through which Christ has to pass.

Look at that crowd.

These three blokes down here including the evil thief -

I suppose you might see them today on the street corner, drinking

their Tennent's full strength lager at ten in the morning.

Here's a fat-jowled soldier.

A curious image of a witch with a hat

that reminds me of Pink Floyd album covers, of

their middle to late period weirdly enough.

Up here, the hook-nosed mercenary.

Here we see another soldier clutching the cross

with his fingers - who knows why.

And at the centre of it all, the image of Christ.

I think you can just see a tear coming out of that,

leaking out of his right eye.

It's as if he is passing through this world

as if it were a bad dream.

He's right at the centre.

And I think what Bosch is saying to us, is in this age of anxiety,

uncertainty, religious unrest, intellectual change,

geographical exploration, this world where we suddenly no longer

know where we are, that's the one thing we CAN be sure of.

That IS the one thing we can be sure of.

In that sense Bosch is still a man of the Middle Ages,

he does believe in God as the one route to salvation.

And I think he gives us a little clue here, because there is actually

other than Christ, one other good figure in the painting and

that is Saint Veronica. She's got the veil, the veil that she used to

wipe the brow of Christ - it's what lies behind the Turin shroud myth -

on which is miraculously imprinted the image of Christ's face.

She is on her way out of this maelstrom of evil -

she's found her escape route, because her escape route

is the image of Christ that she's holding in her heart.

And Bosch is saying to all of us looking at the picture,

"Do what she does."

"Look at his face.

"Burn it into your mind's eye -

"because it's the only path through

"this evil world, it's the only way out of these troubled times."

The tides of change swept on regardless.

Soon after Bosch's death in 1516, the Reformation shook

the established Church to its foundations.

Art too turned critical.

The subtleties of oil paint,

once used to conjure beauty or flatter the wealthy,

were now deployed as weapons against corruption and ugliness.

Satire was the order of the day.

Grotesques that ridiculed the well-to-do as vain and pompous.

Caricatures of the jobsworth bureaucrats

who propped up unpopular rulers.

The flames of unrest were fanned by a tyrannical new regime.

In 1555, King Philip II of Spain inherited

the Low Countries from his Burgundian ancestors.

A fanatic Catholic, he was determined to stamp out heresy.

The attempted clampdown only provoked more unrest.

Free thinkers multiplied.

Perhaps the most quietly radical idea of all was hatched in the

imagination not of a philosopher or a scientist, but a painter who took

his inspiration from the rituals and festivities of the common man.

Well the architecture's changed a bit, the angels might be wearing

peroxide Shirley Temple wigs, and the floats might be

made of polystyrene, but otherwise remarkably little has changed.

The fact is that the people of the Low Countries have been

participating in popular religious festivals like this

since the Middle Ages. This festival here in Mechelen, which celebrates

the saving of the city from plague by the blessed Virgin Mary in 1272,

has been going for more than 700 years.

But the funny thing is that ordinary people doing this

kind of thing simply don't appear in Flemish art

until the middle years of the 16th century, and it's one man,

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who puts the common people centre stage.

Pieter Bruegel painted peasants going about their business -

feasting, laughing, dancing, drinking.

Bruegel's work was popular, and no doubt the wealthy clients who

bought his paintings found comical entertainment in the rich detail.

But there's also a gently subversive warmth

and empathy for these ordinary people.

It's as though Bruegel is saying that it's NOT just

the high and mighty who are important -

there's nobody who's an unworthy subject for art.

This is one of the most famous pictures associated with

the name of Pieter Bruegel the Elder -

in fact people come specially on pilgrimage here to the Musee

des Beaux Arts in Brussels just to see this one celebrated image.

At first sight it's quite a baffling, disorientating picture.

The eye is immediately drawn to this figure of the ploughman

plodding along his modest patch of earth,

ploughing it up into these meaty chunks, following his horse.

Behind him is a shepherd, with his dog, and they both seem absorbed

by something or other, we can't quite tell what, in these trees.

Over here is another character,

another person from ordinary life absorbed in an ordinary activity,

fishing.

Behind, there are ships.

But then, you look at the title of the painting

and you see Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus.

Icarus, that character from mythology,

the boy who makes himself wings from feathers and wax, flies

too close to the sun, the wings melt and he falls to his death.

Where's Icarus?

You look all over the painting -

and then suddenly, if you look hard enough,

it's a sort of Breugelian "Where's Wally?" moment.

There he is - a pair of white, floppy legs,

splashing into this emerald green ocean.

But what an extraordinary image of that mythological event this is.

Here he's imagining what it actually feels like to be someone

who's outside history.

In a way it's a picture about the spear carriers,

the people who aren't the heart of the action.

But they are at the heart of their own lives, and it's a picture

about the disjunction between big history and little history,

and the little history doesn't even notice that the big history

is going on, it's a picture about not looking, not seeing.

And WH Auden wrote a wonderful poem about this picture.

"Everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.

"The ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

"but for him it was not an important failure.

"The sun shone, as it had to,

"on the white legs disappearing into the green water.

"And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something

"amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

"had somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on."

And I think the subversive implication behind it,

perhaps for someone living in the Low Countries,

someone unhappy with Spanish rule,

the implication behind it is that

if you don't like the history that's given to you

by the great, perhaps the not so good,

by kings from elsewhere, those

coming into your world from outside, a little bit like Icarus -

if you don't like their history,

perhaps you're allowed to create your own.

In reality, the lives of ordinary people went from bad to worse.

When the Low Countries openly rebelled against Philip II's rule

in the late 1560s, he tried to crush them with Spanish troops.

Thus began a bloody 80-year war against Spanish oppression

that would split the Low Countries in two.

No-one would escape the fallout.

Massacres on an epic scale,

widespread famine, cities besieged till their starving citizens

boiled shoe leather for food.

This darkest of times would produce one last great

flowering of Flemish art -

the work of an Antwerp painter called Peter Paul Rubens,

which for me represents both the end

and the encapsulation of the whole Flemish tradition.

Rubens was the supreme master of a new, bold style

emerging from the Catholic Counter-Reformation - the Baroque.

He spent most of his glittering career

travelling Europe at the behest of his

seriously impressive client list, painting grand state allegories

of power for among others the royal families of France and England.

At the public level, Rubens had lived out a personal version

of the history of the Low Countries -

trading with foreign powers, rising from low origins

to achieve astonishing wealth.

This is his house in Antwerp - the palace of a prince.

But if you look behind its facade to the private Rubens,

you discover that his most intimate dream

was surprisingly humble, touchingly simple.

Now, Rubens painted that piercing self-portrait in 1630.

He was 53 years old, and on the face of it he had it all,

he'd just been knighted by King Charles I of England.

He's the painter to kings, princes, queens all across Europe.

He is the single most powerful and influential artist who has

ever lived, and at this point, he does something truly extraordinary.

He decides to marry the 16-year-old daughter of a merchant

here in Antwerp - she's called Helene Fourment,

he's completely besotted with her, they'll have five children -

and he decides to retreat completely from public life.

He writes about it in a letter, he says,

"I have decided to do myself a kind of violence.

"I have decided to cut the golden knot of my own ambition."

He retreats away from the world,

and during his last 10 years he creates an extraordinary,

deeply personal body of work. Highly idiosyncratic, utterly unique,

and yet also, I think,

the ultimate expression of a fantasy that had obsessed

the imagination of people here in the Low Countries for centuries.

Some of those final works are rapturous allegories

of marital joy,

invariably bursting with

Rubens' characteristically voluptuous, fleshy bodies.

Here we see Rubens himself

gazing in adoration at his rosy-cheeked young bride.

Everything in Rubens's late paintings

seems to speak of desire - no-one had ever expressed it

more urgently, more carnally.

But I think it's essentially that same desire for colour,

life, light and blessedness

that had always infused the tapestries,

illuminated books and paintings of Flanders right from the beginning.

But for me, there's one work above all in which he revealed

his true Low Country soul.

Painted on an epic, panoramic scale, Rubens' Landscape With A Rainbow

is quite simply one of the greatest landscapes ever painted.

Like all of his pictures it's a cornucopia,

a hymn to plenty and abundance. Ripeness is all.

Look at those ducks - literal symbol of the fat of the land -

clucking and quacking and waggling their feathers

and diving into the water.

The cows seem to be multiplying before our very eyes,

and there, as so often in Rubens' art,

a real touch of human carnality.

There's a milkmaid, with her ewer balanced

very ingeniously on her head,

simultaneously flirting with a peasant,

and giving us a wink at the same time,

her companion flirting with the other peasant,

the hay wain, as he winds his way into the picture.

Constable, who painted The Hay Wain, loved this work of art.

Look at that slab of yet to be cut hay.

It could almost be a slab of butter.

Look at the way the landscape has been laid out before us

almost like a fertile body.

A windmill's sails, glittering on the far distance.

Even Rubens' sky is abundantly stocked with clouds.

It's a dream of peace, and a dream of plenty.

And I think that Rubens wants us to recognise that it IS a dream.

Flanders in his day was not a place of utmost peace and prosperity

and I think that's why he's included the rainbow,

an old divine symbol of hope,

of something that might come to pass in the future.

I think Rubens himself knows that what he's depicted is a world

that does indeed lie beyond the far end of the rainbow.

A world that he hopes may one day come into being.

So yes, the painting is a beautiful dream -

but it's also a prophecy.

Because not too far to the north,

another upstart nation of the Low Countries, the Dutch Republic,

would be attempting to turn that dream into a reality.

But that's another story.

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