ONE
 
MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPE
THE FRENCH - ITALIAN ALPS, MAY 1552
 
 
Peter Bruegel was looking at his first mountain, a steep, rounded foothill at the edge of the Alps. He and his friend Martin de Vos had never seen anything like it.
“The land swoops right up into the air,” said Bruegel. He was a tall young man with a high brow, a big nose, and alert clear gray eyes. “Just like it’s supposed to.”
“Like a great ocean wave,” said de Vos. He leaned on his long staff, peering out from under the low brim of his hat. He had a snub nose and a cheerful smile. “It was worth coming all this way from Antwerp.”
Do you notice how the mountain’s flank tilts up towards us?” continued Bruegel. “It’s like we’re looking down at it from the sky. With everything spread out next to each other. All there for us to see.” He stepped off the stony road into the green grass and held out his arms as if to embrace the landscape before him.
It was a rain-kissed afternoon in May. Puffy little clouds were scattered across the watery blue sky, some hanging so close to the ground that Bruegel could almost touch them. A small river ran beside the road, lit just now by a patch of sun. Slanting gray streaks of rain caressed the green mountain. Bruegel felt as if his heart were blooming.
“I have to draw this,” he told de Vos. He shrugged the strap of his satchel from his shoulder, peeled off his skirted jerkin, and sat down cross-legged upon it. He found ink and pen and a bottle of water in his satchel, and pulled a sheet of paper out of a special flap in his jerkin’s lining. All the while he was staring at the mountain. “It’s quite unlike what we’ve seen in paintings back in the Low Lands, Martin. Different than what we’ve been taught. It’s less contorted, more like a living thing. It’s saying hello to me.”
De Vos smiled and sat down to watch his friend begin making tiny brown ink marks on his paper. Rather than drawing a scene with long continuous outlines, Bruegel preferred to nibble away at the edges of things with an accumulation of dots and strokes. The progress was steady and surprisingly rapid.
Some other travelers passed by, distracting de Vos. This was a busy road, with any number of merchants moving their goods back and forth between Italy and Northern Europe. Beyond the little mountain before them was one of the few passes where a wagon could get through the Alps.
“I’ll meet you at that monastery by the mountain’s base,” said de Vos, looking off down the road. “See it? I’ll warrant we can find food and lodging there.”
“Be sure and tell them that we’re guild artists,” said Bruegel. “Maybe we can make something for them instead of paying cash.”
“They might want to own the drawing that you’re doing right now,” suggested de Vos. “It’s off to a nice start, I’d say.”
“The monks won’t want a plain nature sketch,” said Bruegel. “If I were to offer them this drawing, I’d need to add something Scriptural.”
“Joseph and Mary on the way to Egypt,” suggested de Vos. “The hermit St. Anthony. The repentant Mary Magdalene taking a piss.”
“I’d like that,” said Bruegel, smiling. He was known among his friends for his fondness of sketching people in their private moments. “But the monks are surely beyond such low concerns. I imagine they’re educated men. Humanists, perhaps. I could add some Classical figures for them. Mercury and Psyche in the sky. Or Daedalus and Icarus.”
“Well, in any case be sure to draw their monastery!” said de Vos. “But leave the figures for when you’ve found your patron.”
“Good idea, Martin,” said Bruegel. “Meanwhile, less of you and more of my pen and this mountain. They’re talking to me.”
“All I hear is the bells of the monks’ cows,” said de Vos, rising to his feet. “Fat cattle mean good cheese. Bread and cheese and ale and some dark-green mouse-ear lettuce. It’s the season for radishes too! There’s quite a few buildings over there beyond the monastery. It looks like a regular village. Maybe I’ll find a young widow with a hungry eye.” De Vos had little more experience with women than Bruegel, but he liked to talk big.
He stepped down to the river and splashed some water on his face. He scrambled back to the road, gave Bruegel a cheery wave, and walked off whistling. Bruegel continued to draw, sinking into a kind of conversation with the mountain.
Whenever Bruegel concentrated on objects they seemed to talk to him. The quill pen told him how stiff it was and how it loved to be dipped in ink. Its squeaks were as the faint honks of a goose. The sepia ink spoke of the squid and cuttlefish sacks it came from, of water and writhing tentacles. The paper stretched itself out like a dog in the sun; it sighed with satisfaction at being scratched.
Most of all, though, it was the mountain that spoke to Bruegel.
“I’m alive too,” the great mound said. “I move slower than you, but yes, I roll and turn within my sweet green skin. See the cleft at my top? Like the tip of your prick. I leak a stream from there and it’s of a marvelous purity, refined by my mineral body. Be sure to sketch in the rim of my stream’s gully, Peter. I used to be much taller than the younger mountains beyond me, so make me the highest thing in your picture. I’m old and wise, but on this summer day I feel young. The trees on my flanks are feathered with leaves that shelter all manner of birds, beasts, and men. I’m glad that you’re drawing me. Yes, I have a dent halfway up, so shade it dark like that, good, and right before the ridge I’m a bit flat, so the bumps you make for trees should be closer together there. Fine. Leave the paper blank where the sun’s very bright upon me, that’s perfect. And now fill in that tangle of trees that march up my gorge—I’m lovely in there, Peter, you should walk up onto me and see.”
After an hour of this, the pleasant mountain had been well depicted. Now Bruegel drew the monastery as well. It had a tidy Gothic chapel, a stone refectory, and a long two-storied wooden residence house with a red tile roof. Just like the mountain, the building spoke to Bruegel as he sketched it, talking about right angles and perspective, about monkishness, and about the joy of having windows. And then the sketch was done.
Bruegel sighed and stretched, got to his feet, and looked down at his new drawing, its corners weighted down by little stones. The sun was low in the sky behind him, glazing the world with shades of gold. How lucky he was to be an artist, a guild member in good standing. If all went well—and surely it would!—he’d come into his own before much longer. He’d have his own studio, a string of wealthy patrons, apprentices to make up his paints, and a fine house in the center of Brussels. All this assuming—and here lay Bruegel’s great worry—assuming there was a market for the things he saw, and for his way of seeing them.
Seeing, seeing, seeing—very nearly...