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.
