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Toward the Contextualization of Pieter Bruegel's "Procession to Calvary". Constructing the Beholder From Within the Eyckian Tradition
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Toward the Contextualization of Pieter Bruegel's "Procession to Calvary". Constructing the Beholder From Within the Eyckian Tradition

Joseph F. Gregory
Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek, v 47(1)
01 Jan 1996
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22145966-90000148

Abstract

Crosses Divinity Iconography Images Meditation Narrative modes Processions Renaissance art Stoicism Metaphysics
The compositional format of Bruegel's Procession to Calvary (fig. I), with its flood of humanity driving a diminutive figure of Christ along an immense arc that turns through a vast landscape connecting Jerusalem to Golgotha, belongs, in the strictest sense, to a sixteenth century tradition that begins with the second generation followers ofPatinir (c. 1480-1524) such as Herri Bles (c. 151O-C. 1550), Cornelis Massys (c. 1510-1557), and Jan van Amstel (c.1500-C. 1540) (fig. 2).1 This format, however, which inverts the priority of sacred subject and narrative setting by pushing a diminished image of Christ back into an expansive landscape, is itself a variation on an earlier, fifteenth century type (fig. 4) that most likely springs from a lost Eyckian composition known through several derivative images, among them two panels, one in Budapest (fig. 3) and the other in New York. Two formal characteristics distinguish this fifteenth century type from its sixteenth century descendent: the relatively cramped background landscapes that tend to be pinched between the termini of the processional arc; and the way in which Christ, centered and ample in scale, is pressed into the immediate foreground of the composition.

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