Winter wonders

Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 26 April

If you felt deprived of snow this Christmas, hasten along to The Queen’s Gallery, for there, in a splendid exhibition of Flemish painting from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, is one of the best snow-scenes ever — Bruegel’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (1565–7). You may think this too grisly a subject for the season of good will, and the Emperor Rudolf II thought so too, for the painting was bowdlerised at his orders in the early 17th century. Rudolf did not approve of Bruegel’s satire, which cast the Flemish townspeople as the innocents and the Imperial troops as their murderers (standing in for Herod’s men in the original Bible story). The panel was overpainted to render the image less inflammatory, and to look like a scene of plunder rather than massacre. Today, we can see through some of this overpainting and glimpse the shadows of the original imagery; further information is available from X-rays. Bruegel’s picture was indeed a savage indictment of the Spanish rule of the Southern Netherlands, but it remains a beautiful painting.

It forms the centrepiece of the first room of this enjoyable exhibition. The fluidity of paintwork and variety of expression are utterly brilliant. Consider the filligree patterns the leafless boughs of the trees make against the snowy roofs, or the very effective blue of the sky, scumbled over a paler ground. The details are telling in a typical Bruegel manner: the pollarded willows at front right, the soldiers climbing in through windows, the great blue icicles hanging from roofs. The domestic animals and birds which were used to disguise the slaughtered children, the turkeys, geese, pig and calf, are not particularly well-painted or convincing, but they do make a powerful contrast with the massed phalanx of armoured soldiery in the centre of the composition.