With terrible female power – Weekend – Kommersant

In 1563, Pieter Brueghel the Elder settled down: he married, moved under the pressure of his powerful mother-in-law, an artist, to the capital Brussels, gradually closing the circle of influential customers and patrons there. In the remaining six years of his life, he, in fact, will become Brueghel Muzhitsky – the author of The Seasons, The Peasant Wedding, and The Land of Lazy People. But this is later, but for now in the same 1563 – finally, so to speak – he writes “Mad Greta”, one of the wildest works of both the Flemish XVI century, and all world painting.

Text: Sergey Khodnev

“Hell has expanded and opened its mouth without measure,” the biblical Isaiah stated bleakly, “and their glory and their wealth, and their noise, and everything that makes them glad will descend there.” The mouth of the underworld, the mouth of hell, shaped like a fearful mug with toothy jaws, is such a motif that was already quite old in the 16th century; everyone somehow got used to him, so, perhaps, to scare children for educational purposes. But Brueghel in “Mad Greta” skillfully turns this mouth of the underworld from edification, almost comfortable, into a nightmare. It seems like the head of a monster growing out of a cliff, and a humanoid monster, but absurdly huge, whose skin is bumpy with toad blisters. And then, lo and behold, the mug becomes a stone tower. And the tower is an awkward cap. And the cap is a bare tail wriggling in the sulphurous red-smoky air. Rat? Reptilian? And no, that’s not all, because at the tip of the tail hangs like a Christmas tree ball a glass lantern-sphere, in which naked bodies crouched with embryos are stuffed. And a twig sticks out of the lantern, and another flashlight, dazzlingly meaningless in this situation, burns on it – so from one unpleasant dream you fall into another, feeling that there will be no end to them.

In the hell of “Mad Greta” it is monstrous, firstly, precisely this dream stratification: one twisted piece of reality, and unpleasantly embarrassing in itself, creeps into another against any “daytime” logic and against any expectation. Here, both plans and scales are also mixed in an absolutely blissful way, as imagery and familiar iconographic registers are mixed. Let’s say, in the middle part, far, far away, almost on the horizon, where you can see a piece of the water surface, hosts of barely noticeable figures are grouped into something reminiscent of the topoi of Dante’s Hell. The researchers even found references to specific episodes of the Divine Comedy, recognizing in these naked goats the newly arrived passengers of Charon, misers, spendthrifts, gluttons and angry. But the horror is that in the context of the picture, as you immediately perceive it, even Dante’s sinners seem like a small moment of almost light orderliness.

Because such is the population of this underworld scattered in the foreground. Having examined three, five, eight reptiles, you unconsciously think that it is simply impossible to imagine an even more repulsive combination of bird-fish-frog-ovoid-anthropomorphic features – but no, here you are. And then there are masts with gear, which for some reason grow not from ships, but from the ground or from a tower, and right there a crowd of women in caps, who for some reason are kicking someone on the bridge; there is some kind of war, but an unthinkable, delusional war, where there is nothing sublime and cannot be.

There is no doubt that Breugel’s Triumph of Death, written a year earlier, is unbearably terrible – but there is still something calming in its own way in the initial predictability of the message: well, Sim prays, Ham sows wheat, Death owns everything. “The Fall of the Rebellious Angels” (again, 1562) is also an example of utter Boschianism, also on infernal themes, but there, somehow, as they say, according to the conditions of the problem, it is obvious that thin angels beat the ancient serpent with all its host and someday sure to be beaten for good. “Mad Greta” seems to be a completely hopeless end to this series precisely because there is no obvious fulcrum in it.

The central figure in the foreground is a crazy old woman who somehow put on a cuirass, armed with a sword and trying to keep the goods stolen from somewhere: this is the same Mad Greta, who is usually mistaken for an allegory, naturally, of Madness. A little to the right sits on the house a skinny giant, on whose head is the emblematic Ship of Fools: this is considered to be Stupidity. Not Lucifer, not the terrible Reaper, not the Archangel Michael, but such characters from whom it is absolutely impossible to expect that they will give meaningfulness to the unfolding events. But it is enough to realize this – and everything turns upside down.

The fact is that in the hell of “Mad Greta” there is no most terrible and most infernal thing: hopelessness. No, precisely because what is actually happening in this underworld, yes, is not at all wise – but funny.

The picture insists on this more and more decisively as the viewer passes dumbfounded. This is not a destructive force that falls on the human race – the human race itself comes to beat its Enemy on the first day. It is not the heavenly host that establishes the cosmic order – a crowd of businesslike housewives, without taking off their aprons and armed with what the hell, follows Mad Greta into the possession of the prince of darkness. Moreover, it is with the most pragmatic goals: in order to profit, if not gold or silver, then kitchen utensils or weapons, which is good to disappear, maybe it will come in handy in the household.

This, let’s say, also seems to be bizarre, where could earthly wealth come from in the villages of damned souls? But the figurativeness of “Mad Greta” is, first of all, the figurativeness of folk proverbs and sayings. Brueghel in it felt like a fish in water, he clearly had enough intuition to inadvertently feel the very archetypal mainland in all this masculine wisdom. The dead descend into the earth. Food will come from the earth. There is gold in the earth. The living becomes filth, the filth becomes rich soil, the land in which the grain dies yields a rich harvest. Vague cultural associations between wealth, the abode of the dead and anal-fecal themes were not invented by Freud. Here is Brueghel with the prescribed carnival directness and beats these associations in a tail and a mane. He and the monsters strive to show the viewer the mouth with which Til Ulenspiegel did not speak Flemish, and silver coins rain down on the army of cooks not from anywhere, but from a surrealistic hole in Stupidity’s bare ass.

You can denounce human stupidity, like Erasmus of Rotterdam, with exquisite Latin periods, but you can do it like this. In addition to the actual stupidity and madness, in “Mad Greta” some also see a denunciatory allegory of either anger or greed, which is also logical: the very absurdity of human violence is spelled out here as grandiosely.

There is, however, one nuance that brings thunder and lightning to Brueghel’s head from the current feminist art history. The fact is that in the notorious proverbs and sayings, which are dissolved in the images of “Mad Greta”, it was obviously full of everyday misogyny. It is generally accepted, for example, that one of the relevant sayings sounded like this: “One woman is a noise, two are a dokuka, three are a bazaar, four are a swara, five are a gang, and the devil cannot stand against six.” And the very phrase “crazy Greta” was a well-established designation of a boy-woman, with whom it is better not to mess with. The result is a terry patriarchal libel on the topic of gender roles – and almost revenge on the stubborn mother-in-law, who forced the artist to give up his bachelor life in Antwerp for the sake of Brussels.

But everything is more difficult. Okay, mother-in-law, but the European 16th century is the century of women rulers. In England – Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I. In France – Catherine de Medici, who ruled the kingdom behind her three sons, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. In Scotland, Mary Stuart (and her mother, Mary of Guise, who ruled for some time on her behalf). Brueghelian Flanders in the 1560s is still part of the united Netherlands, from which the Dutch provinces have not yet broken away; it is the possession of crowned men – the Spanish Habsburgs. But the governors-stadtholders of the Netherlands, those who actually ruled these lands, again turned out to be women from the Habsburg family – Margaret of Austria (1507-1530), Maria of Austria (1531-1555), Margaret of Parma (1559-1567). There are two Margaritas at once, and one of them rules in the year of the creation of “Mad Greta” – and meanwhile the name Greta, of course, is nothing more than a derivative of the name Margarita.

But what about the protest against power as such – greedy, predatory, stupid, inhuman – only disguised as a possible misogyny? In the end, quite recently, in 1558, the exuberant Scottish whirlwind John Knox wrote his “First Trumpet Against the Monstrous Rule of Women”: a kind of theological discourse that it was unsuitable for a woman to reign, but in fact a pamphlet aimed personally at Mary Tudor and her religious policy.

Knox, however, was a Calvinist, and Brueghel a Catholic, who would be strange to complain about the rule of women as a principle. Let him be a freethinker, but at least he knew for sure that the images of other militant women can, instead of phobia, normatively evoke respect and, moreover, such that the conditional Margaret of Parma could not even dream of. Judith beheading Holofernes; Jael, hammering a peg into the temple of the Canaanite commander Sisera; the Scythian queen Tomiris, who defeated Cyrus the Great (and put his severed head in a bloodskin with blood – they say, he wanted blood, so get drunk) – all these were for the traditional Catholic consciousness venerable prototypes of the Mother of God, the Woman clothed in the sun, who destroyed the infernal dragon.

Of course, this is also from the category of proverbs and sayings, but still, in the Rabelaisian campaign of Mad Greta and her companions, there is, as they say, poetic justice. They acted not in providential forms and obviously not from a great mind – but as a result, the vile, absurd and allegedly omnipotent kingdom of darkness got a lot from them. Already good.

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