A WEEK-END WITH THE

BRUEGHELS

 

 

         Dr Klaus Ertz wore tweed for the opening of the Brueghel Exhibition.

         “Welcome to Antwerp,” he told his audience “and to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.” He gave a speech first in Flemish, then French and then German. The brothers’ paintings had toured Europe, he said, and were now here for our pleasure. When it came to his English speech, he simply said, “Anybody got any questions?” and laughter rustled among the academics: nowhere in the world can so many people make little jokes in four languages.

 

         The brothers’ gift to Flemish culture carried with it a simple, fruity message; Learn the glory of civic duty, the perfection of allegory and the joy of food and drink. In their paintings, The Good inhabit a rolling, bountiful Arcady whilst The Sinful are peeled alive in a dull, dark place like Holland. In my favourite picture, an honest burgher puts on yellow stockings and dances on the frozen Scheldt. In another, a voluptuous maiden is draped in wreaths of juicy fruit inhabited by monkeys and parakeets. Even the rabbits at her feet look sleek and urbane.

Four hundred years later, the people of the Brueghels’ city still live by the brothers’ uncomplicated values; put on fine leather and breakfast on almond cakes and witbier; take an ornamental dog for company and dye your hair the colour of rubies; roar with laughter and canoodle in the Grote Markt; eat the exotic and visit apothecaries; fall in love with someone ugly; feast and drink but don’t be late for Mass”.

 

         My wife, Jayne, and I found Antwerp happily immersed in the early sixteenth century. The citizens still call themselves sinjoren, once a jibe at their courtly Spanish behaviour, and most would prefer to believe that the skinny years that followed the Golden Age were just an unfortunate dream. There’s fresh gold leaf on the guildhouses of the crossbowmen and the arquebusiers and the vlaaikensgang is still Pie Lane, a cobbled gulley of workshops and eateries, and not the carpark that the city elders had wanted. The Onze Lieve Vrouwe Kathedraal stands as Jan Brueghel saw it, splendid, intricate and quite unfinished. Inside, there had been small changes; swordsmen and spaniels no longer made sport in the ambulatory and, instead, it resounded to the snap and whirr of curious orientals. Every Japanese child has read “A Dog of Flanders”, even though it’s English, sentimental and cheerlessly fatalistic: Nello and his dog, Patrasche, come here, see Rubens’ Descent from the Cross and drown in whimsy. We stood before the picture, bathed in flashlight, and admired the great thick limbs and bosoms, all glittering with jewels and blood. Van Dyck had painted Mary Magdalene’s arm and declared it perfect. We had to admit that it was indeed a well-nourished Flemish arm.

 

         We went on the Rubens diet and ate horses, eels and ostriches. Everything was so exquisitely cooked and garnished that it seemed there wasn’t an animal in the world that couldn’t become Belgian nouvelle cuisine. At Antwerp Zoo, I found myself staring at the sinjorens as they watched the gorgeous, lean tigers, wandering who would eat who first. It was a cruel thought; Belgians love animals and they happily shared their baguettes and worst with the American Bison. A brass band played and the monkeys were allowed out, as a notice explained “de faire un tour dans le jardin”. It was a blissful afternoon, an afternoon to catch up on some chocolate; every year, Belgians get through 12.5kg a head.

 

         Despite the eating, the pastries, the Karbonaden stews and the stroopwafels, we never neglected our drinking. We found De Vagant gin-shop with 350 jenevers, some old, some made with eggs or flavoured with bananas and some stored in eight litre flagons. The beer shop sold 280 Belgian beers - cherry beers, Trappist beers and beers dyed green and labelled “Paranoia”. But the serious drinking went on in the bars. I remember De Pelgrom, which was so old that even the cat-flap was baroque, and Het Elfde Gebod (The Eleventh Commandment), which was packed out with rosy-cheeked church statues, and then I recall, with slightly more difficulty, some smokey place on Oude Waag where the students still thought it was sexy to look like Ho Chi Minh.

         Naturally, such a lifestyle affects people in different ways. We could always repair to our peachy hotel, the Rubens, where the outside world, now looking mean and scraggy, could be beamed in on cable television. Rubens himself got gout and eventually succumbed, to be buried in St Jacobskerk under a sumptuous self-portrait, squeezed into the armour of St George. On the other hand, the American visitors, upset to discover people eating their friends - the horses - became rather earnest and behaved oddly. They stuffed their handbags with breakfast rolls and pestered the waitresses for news of the war.

         “Was Antwerp bombed?” one kept asking but no-one knew or particularly cared and this seemed reassuringly English. Sometimes, I even felt that I understood Flemish, particularly the graffiti (“Miranda is een trut”), although I was a little concerned by snit brushing at the barbers.

 

         We walked everywhere and found Antwerp as exotic as the Breughels had promised. Gays, looking pinched and severe in black suits, had become the new ascetics. Berber tribeswomen begged in Flemish and orthodox jews scuttled around the diamond district, buttoned-up and chained to their briefcases, unable to shrug off that persecuted look. Around the docks, Russians sold off silver icons and the detritus of the Soviet navy whilst the Moroccans offered us felafel and, more adventurously, tattoos. At one point, I wandered down Schippers and the windows rattled like gunfire as the whores beat their jewellery on the glass. I had stumbled into a Rubens. When they spotted Jayne, they stopped and, with admirable dexterity, affected a look of disdain. Business was quiet as there was only one punter about; he seemed amiable enough but there was some problem about his big, black woolly dog.

 

         On Sunday, the gentlefolk went to church and the rest went to market. There, they strutted around, sniffing at cartwheels of cheese and sorting through the geese and ducks in the Vogel Markt (Bird Market). It was pleasing to think that here, in one of Europe’s foremost ports, you can still walk home with your lunch squawking under your arm. The flea market, however, was shut.

         “Riots,” they told us at the tourist office with grim satisfaction, “The gypsies rioted”.

         Most of the junk found its way into the Antiek shops. Much was just landfill, from England, but there were also intriguing medals for vegetables, morality, and sport and some cutlery from the Cie Maritime Belge du Congo which, despite the rust, seemed redolent of glamour and adventure. When I spotted a military hamper, I was so delighted at the idea of the brave little Belgian Army being exquisitely provisioned that I paid over the odds for it and had to carry it home on Eurostar, where it nestled among the Prada and the Louis Vuitton. Had my wife’s wise counsel not prevailed, I would gladly have filled it with a tableau of chocolate drunks, prostitutes and dustcarts which I found in the chocolatier’s on Gasthuisstraat.

 

         On our last day, we visited the Maidens’ House, where from the Golden Age until 1860, the city’s foundlings were cared for. Their parents could leave them there, anonymously, by placing them in a drawer in the wall. If circumstances changed, the children could be reclaimed, upon presentation of a severed token, the other half of which was held by the warden. We admired the foundlings’ delicately painted porridge bowls and Cornelius de Vos’ joyful Portrait of an Orphan. It all seemed so sublimely civilised and tasteful without being anything other than distinctly Flemish. A punky girl who smelt, not unpleasantly, of cigars agreed to translate the rule book.

         “Always add water,” she read, “to the children’s beer.”