Free Headlong by Michael Frayn

know that there must have been others because we have the copies and engravings that his followers made of them.
    But whether there really are seven paintings missing from the series, or nine, or six, or five, or four, no one seems to know. I’m sitting now in the Reading Room of the London Library, my back firmly turned upon the green haze on the trees in St James’s Square outside the window, speed-reading the seven standard authorities on Bruegel that I’ve assembled on my table, before I rush back to St Pancras to keep my pledge to make dinner for Kate. The more I read, the more uncertain everything about him seems to become. The uncertainty fills me with a terrible anguish. I need to know exactly what’s missing. I really do.
    Scarcely anything about him has survived, I discover, apart from some unknown proportion of the pictures themselves and a handful of dates from official records. He was admitted to the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1551. From 1552 to 1554 he was on his travels to Italy. In 1563 he moved to Brussels and married the daughter of his former master. In 1569 he died. How old he was when this cryptic story ended no one knows, because no one knows when it started. Scholars have found various scraps of evidence that suggest he was born some time between 1525 and 1530, but can’t exclude 1522, or even 1520.
    There are two engraved portraits of him, according to the inscriptions on them, one by Lampsonius, the other by Sadeler. But no letters, and no certain firsthand recollections. Almost the only source of biographical information about him is an extraordinary work called the Schilder - Boeck , the Book of Painters. The author was a painter himself, Karel van Mander, and the book is a Brief Lives of European artists from antiquity onwards, modelled on Pliny and Vasari. The most interesting section, though, is the one devoted to German and Netherlandish painters. The entry on Bruegel is brisk and anecdotal. ‘He was a very quiet and thoughtful man, not fond of talking, but ready with jokes when in the company of others.’ He used to go to fairs and weddings, with a merchant friend called Hans Franckert for whom he often worked, ‘dressed in peasant’s costume, and they gave presents just like the others, pretending to be family or acquaintances of the bride or the bridegroom. Here Bruegel entertained himself observing the nature of the peasants – in eating, drinking, dancing, leaping, lovemaking and other amusements …’
    What else? Not much. He liked to frighten people with ‘all kinds of spooks and uncanny noises’. When he was in Antwerp he lived with a servant girl, abandoned her because she was a terrible liar, and moved to Brussels to get away from her at his mother-in-law’s insistence when he married. He left his wife one of his pictures and ordered her to destroy others.
    Van Mander’s book was published in 1604, thirty-five years after Bruegel’s death, and since he spent most of Bruegel’s working lifetime in other cities it seems unlikely that he knew him personally. So a question mark hangs over both the description and these odd few anecdotes.
    Even Bruegel’s name opens up fresh mysteries. Van Mander says that he took it from the village where he was born, Brueghel, near Breda in North Brabant, which is now part of Holland. But according to Friedrich Grossmann, one of the authorities I have open on the desk in front of me, there are two villages with the name of ‘Brueghel’ or‘Brogel’, and neither is near Breda. One is thirty-four miles to the east of it, the other forty-four miles to the south-east, near the town of Brée, which in the sixteenth century was Breede, Brida or – in Latin – Breda. But if this was Bruegel’s birthplace, then he was not proto-Dutch but proto-Belgian, and if Tony Churt’s sensitive assessment is right, his works are either chocolate or beer, or beneath notice.
    But then the mere spelling of the name is a puzzle in itself. The Massacre