Free Headlong by Michael Frayn Page A

of the Innocents that faces The Hunters in the Snow in the Kunsthistorisches Museum is not in fact the one by Pieter Bruegel, which is at Hampton Court; it’s a copy of it by Pieter Brueghel with an ‘h’ in the middle of his surname. Pieter Brueghel with an ‘h’ is not the same painter as Pieter Bruegel without an ‘h’, nor for that matter is he someone totally unrelated who confusingly happens to have almost the same name. He is, even more confusingly, our man’s son , and of course is usually called Pieter Brueghel the Younger, to make the distinction from Bruegel the Elder a little clearer – though possibly not the distinction from Brueghel the Elder with an ‘h’, who is Jan Brueghel, our man’s elder son, but called the Elder to set him apart from his son, Jan Brueghel the Younger. Not to mention Abraham Brueghel, the son of Jan Brueghel the Younger, and Ambrosius Brueghel, another son of Jan Brueghel the Elder – making a round total of five painters called Brueghel, all with h’s, but all sprung from our man’s mysterious and potent seed.
    The one certain way of distinguishing between our man and all his descendants is that his name is spelt without an ‘h’. Except that Wilhelm Glück, one of the most notable of all Bruegel scholars, I see from his great work on the table in front of me, spells him with an ‘h’. But then so almost always did Bruegel himself, until 1559. Then, at the age oftwenty-nine, or thirty, or thirty-four, or thirty-seven, or thirty-nine, when his reputation was already thoroughly established under the Brueghel trademark, he ceased to sign his pictures Brueghel and almost always signed them Bruegel. Why? Nobody knows.
    Why not, though? It makes it easier to spell, it uses up a spot less paint. But then at once another mystery arises. If he liked the new version better, why didn’t he give it to his sons when they were born in the following decade? Why did he condemn all his descendants to the ‘h’ that he didn’t want himself?
    Nobody knows.

Something, somewhere, in that great cycle of the year is missing. On this point almost all the authorities agree.
    But what? That depends on what the five surviving pictures represent, and on this the authorities sharply differ.
    I struggled with my mountain of accumulated scholarship all the way northwards in the train, frustrated by the difficulty of cross-referencing between a dozen different books with nowhere but my lap to put them. Exhilarated too, though, because they’ve one other single point of agreement: that the solution to the problem lies in the iconography . Bruegel (they all concur) didn’t choose the seasonal labours and activities in these five pictures on the basis of his personal knowledge or observation of country life, in spite of all the espionage recorded by van Mander. He used symbolic ones. They’re the labours and activities traditionally shown associated with particular times of the year in the calendar that formed part of a Book of Hours. ‘A placid, bucolic, unchanging world’, says Wieck in his study of this best-selling mediaeval title, ‘in which there seldom penetrates any of the hard work and harsh poverty that was the reality of this life.’
    So Kate and I can work on the problem together. She knows at least as much about the iconography of a Book of Hours as any of the authors I was balancing on my knees. The Book of Hours, in all its various manifestations, is as familiar to her as the works of Occam are to me. It was in away through a Book of Hours that I met her – on a flight to Munich, when she was on her way to study the manuscripts in various south German archives and monasteries, including the celebrated Calendrier flamand preserved in the Bavarian State Library. Not for the first time I bless Lufthansa, and my admirable quickness and recklessness in pressing my refresher, paper napkin and even my handkerchief on her when the old-fashioned fountain pen she was using leaked over