New York Times Book Review, 20 May 2001 - Nicholas Fox Weber
As readable and riveting as a first-rate spy-thriller... In the tradition of fine-art historians like Erwin Panofsky and Meyer Schapiro.


The Catholic Herald, 30 March 2001 - Patrick Reyntiens
It is the first time that Bruegel has been given the real attention he deserves.


The Irish Eyes, December 2000, Ann Cremin
A delightful volume, felicitously well written, beautifully produced and with excellent illustrations.


Ha'aretz, 7 February 2001, Dan Kedar
Gibson sets down his impressions fluently and insightfully.


Book Description
"The Mill and the Cross" is a highly original approach to a single painting by Peter Bruegel the Elder - "the Way to Calvary" - to which the book is entirely devoted. But it also represents an innovative approach to the general emergence of Christian culture out of the patterns of Antiquity. Bruegel's work tells two stories at the same time: on the one hand, it is a straightforward relation of Christ's Passion, in which Jesus appears, lost in a crowd of some 500 characters, carrying his cross from Jerusalem (enclosed in the circle of its walls) to Calvary (marked by the darker circle of the expectant crowd). But it also tells the story of the passion of Flanders in Bruegel's day, since Christ is here escorted to Golgotha by the red-uniformed mercenary police of the king of Spain who was then imposing a fierce repression on Bruegel's native land. Gibson also takes a close look at the windmill, oddly perched atop a pointed rock. It is, he argues, Bruegel's depiction of the "cosmic mill" which, in the tradition of Antiquity, was thought to grind the fates of men and nations. The theme of the Precession of the Equinoxes is invoked to explain the deeply rooted tradition of the passing of the ages, the age of the ram giving way, in Jesus' day, to the age of the Fish, to which Christian tradition tied Christ himself. This allows Gibson to take an innovative look at the way myth commands our representations of the world and how we, today, at another "turning of the world", may look back on the age out of which we are already moving. More than an art book, it is a book about how we can come to terms with our own culture.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French


From the Publisher
Michael F. Gibson's perceptive eye and limpid prose lead the viewer effortlessly through the story of Christ's Passion as told in Peter Bruegel's "Way to Calvary" - an astonishing work, laced with allusions to the harsh political an religious climate King Philip II of Spain imposed on the artist's native land. Having sketched out the historical background, Gibson goes on to argue the painting's relevance to the contemporary world. In doing so he develops an innovative theory of image and myth. Never before, perhaps, has a single work by Bruegel been as carefully scrutinized and exhaustively described. Closing this insightful book so full of strong feelings and creative ideas, one realizes that Bruegel is indeed a major figure of Western art, a creative genius of truly Shakespearian immensity.


From the Author
Bruegel's paintings have always fascinated me, because they each contain a world - hence the much deserved comparison with Shakespeare. These paintings are in fact miniatures on a tremendous scale. This means the spectator can never really get close enough to see them as the artist himself did - a handicap the publisher has overcome by offering a large number of details of the painting (100 illustrations, including a large fold-out of the entire painting). More than any other painting by Bruegel "The Way to Calvary" encloses a world. It also offers a profoundly poetic cosmic view in a homespun idiom. For the warm-hearted, earthy folk quality of his art does not prevent Bruegel from having a touch of the sublime - as can be seen in the group surrounding the fainting Mary in the foreground. Going through all this gradually allows one to realize that a picture like this one is much more than a representation of an event (a twofold event, since it relates both Christ's Passion and the religious and political repression of Flanders in Bruegel's day). It is above all an extraordinarily eloquent expression of the breadth and depth of Bruegel's own conception of human experience with its ordeals and its hopes.


About the Author
Michael Francis Gibson is an independent scholar and philosopher who has been writing on art over the past thirty years for numerous publications, including the International Herald-Tribune in Paris. He has published a number of books, including one on the nineteenth-century Symbolist movement and one on Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement (in French, Vasari International Art Book Prize, 1991). Gibson's anthropological approach to art is highly innovative, and his unusual gift of empathy affords him exceptional insights into the workings of the artists' mind. When his Bruegel was first published in 1980, Sir Kenneth Clarke termed it "much the most profound thing I have ever read about Bruegel". Acatos will be publishing a new, revised edition of it in the near future.


Excerpted from The Mill and the Cross - Peter Bruegel's "Way to Calvary" by Michael Francis Gibson. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
INTRODUCTION – MULTA PINXIT One thing I really hated as a child was being told what I should think of a person or a work of art before I had even laid eyes on either. To me, standing in front of a painting is rather like meeting a living person. The impression the work makes on you depends mainly on the relationship you establish with it, and only incidentally on the information everyone seems so eager to impart. This encourages me to make the following suggestion: Perhaps you shouldn’t read this book just yet. Why not look at the pictures first. Get acquainted with them. Step into their world without preconception. If you look carefully, you will discover Christ somewhere in the middle of the crowd, carrying the Cross on which he will shortly be crucified. How long will it take you to find him? The question is not as pointless as it may seem, since it suggests Bruegel took considerable pains to conceal his central figure. Why? This is something we shall discover in due course. The painting dates from 1564. This much you may want to know. The painter was then in his late thirties and had only five more years to live. He had married the year before and Peter, his first son, had just been born. His period, like our own, was a time of great perplexity, seared by bitter conflicts of convictions. And though the Church of Bruegel’s day – rent from top to bottom, like the Temple veil in the hour Christ died – confronted an anguished world with the disturbing riddle of the vacant shrine, none of the more pressing questions people were actually asking themselves managed to leave a trace in the art of the day. The Protestant Churches disapproved of images while the Catholic Church favored a forceful, affirmative rhetoric conceived to stir the heart and win the mind. In this context Bruegel’s paintings are unique in that they present one with one man’s entirely personal assessment. Abraham Ortels said as much. He was the painter’s oldest and closest friend from the Antwerp days, but also the greatest geographer, cosmo-grapher and mapmaker of his age. In 1573, four years after Breugel’s untimely death, Ortels, in tears (lugens) we are told, delivered his eulogy in Latin: “Peter Bruegel,” he declared, “painted many things that cannot be painted” (multa pinxit quae pingi non possunt).... “In all his work there is always more matter for reflection than there is painting” (In omnibus eius operi-bus intelligitur plus semper quam pingitur). I quote him here only to encourage you to give your thoughts the freest possible rein. For no matter how far you wander, you will always find the artist at your side, observing you with his characteristic, quizzical gaze, and -anti-cipating your next move with silent amusement. This is the way he kept me company all the while I was writing this book. Take all the time you need. An hour, a month – a year if necessary. Then, once you have studied the painting at leisure, come back to the text and, if you feel so inclined, we can go over the same road together, like two people strolling through the woods and reminiscing about a friend. I naturally sought to familiarize myself with the body of his work, with the artist’s life and the history of his day, but mostly I scrutinized this teeming painting, trying to discover what connects the various pictorial masses and what secret links tie together the countless figures making their way across the stage.