
Pieter Brueghel’s “The Way to Calvary” is a large painting of many figures in a surreal landscape. With his master’s eye for detail and perspective, he packed the canvas with the almost hidden story of Christ bearing his cross to Golgotha. Part of the strangeness is that the scene is reimagined as taking place in 16th Century Flanders, and the Roman soldiers are replaced by the Spanish soldiers who currently terrorized the country, crucifying heretics (in the name of the holy church) across wheels jutting into the sky. Thus Brueghel combined an angry political statement with a nominally holy subject, creating a masterpiece with many levels of meaning in his typically beautiful, arresting, intense, numinous, almost grotesque style.
Although Christ is at the center of the picture, the viewer’s eye is distracted by the multifarious dramas around him, and this is part of the painter’s philosophy of how cataclysmic events happen almost unnoticed while life goes on. W.H. Auden expressed this idea in a famous poem on Brueghel’s “Fall of Icarus”.





































