Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–1569), The Census at Bethlehem (1566), Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.

The Census at Bethlehem Essentially, we are looking at three paintings in one here – a religious painting, a snowy landscape, and a genre scene of everyday life. And added to this, there is possibly a fourth – a propaganda painting. In this article we’ll examine all these aspects, and see how Bruegel subtly knits them seamlessly together into a unified whole. 
 
The religious element of the painting, and the painting’s pivotal episode, take place in the mid foreground. An inconspicuous Mary and Joseph appear to be just arriving (Fig 1). Mary, pregnant, in a long blue cloak, with her face partly revealed, is seated on a donkey, with an accompanying ox by her side, who has turned its head to look directly at the viewer. The donkey is being led by Mary’s espoused husband, the brown-clad Joseph, carrying a long carpenter’s saw on his shoulder, with his back to the viewer. He is threading his way between two wagons laden with large beer casks. Apart from the fact that Mary and Joseph are evidently visitors, there is little indication — by halo, colouring, size or otherwise — to distinguish them from the rest of the crowd.

So why are Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, when their hometown was Nazareth? According to the Biblical account (Luke 2: 1-5), they left their home in Nazareth because of a decree from Caesar Augustus that ‘all the [Roman] world be taxed’ in their ‘own city’.  They have come to Bethlehem, ‘the city of David’, because they are required to register and pay tax there, as Joseph was of David’s ‘house and lineage’. And it is there, after failing to get a bed at the inn – not surprising in view of the crowds — that Jesus will shortly be born in a stable.

It is of course obvious that although the painting is titled The Census at Bethlehem, it is not in fact set there. Bruegel, as he has done in other paintings has instead depicted the Biblical scene as a contemporary event, and relocated it from Biblical Palestine to 16th-century Brabant. This switch, creating a deliberate anachronism, requires us to accept an internal contradiction — the villagers are about to witness an impending event — the birth of Christ — that actually occurred one and a half millennia before.

The Census itself can also claim two further ‘firsts’– it is apparently the first depiction of a ‘White Christmas’ in art; it is also, rather surprisingly, apparently one of the first times that any painter has tackled this particular Biblical episode of the Census despite the fact that this incident plays such a pivotal role in the Christmas story.

The painting is also a genre scene of life in a Brabant village some 450 years ago. It teems with different characters (about 200 of them!) and activities. Through the bare branches of the tall tree at the left of the painting, we can see a red sun setting in the distance, above the frozen pond. The scene is alive with activity – a crowd gathers, children play, men drink, and villagers carry out their daily chores.

From an elevated position, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the lower left corner, where there is the densest activity round the inn, then alights on Mary and Joseph, then curves round to the upper right, then follows the activity back across the buildings at the top of the painting, back to the inn. So, let us follow this route to see what is going on.

In the lower left of the painting, outside an inn identified by its sign as ‘The Green Wreath’, a crowd of people, bundled up against the cold, has gathered to register and to pay their taxes (Fig 2), watched by an interested spectator poking his head out of an upstairs shuttered window. At the inn door, a scribe sitting at a table records the villagers’ details, and an official with a fur-collared coat collects their money. Notable among the crowd is a man wearing an exotic, striped, yellow outfit, probably North African, interesting because similar figures appear in other of Bruegel’s works, such as the Conversion of Saul and Sermon of St John the Baptist’.

The official nature of the proceedings is reinforced by the presence of the small red and yellow sign, with the Habsburg imperial double eagle, on the inn wall, close to the red-hatted, spear-carrying guard standing next to the tree. As we shall see later, this is possibly a sly dig at the association of the Habsburgs for the onerous crippling taxes they were enforcing against the Brabanders. Near the guard, a man is loading a wagon of sticks, maybe to be used as firewood.

To the right of him, another man stands motionless at the edge of the frozen ice, the smudge of a previously thrown snowball still just visible on his shoulder. In the lower left corner of the painting, a woman is grasping a pig’s ears as she leads it out to a butcher who is already slaughtering another, its blood being caught by the bending woman holding a pan. It will probably be fried in hot fat or made into sausages, or even be intended as a payment of taxes in kind. (Fig.3)

Of course, in the real Jewish town of Bethlehem, pork would have been prohibited, but it was a popular luxury in Brabant, and it can even be seen as a metaphor for the peasants being bled dry by excessive taxes levied by their Spanish overlords. Straw is being laid out for the flesh to be singed. Two children, one of them inflating a pig’s bladder for skimming on the ice, watch the proceedings. A beehive fixed under the eaves of the house (see Fig 1) is being used as a birds’ nest, possibly in the hope of collecting eggs or the birds themselves. On the ground, chickens peck hopefully.

In the foreground on the right of the painting, children play on the ice, using sleds made from improvised cow jaw bones. In one vignette, a boy on an overturned three-legged stool is being pulled across the ice, while a third smaller child watches on, shivering. Just beyond them, two children spin tops on the ice. At the far right, an older child assists a toddler to skate, and two girls on sleds use sticks to scud across the ice.  A man crouches at the edge of the pond, tying on his skates. Near him, a peasant in a blue cloak greets a red-hatted child, and two others carry baskets, probably with poultry inside. In the lower right corner, a pair of pilgrims enter the scene, unwittingly following the trail of Mary and Joseph. 

Beyond the frozen pond, there is a tumbledown hut. On its roof an old basket without a bottom has been turned upside down to make a chimney. Someone looks to be tending or pilfering items in the snowy garden at the back of the hut. The hut’s distance from the others suggests that it houses a leper (or plague victim), who appears at the door begging, holding the characteristic leper’s clapper. A spindly cross on the gable suggests that the inhabitant depends on alms.
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Just across from the hut, a boy is tripping up another, and behind them, children are scuffling and throwing snowballs at each other. Some villagers, clustered at a wagon, appear to be having their palms read as others load bags of grain. Further out, in front of a partly ruined moated castle, men with wagons are constructing a new timber building. The poor state of the castle has been variously proposed as a symbol of the passing of the feudal era – serfdom had been abolished in Brabant during the 16th century — or as reflecting the uncertain political situation at the time Bruegel was painting; or even as a symbol of declining heathendom in the face of the coming of Christianity. At the edge of the moat a small child is waving its arms, apparently to scare off the birds. 

At the hollow tree, in front of the solid building with the stepped gables (possibly a merchant’s country house), is a makeshift bar where men are drinking. A red sign with a depiction of a swan hangs from a branch. At the very top of the tree sits a crow. People, including some off-duty guards with spears, huddle round a nearby brushwood fire. Hollow trees and crows could sometimes be symbolic of dissolution.

In the very centre of the painting, a wagon appears to have collapsed, leaving the two wheels prominent. They are sometimes rather imaginatively interpreted as the wheels of fortune or as representing the cyclical nature of things, or as a sign of chaos. Finally, at the top far left, directly beyond the Green Wreath Inn, we see a church, conspicuously clean and well-ordered, possibly symbolising the beneficial influence of religion in contrast to the crumbling secular castle.

While Bruegel’s palette of ochres, whites, browns and grey-greens still predominates, Mary is made more prominent, with a brighter blue robe, and various other figures in the composition are picked out more clearly by blues and reds. The town has been tidied up and slightly simplified – the original’s slushy ice in the right foreground has been replaced by a clean, neat walkway, and the man sitting to put his skates on has been omitted; the distant church grouping at upper left has been brought closer; the buildings are cleaner, as is the snow, which has lost much of Bruegel’s well-observed shadings, and is more uniform in colour. A homely wisp of smoke has been added to the large house’s chimney. In short, the copy has sanitised the realistic grit of the original, and replaced it with a more prettified, softer version.

As with many works by Bruegel, his Census can be interpreted in various ways.

Bruegel’s relocation of the Biblical event into a more contemporary setting can be seen simply as a way of enabling his audience to identify with that event more easily. There were in fact some significant parallels between the social and political circumstances in both 16th-century Brabant and Palestine at the time of Christ’s birth. Both were ruled by foreign militaristic dictatorships – Brabant by Spain, and Palestine by Rome. In both, those foreign powers exacted heavy taxes. In both, the local populations were oppressed — Rome suppressed opposition just as Spain’s emissaries executed rebellious Brabanders. And in both, there were violent religious differences – Rome attacked the adherents of the new Christian religion, and Spain, as ‘defender of the Roman Catholic faith’ attacked the adherents of the emerging new Protestant church.

​For all that, for us in the 21st century, the main feature in this painting is its projection of sheer humanity. Observing the painting’s numerous self-contained vignettes of ordinary life, as it was experienced almost than half a millennium ago, it is impossible not to be struck by the continuity of the things that we value and the things that challenge us – a love of play, an appreciation of the importance of labour, the temptation of indulgence, the inspiration of hope, the unwelcome inevitably of paying taxes, the need for resistance to tyranny — or just the peaceful pleasures of pottering around.

Psalm 89.1–4, 19–26

1  My song shall be always of the loving-kindness of the Lord: 
   with my mouth will I proclaim your faithfulness
      throughout all generations.
2  I will declare that your love is established for ever; 
   you have set your faithfulness as firm as the heavens.
3  For you said: ‘I have made a covenant with my chosen one; 
   I have sworn an oath to David my servant:
4  ‘ “Your seed will I establish for ever 
   and build up your throne for all generations.” ’
19  You spoke once in a vision and said to your faithful people: 
   ‘I have set a youth above the mighty;
      I have raised a young man over the people.
20  ‘I have found David my servant; 
   with my holy oil have I anointed him.
21  ‘My hand shall hold him fast 
   and my arm shall strengthen him.
22  ‘No enemy shall deceive him, 
   nor any wicked person afflict him.
23  ‘I will strike down his foes before his face 
   and beat down those that hate him.
24  ‘My truth also and my steadfast love shall be with him, 
   and in my name shall his head be exalted.
25  ‘I will set his dominion upon the sea 
   and his right hand upon the rivers.
26  ‘He shall call to me, “You are my Father, 
   my God, and the rock of my salvation.”

Almighty God, you have given us your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin: grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.