The Blind Leading the Blind

The whole subject is one sentence from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 15, verse 14: if a blind man guides a blind man, both will fall into a ditch. It is a short, hard saying about false teachers — people who claim to know the way and do not — and painters had illustrated it before Bruegel took it up. He does two unusual things with the verse. He slows the fall down, and he multiplies the men.

Slowing it down means choosing the least dramatic instant available. A painter who wanted pity would show the men in the water. A painter who wanted a joke would show the fall at its peak. Bruegel shows the fall in stages, and the stages follow from a physical fact the painting makes visible. Each man keeps his balance by holding on to the man ahead — a hand laid on a shoulder, or a stick gripped at one end by one man and at the other end by the next. Balance borrowed this way has a cost. When the leader drops, his weight tugs at the second man through the stick they share. The second man, who cannot see what has happened, pitches forward in his turn. His weight will pull on the third, the third's on the fourth, and so on down the line until the last man goes over too. Bruegel paints the sequence part-way through: one man already in the water, one falling now, four still upright and walking in good faith. The viewer sees the whole chain of consequences at once. The men cannot see any of it. That gap — we know what is coming, they do not — is the engine of the painting, and it needs no symbols to run. The men's heads are tilted up, offered to the air rather than the ground, because a person without sight leans on the other senses, and the raised head serves them. The posture that helps them find their way is also the posture that makes them look, to us, as if they were already appealing to heaven.

Multiplying the men means turning the pair of the verse into six, and refusing to let the six be interchangeable. Bruegel gives each a different eye condition, painted precisely enough that they can still be identified. One man has a corneal leukoma: a white scar clouding the cornea, the clear window at the front of the eye. Another shows atrophy of the globe: the eyeball itself has shrunk and wasted. A third has had his eyes removed altogether, so the lids have sunk over the empty sockets. This range is usually cited as proof of how closely Bruegel observed real people, and it is hard to read the faces any other way. But the detail also does moral work. A generic blind man is a symbol, and a symbol can fall without hurting anyone. Six men, each blind in his own particular way, are people — and it is much harder to enjoy watching people fall.

The making is part of the meaning. The picture is not painted on a wooden panel but on linen cloth, and the paint is tempera, also recorded as distemper: pigment mixed with a water-based glue rather than with oil. Paint of this kind dries flat and slightly chalky. It cannot give the deep, glossy darks of oil, and the combination is fragile — the paint layer is thin, and cloth swells and shrinks with changes in damp in a way that wood does not. The canvas measures 86 by 154 centimetres (34 in × 61 in), nearly twice as wide as it is tall, which is exactly the shape a procession needs. There is no room above the figures for heaven and none below for hell. The long, low format holds the six men at eye level and lets the diagonal of their walk run downhill across the full width of the picture, towards the ditch at the lower right.

The date is 1568, and Bruegel died the following year. Much writing on the painting reads its bitter, sorrowful tone in that light: an artist near the end of his life, choosing a story about being led wrongly. A political reading runs alongside. In 1567 the government of the Spanish Netherlands set up the Council of Troubles, a special court that ordered mass arrests and executions to enforce Spanish rule and suppress Protestantism. A painting about trusting a guide who cannot see, finished the year after that court began its work, invites the connection. But the connection is an inference from the calendar, nothing more. No document links the painting to the council, and it is not clear that Bruegel meant the work as a political statement at all. That gap in the record is worth keeping open rather than filling.

The same caution applies to the small church in the background, identified as St Anna's Church in the village of Sint-Anna-Pede. The blind men are walking away from it. Readers hostile to Rome have taken that as an attack on the Catholic clergy: guides who cannot see, leaving the true church behind them. Readers on the other side have taken it as the opposite: the church stands firm while the men who left it stumble into the water. The building is conspicuous enough to look meaningful and neutral enough to support both cases, and neither has closed the other out.

What is not in doubt is that the composition travelled. Bruegel's son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, painted a larger copy. Charles Baudelaire and William Carlos Williams each wrote a poem from the picture, and Gert Hofmann built a novel around it. The original hangs today in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples — a long way from the Netherlands where it was made, though how and when it made that journey is not something the record before us explains. Few paintings of a single scriptural verse have gone so far from their text.