The Counting of Bethlehem by Brueghel the Elder

Pieter Brueghel the Elder paints his world in the year 1566: a village in Brabant, during one of the harsh winters of the so-called Little Ice Age, in the pale glow of a sun very low on the horizon. The artist places us a little higher up, as if in the front row, to observe a vast open scene, teeming with life. Dozens of characters demand attention from all sides.

The presence of two travelers would go almost unnoticed: here is the Virgin Mary, dressed in a blue cloak, mounted on a donkey guided by Joseph, a carpenter’s saw on her shoulder, her arm outstretched towards the narrow passage between two carts. He is looking for his way. If an additional sign was needed to identify them, the ox in the manger responds, its eye fixed on the viewer. The group has crossed the centuries to reach the banality of everyday life on a winter day in the 16th century.

Children in the spotlight

Many little stories are waiting to be deciphered in this extraordinary Count of Bethlehem. Around adults who are often busy, Brueghel represents many children. It seems as though they are, as they are today, at the heart of the Christmas celebration, on this evening of December 24 when the Child Jesus will soon be born.

At the bottom right, two little girls slide on the frozen pond, sitting on ox jaws, like on sleds. Two other children whip their tops. In the distance, snowball fights; one of them hit a man in the back, who is no longer playing and seems to be watching two small children near the bin stuck in the ice, on the left. And this charming, tiny detail at the top of the painting, on the right: at the edge of another stretch of frozen water, a toddler, a sketched silhouette with raised arms, tries to make the birds placed in front of him.

At the time he painted this painting, Brueghel, around 40 years old, was enjoying the new joys of fatherhood while his wife had given birth to their first child the previous year. The diversity of situations in which he sketches the characters reveals his benevolent, even smiling, attention to his contemporaries.

A scene is highlighted: the small crowd gathered in front of the house in the foreground. An inn, recognizable by the double green crown on its facade, on which appears the red Habsburg coat of arms. It serves as a counter where payment of the tax due to the imperial power is recorded, in currency or in kind.

Brueghel thus continues his transposition of the Gospel of the Nativity according to Saint Luke: the census, ordered by the Emperor Augustus, the cause of the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem according to the evangelist, is represented by another obligation, decreed by another emperor, contemporary of the artist. The painting was not always known by its title. The Numbering of Bethlehem.

In the center, the new arrivals

Joseph, Mary, the donkey and the ox, blended into the multitude of characters, find themselves seemingly at the heart of the composition. Two diagonals lead the eye towards the group. One starts from the church at the top left, following the line of porters on the frozen river. The other, from the ruins in the right corner, above, is based on three groups of figures detached against the snowy background.

Along the way, this second axis draws attention to a poor hut with a thatched roof, topped with an overturned basket as a chimney, and a cross, before leading to the couple of travelers.

In the opposition of the ruins, on one side, and the solid building of the church, on the other, Brueghel takes up a code of painting of his time representing the Old Covenant of Jewish law, supposed to be obsolete – a theological error – and the New Covenant in Jesus.

The cottage, also dilapidated, is inhabited. Two signs, unfamiliar to us, but very clear in the 16th century, reveal the identity of its occupant. The man holds in his hand a ratchet or rattle, an instrument made up of several movable pieces of wood attached to a handle, the clicking of which signals its presence when he shakes it.

The stake planted in front of the barracks, topped with a bowl, confirms it: the unfortunate man suffers from leprosy, a fearsome disease among all others. Brueghel painted The Numbering of Bethlehem while the epidemic is in sharp decline in Europe. But leprosy and the misery of the leper allow him to signify humanity which suffers from the consequences of sin and awaits deliverance from it.

Salvation of all times and all places

In a few hours, Christians will hear at night mass the Gospel of the Nativity according to Saint Luke (2, 1-14): “Today, in the city of David, a Savior was born to you who is Christ, the Lord. » In his way, Brueghel perfectly expresses this “today”.

Luke hammers it out throughout his gospel: “Today a Savior is born to you” continues with “Today salvation has come to this house”, launched by Jesus to Zacchaeus, the tax collector (19, 9), and finally with the words of Jesus on the cross to the good thief: “Today, with me, you will be in Paradise” (23, 43).

By representing Mary about to give birth to the Savior, not in Bethlehem but in the village of Wijnegem (where the large house reproduced in the upper part of the painting, in the center is located), the artist expresses in the language of the image that salvation is limited neither by space nor by time.

If the birth of the Son of God made man took place once in a specific time in History, for Christians, salvation is something new offered at each moment of time. That of a winter day in 1566 and 2025.