Brueghel’s Renaissance Beauty and Blisters (Part II)

An influential teacher during Brueghel’s apprenticeship in Antwerp and his future father-in-law, Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-1550) served as painters’ guild master and court artist to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the great Renaissance economic crossroads of Brussels and Antwerp. Van Aelst also designed immense stained glass windows and exquisite tapestries to adorn the chilly, plastered walls of some of Europe’s most prominent cathedrals and palaces. Coecke’s treasured allegorical fabrics are alive with expressive figures and exotic classical scenes that include the Vertumnus and Pomona series based on Ovid’s tale in The Metamorphosis of how the Roman god of seasons’ deceived Pomona, goddess of abundance. Infused with hope from more bountiful harvests and rising populations, Renaissance artists and authors used the harvest theme both as allegorical of divine blessing and offering commoners the prospect of a reasonably fulfilled life on earth. Europe’s centers of tapestry production in Brussels and Antwerp flourished throughout the sixteenth century, and as princely and papal commissions increased other workshops were established in Fontainbleau, France, and in Florence and Mantua, Italy.

Van Aelst introduced Brueghel to many of the era’s most notable artists and travelers. Following his master’s death in 1550 the young artist completed his apprenticeship in the Antwerp workshop of Hieronymus Cock (1518-1570), one of Europe’s most distinguished engravers and publishers who had sought full advantage of the newly introduced printing press. Among Cock’s other workers was Flemish engraver Phillips Galle (1537-1612) who became one of the period’s most prolific publishers in the late sixteenth century. Galle had traveled widely in Europe and likely influenced Brueghel’s classical style with descriptions of works by early Renaissance Italian masters. Galle published a stunning series of engraved allegorical months in at least three editions depicting summer harvest labors and other agrarian endeavors.

Jan van de Velde II, August, from the Twelve Month Series (c. 1616)
Copperplate engraving on paper, 11 ¾ x 17 ¼ inches
Columbia Heritage Collection

Brueghel himself toured France and Italy in 1551 and extensively sketched rural landscapes. His emphasis on first-hand observations of actual places and peasant labor influenced a generation of Flemish artists including Lucas van Valckenborch (c. 1535-1597), Pieter van der Borcht (1545-1608), and Joos de Momper (1564-1635). Their works also commonly employed broad spatial construction featuring hillsides and ledges to lend grand recessive perspectives to canvases like van Valckenborch’s Landscape in Summer (1584). The painting shows harvesters wielding substantial scythes while others enjoy a midday meal in the presence of a well-dressed nobleman, probably the landowner, with a verdant valley that melts into the distant horizon. De Momper’s Summer (c. 1600) is notable for the detailed and colorful depiction of cutting, binding, and carting chores with background of gleaming sun and church steeple suggesting the sacred nature of rural labors.

Joos de Momper, Summer (c. 1600)
Oil on wood, 28 ½ x 20 ¼ inches
National Gallery, Oslo

Brueghel’s Renaissance Beauty and Blisters (Part I)

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s sixteenth century masterpiece The Harvesters (1565) provides vivid commentary on the Old World division of labor. The vibrant panorama is one of five in the acclaimed Renaissance artist’s ambitious Seasons series of wide, high diagonal foregrounds that allow viewers to perceive vast distances. The work teems with life and hot summer harvest bounty likely set in “Peasant Brueghel’s” native northern Brabant district of central Belgium. A group of men wield scythes in a dense stand of wheat almost as high as they stand, followed by women who pile the stalks into sheaves which some carry toward a clearing. In the distance a team of oxen pulls a wagon piled high with grain to the farmstead to await threshing. The field’s proximity to a church suggests these communal endeavors are hallowed tasks, while field hands also cluster in the shade of pear tree to rest, frolic, and eat bread and porridge. The grand work is also an allegorical depiction of Proverbs 10:5—“He who gathers in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who brings shame.” Flemish threshers also banded together by the thousands in this time to cross the Channel and work the later English harvest. They brought their folksongs with them, including one derived from a Medieval Latin hymn with a cadence guided by the swinging of their scythes. The tune’s doggerel verses were retranslated again by English hearers as “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” 

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Harvesters (1565)
Oil on wood, 45⅞ x 62⅞ inches
Rogers Fund, Metropolitan Art Museum, New York; Wikimedia Commons

Brueghel (1525-1569) began his career as an engraver, and his landscape Rustic Efforts (Solicitudo Rustica) shows the influence of his earlier travels to Italy in 1552-1553. Before this time, Brueghel, like most other artists of the age, used landscapes as backdrops for religious figures or other representations. The idea of depicting grand open spaces for their own sake stimulated uneasy prospects in the minds of viewers accustomed to perceiving wilderness and grand vistas as fearsome. While Petrarch’s idea of ascending a mountain simply for “the view” largely remained a radical notion in the sixteenth century, Brueghel’s art humanized such perspectives in ways that marked the emergence of a new approach that would popularize landscapes. Rustic Efforts—sometimes translated Country Concerns, presents a grand agrarian vista of Flemish vitality that directs the viewer from two harvesters in the lower right-hand corner upwards to a primal forest far in the distance, and across waterways teeming with trading vessels to steeply thrusting mountains on the left side. Between the scythers and the mountains is a broad verdant plain with a universe of tiny villages, a gristmill and churches, and farm workers and livestock who share the fields with the Brueghel’s puffy trees. One’s eyes return to the two harvesters, one of whom is pounding his scythe on a small anvil, who might well be thinking with pride, “We make all this possible.”

Known for realism in a day of artistic formalism, Brueghel offers a faithful if restrained record of agrarian life in its many manifestations—joy and fatigue, beauty and blisters, to impart the sense that peasants were ciphers for timeless humanity. Among his revolutionary artistic innovations is the sympathetic portrayal of ordinary people with all their foibles and prosaic chores amidst backdrops of natural grandeur.

The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Miracle of the Wheat Field

Some medieval theologians and parish priests saw divine intervention in agrarian fortunes and used familiar harvest experience to acquaint parishioners with higher truths revealed in the Scriptures. The faithful heard sermons about Jesus’ parables of the sower, wheat and tares, mustard seed, and leaven—all four found in Matthew 13, in which the temporal realm of crops and barns and harvests represented profound spiritual happenings and fates. These and other parables were subjects of an extensive series of engravings by French artist Léonard Gaultier (1561-1641). The influential Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) depicted such allegories in complex paintings of detailed fantasy also known for his use of colorful impasto. Among the best known of some sixteen surviving Bosch triptychs are the masterful The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Path of Life. Both works are held by Madrid’s Museo del Prado and may have been used as altarpieces usually opened to glorious effect on feast days. They were likely painted between 1500 and 1505 in the time when Old World conceptions of humanity’s place on earth was giving way to new understandings made possible by Columbus’ trans-Atlantic discoveries.

Heironymus Bosch, The Path of Life Center Panel, The Haywain ( c. 1505)
Oil and tempura on wood; 53 x 79 inches (tryptich)
Museo del Prado, Madrid; Wikimedia Commons

The centerpiece of The Path of Life, known as The Haywain, is flanked by an image of Eden on the left and the Last Judgement to the right to provide a visual narrative sequence rich in detail of humanity’s fate apart from vigilant faith. The heavily laden hay wagon dominates the view of workers too busily engaged in the affairs and frivolity of daily life to consider Christ’s overview from the clouds above. Wagon and passengers are pulled toward destruction by a team of infernal beings while others eat, drink, and be merry. Bosch derived the conception from Jesus’ explanation of the Parable of the Tares of the Field in Matthew 13:37-39 which concludes, “…the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are the angels.” Bosch’s visionary art influenced the Brueghels, David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), and others whose own styles marked the emergence of the Northern Renaissance.

Works by the notable Flemish artist pair Joachim Patinir (c. 1480-1524) and Quentin Massys (1466-1530) evidence imaginative spatial variety with agrarian settings in service to biblical narratives popular in the late medieval and Renaissance. Patinir, for whom story was as indispensable as setting composed the landscapes while Massys painted the more detailed human figures in the foregrounds. These elements are seen in their most ambitious paintings of apocryphal The Miracle of the Wheat Field, also known as Rest on the Flight into Egypt, which are comprised of scenes during the Holy Family’s escape from King Herod. Mary asked a peasant farmer to tell the pursuing Roman soldiers—portrayed as dullards, that they had long since the mature grain would cause the pursuers to think too much time has passed to continue. The farmer can be seen speaking to the soldiers, and because he had helped the fugitives, the field appears miraculously transformed into a crop of ripened bounty visible on the right side of the several versions attributed to Patinir’s worship and painted between 1515 and 1524.

Georges Trubert and Simon Bening, The Flight into Egypt (c. 1485 and c. 1530)
Tempera colors with gold leaf on wood (showing the “Miracle of the Wheat” in background)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Used by permission.

Patinir and Massys’s renderings evoke compassion for the sufferings of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, and are remarkable for the detailed harvest scenes showing teams of field workers with their tools and livestock, other tillage operations like plowing and harrowing, and the remarkable height and appearance of landrace grains. Because neither Patinir, Massys, nor their Northern Renaissance contemporaries like Simon Bening (c. 1483-1561) and Georges Trubert (1469-1508) had ever visited the Holy Land, such immense panoramas appear more colorfully exotic with towering blue-green mountains and verdant valleys than actually exist in the Low Countries. Trubert, a French illuminator, is known for panels enhanced by intense red-oranges, lapis azures, deep garnet, and other dramatic colors. Patinir’s oil panels are also more imaginatively composed and with naturalistic depth than other paintings of the time, and mark the emergence of European landscape art as a distinct genre imbuing place with as much significance as people. But only in the early eighteenth century would landscape art acquire the modern sense of depicting the countryside for its own sake.

The Holy Days of Harvest

Centuries of agrarian experience by European peasants and yeoman farmers led to adroit adaptations to the typically harsh conditions of life on the land. They learned to survive during the long continental winters through hard work and carefully arranged field operations suited to local conditions. Changes in the winds, soil textures and available moisture, and myriad other aspects of nature informed their management decisions throughout the year. The earth’s fertility meant life, perpetuation of family, and community wellbeing. The center of existence came to be the village church where people gathered weekly in the presence of an altar representing the axis mundi of heaven, earth, and the underworld. Here priests and pastors mediated a secure grace-filled dimension from past to future with hallowed reference to good soil and sowers, gleaners and reapers, and “fields white for harvest.”

Archibald Hartruck, A Harvest Festival in the Cotswolds
Boxwell Church on a manor formerly owned by Sir Walter Raleigh
The Sphere (London, September 21, 1901)

Medieval literature is rich with subjects of agricultural association derived from biblical texts, early church documentary accounts, and regional folklore. St. John the Baptist has been venerated at various times of the year as Herald of the Harvest, and since the Middle Ages on Midsummer Day—June 24, in part because of the metaphorical significance of his prophetic call for repentance before the baptism of Jesus: “His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). The holy days of the medieval harvest season reaffirmed the cycle of the Jewish agrarian calendar although these commemorations typically took place three to four months later with the cooler climates and later harvests of northern Europe.

The patron saint of harvesters and peasants, St. Isidore the Farmer (c. 1070-1130), was curiously honored less because of his agricultural diligence than his attention to prayer and worship even when interrupting field operations on his master’s estate in Spain. But St. Isidore, who is often portrayed in paintings and sculpture with a sickle fastened beneath his belt, remained steadfast in religious observations and his crops flourished. His wife, St. Maria Torriba (d. 1175), was also canonized for the miraculous provision of grain after she shared their few precious seeds with the needy and foraging birds.

Medieval European Harvest Holy Days and Festivals

June 24: St. John the Baptist’s Day—Feast of St. John, Herald of the Harvest (Midsummer Day)

August 1: Lammas Day (Loaf Mass)—Feast of First Fruits and Blessing of the Fields, ceremonial beginning of harvest

September 24: St. Rusticus Day—Feast of the Ingathering, traditional “Harvest-Home” celebrations (Autumnal Equinox)

September 29: Michaelmas—Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, ceremonial end of harvest and the farm year

November 11: Martinmas—Feast of St. Martin, general thanksgiving, end of fall wheat seeding, beginning of winter

The Grand Grain Refrain—1935 Harvest Reminiscences in Verse

by Don Schmick and Don Reich (2008); edited by Richard Scheuerman

About the time we were winding down last year’s Palouse Colony Farm harvest longtime friend Dale Schneidmiller of St. John, Washington, sent me a tattered photograph showing a steam- and horse-powered threshing outfit for which our grandfathers worked over a century ago. One thing led to another and by some chance I found myself driving by the very place where this picture had been taken 108 years earlier just as a pair of high capacity John Deere combines driven by longtime friends, brothers Matt and Nate Klaveno, unloaded grain there into a bank-out wagon. I had my phone camera so snapped the serendipitous shot below.

Don Schmick and Don Reich viewing old harvest photographs

The experience reminded me of a series of visits I had in 2008 with community elders Don Schmick and Don Reich of Colfax about their memories of Depression-era seasons on the farm. While scribbling down their vivid recollections I was struck by the poetry of their expressions. For the summer-harvest segment, they told of “oiled leather collars and shiny hames” used to harness the immense teams of horses and mules, mimicked thresher sounds, and even remembered the names of their beloved draft animals. When I got back home I decided rather than following my usual custom of typing up a verbatim transcript of the interviews, that I would arrange their words in verse using many of the expressions they had wistfully shared. The following stanzas are their “Grand Grain Refrain.”

Harvests Yesterday and Today—Different Times, Identical Location
Lautenschlager & Poffenroth (1911) and Klaveano Brothers Threshing Outfits (2019)
Four miles north of Endicott, Washington

Mend the fences and steepled posts,
Hogwire and three barbed lines
Hold the Herefords from trespassing.
Reassuring early morning barn stall conversation,
Mammoth creatures, tons of muscled horses.
Fanny, Sam, Mable, Hank!
Friendly short names, ready for the season,
Curry-combed backsides, gettin’ into shape,
Easy walks around the yard, settle them colts down,
Oiled leather collars and shiny hames,
Jingling bridles, bits, and rings on shaking heads,
Harness pulled back in small caresses,
Hooked under tails, trace chains and singletrees—
Don’t get kicked. “Send ya ‘cross the barn!”
Hook those reins so they feel your pull,
“Easy now, girl,” and out to wet April fields,
Great hooves, thrown mud, manure, clods.

Find the backland ‘round the draw,
And follow that plow all day long,
Three bottoms behind nine head,
Plowshares shining like silver service,
Five in the back, four out front,
Through sleet and sunburn,
Slicing, turning black earthen braids.
Red-tailed hawks methodically coursing
For mice suddenly set to sprint.
Ten acres a day of snail’s pace standing,
Then harrow those clods before it dries,
Rod-weed the ground and watch that chain;
Singin’ in the dust.

Every day now, Dad on the hillside,
A crisp ear rubbed in hands, ancient ways,
Wisp of breath, chaff explodes, kernels chewed.
All expectant judgment, till one day
Verdict soberly rendered: Ready. And all hands to harvest!
Headers in wheat, experienced pilots,
Sickles singing, ferris-reels combing.
“Don’t fail me now, Fanny and Sam!”
Four on header-boxes, keep straight
As fifty-bushel treasure falls.
Wagons to the derrick, hoedowns pitch.

Mile-long twisted shush belt,
Engine cranked, pops, …pops and runs.
And she moans, galvanized metal moans.
Heaves and bucks and thumps,
Great clamored crashing, ancient dust.
Long-necked oil cans at ready,
Mechanic tends the grinding symphony,
First and second sprockets and chains,
Guns and cans to tighten, grease, and oil.
Then the pulse, the pulse of tumbling gold.
Squeeze it, chew it; great harvest smiles.
Thirty-five cent wheat, figures in dust,
Delicious cool water in gunny-sacked jugs.
Tenders and jigs and flailing sewers,
Sacks stacked and hauled to flat-houses,
Headers and boxers mine, threshers refine,
And then the dew.

Sounds die, teams unhooked,
Thick black coffee, monstrous dinner.
Bindlestiffs in the barn, hayloft hornets,
Bedrolls over straw, exhaustion sleep.
Week after week: The Grand Grain Refrain.

Amber Waves of Eden Grain

Persian Grain Market (c. 1900)

“There’s only one thing better than a good story, and that’s a good true story!” sagely observed legendary Pikes Place Market restaurateur, brewer, and entrepreneur Charlie Finkel of Seattle. We were discussing the various benefits of heritage grains like flavor and nutrition, and Charlie pointed out that cultural values also greatly contribute to culinary significance. Like fine wines, the evocative names of many heritage varieties suggest fascinating worldwide associations and distinct flavors as with Yellow Breton wheat, Scots Bere barley, and the Himalayan Brown oat. But the context of our visit about “true stories” was how a USDA “plant explorer” came across an exceedingly rare hard white grain while on an expedition to Persia over a century ago. This historic region covered present Iran and portions of Iraq and included the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, long considered the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization.

The American had visited a Persian grain market famed for quality and variety, and asked his host for a sample of their finest wheat. He was directed to a vendor and asked him what made his wheat so special. The visitor learned that its name apparently said it all—the grain came from the land of Eden. The skeptical scientist may well have dismissed such a fanciful story, but nevertheless retrieved a sample for the USDA seed collection at Beltsville, Maryland, where it was stored with countless others. That might have been the end of the story had not some agricultural experiment stations in the western US a few years afterward sought to identify the baking characteristics of several recent grain introductions. As is commonly known, the finest yeast breads are made from hard red wheats, while pastry and flatbread flours are made from soft white varieties. Only in exceedingly rare instances does Mother Nature create a hard white wheat which makes possible a lightly colored whole grain loaf.  The variety found at the Persian bazaar, they discovered, was a hard white wheat which they further identified as an “excellent miller.”

View fullsize

World Grains Map (1907)

The wonderful flavor and appearance of hard white baked goods have long made it a highly desirable flour, and it typically fetches premium prices although virtually all hard white bread flours today are modern hybrids bred primarily for greater yields. We undertook a worldwide detective hunt for the Eden grain found in Persia over a century ago which was no longer available from the USDA. We eventually located a sample from a European germplasm center and set about with a few precious seeds several years ago to carefully increase it to the point that we able to plant about one acre this past spring, which should yield about a ton of when ready to harvest (and we’re harvesting it now as this is written!).

Sowing Palouse Heritage Amber Eden Wheat (Early May 2020)

Grandpa’s Weed-pullers (July 2020)

Amber Eden is a beautiful grain with large beardless heads, and to ensure a clean crop we’ve twice enlisted the valued help of young grandsons Zachary, Micah, and Derek to keep any other plants from growing in the field. This old-fashioned process is called “rōgging,” a term that comes from German roggen, or rye. Back in the day rye was sometimes mixed with wheat and barley so the stalks were pulled out by hand to keep crops pure. The boys are anxiously awaiting the fruit of their labors in the form of a freshly baked loaf after harvest, and Zachary intends to bake it himself, something Grandpa never considered doing at that age.

Of Grains and Gluten

Harvest since time immemorial was understood in ritual terms as the principal duty in humanity’s relationship with Mother Earth for the perpetuation of life. This was essentially the purpose of existence….     —J. Katarzyna Dadak-Kozicka

Perpetuation of life. The association of grain harvest with life has been honored since time immemorial in culinary traditions, stories, rituals, and art forms that I have regularly explored in this forum. The following entry shares long considered perspectives on grains and human health, especially in the context of the recent controversy surrounding gluten. As I compose these lines the word is emblazoned on an enormous crimson heart prominently featured on the back cover of Wheat Life magazine’s current issue, and above the byline “We love wheat.” You might think that’s appropriate advertising for an agricultural trade journal, but in our day gluten has become a touchstone for both nutritional defenders and accusers. Winnowing through the considerable range of literature on the subject helps separate science from speculation, and I am grateful to several persons for sharing their perspectives and pointing us toward informed sources on the topic. In particular I thank cereal chemist Andrew Ross at Oregon State University, Stephen Jones at the Washington State University’s Bread Lab in Burlington, and Weston Price chapter leader Maria Atwood of Colorado Springs.    

Palouse Heritage grain breads at The Grain Shed in Spokane, WA

Palouse Heritage grain breads at Ethos Bakery in Richland, WA

In terms of definitions, gluten is a class of proteins found in wheat, barley, rye, and some oat flours that when combined with water and kneading create doughs for breads and other foods. Glutenins are the gluten proteins that provide dough elasticity while gliadins enable it to cohere when spread out. These functions combine to make doughs rise by trapping gas released through leavening. The process has been widely used since the domestication of grains some 10,000 years ago, and humans gathered wild barleys and “primitive wheats” like einkorn and emmer as long as 100,000 years ago. Einkorn and emmer are prehistoric grains that do not shed their indigestible hull when threshed, so require additional processing for consumption.      

Above: Bakers extraordinaire—Shaun Duffy (The Grain Shed) and Angela Kore (Ethos Bakery), who both use Palouse Heritage landrace grains and proper baking techniques to create healthy breads that are absolutely delicious!

Gliadins are the proteins associated with autoimmune celiac disease that affects approximately 1% of the population in the US and Europe, and with non-celiac wheat sensitivities that affect about 4 to 6%. There has been no documented increase in the incidence of celiac disease in recent decades, although it may be diagnosed more accurately today. Contrary to some outrageous claims in recent popular literature, gliadins are not the by-product of grain breeding since the 1960s for shorter, more high-yielding wheats. The deeper root systems of landrace (pre-hybridized) heritage varieties do contribute to nutritional benefits in heritage flours, but both gliadins and glutenins have been basic components of grain chemistry for millennia.

The rate of wheat sensitivities has been correlated with such factors as shorter fermentation processing, refined flour (vs. higher fiber and whole grain) milling, and the proliferation of chemicals and other environmental changes that foster auto-immune reactions. Emmer and einkorn and nutritionally dense landrace grains like Turkey Red wheat and Purple Egyptian barley cause less reaction in many individuals with grain sensitivities. Higher levels of calcium, phosphorus, other essential minerals and vitamins in these heritage varieties likely contribute to their rich flavor profiles. In other words, the vast majority of the population—over 90%, can benefit nutritionally, and deliciously, from properly processed grain products.