Journal of ART in SOCIETY
  • Home
  • What readers say about us
  • Author details
  • Art book and film reviews
    • Reviews of art books
    • Reviews of art films
    • Top art tweets of the month
  • ARTICLES
  • Cultural trends and changes
    • Exploring Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day
    • A very rich book for the very rich
    • Millet and the Angelus
    • The Two Women in White
    • Bruegel’s White Christmas: The Census at Bethlehem
    • Elsheimer’s Flight into Egypt: how it changed the boundaries between art, religion and science
    • The rescue of the fabulous lost library of Deir al-Surian
    • Feathers, fashion and animal rights
    • Lost masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art from the Nebamun tomb-chapel
    • On the Trail of the Last Supper
    • Floating pleasure worlds of Paris and Edo
    • The emergence of the winter landscape
    • Toulouse-Lautrec, the bicycle and the women's movement
    • From the Rokeby Venus to Fascism Pt 1: Why did suffragettes attack artworks?
    • From the Rokeby Venus to Fascism Pt 2: the Strange Allure of Fascism
    • The Futurists declare war on pasta
    • The art of giraffe diplomacy
    • Science becomes Art
  • Catastrophes and scandals
    • How one man saved the greatest picture in the world: Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection Page
    • Vermeer’s concert, the Gardner collection, and the art heist of the century
    • The Controversies of Constantin Brancusi: Princess X and the boundaries of art
    • Bernardo Bellotto and the reconstruction of Warsaw
    • Surviving the Black Death
    • Julie Manet, Renoir and the Dreyfus Affair
    • Art and Survival in Patagonia
    • The Isenheim Altarpiece Pt 1: Pestilence and the Concert of Angels
    • The Isenheim Altarpiece Pt 2: Nationalism, Nazism and Degeneracy
    • The shocking birth and amazing career of Guernica
  • Forgotten Women Artists
    • Forgotten Women Artists: introduction
    • Forgotten Women Artists: #1 Arcangela Paladini: The Rapid Rise and Fall of a Prodigy
    • Forgotten Women Artists: #2 Jane Loudon
    • Forgotten Women Artists: #3 Marie-Gabrielle Capet: Stepping out from the Shadows
    • Forgotten Women Artists #4: Michaelina Wautier: entering the limelight after 300 years
    • Forgotten Women Artists #5 Thérèse Schwartze and the business of painting
  • Lives and livelihoods
    • The Sphinx of Delft: Jan Vermeer’s demise and rediscovery
    • Rose-Marie Ormond: Sargent’s muse and “the most charming girl that ever lived”
    • The extraordinary career of Granville Redmond, deaf artist and silent movie actor
    • Dr Jekyll, Frankenstein and Shelley’s Heart
    • The Adventures of Nadar: photography, ballooning, invention & the Impressionists
    • Colonial artist, thief, forger and mutineer: Thomas Barrett's amazing career
    • Watchmen, goldfinders and the plague bearers of the night
    • Sarka of the South Seas
    • The discovery of an early graphic novel
    • Should artists get royalties?
    • Strange encounters: the collector, the artist and the philosopher
  • Techniques and technology
    • Art as a barometer of climate changes
    • The life and death of Mummy Brown
    • Egyptian blue: the colour of technology
    • Prussian blue and its partner in crime
    • Why wasn't photography invented earlier?
    • Comets in Art
    • Art in a Speeded Up World >
      • Overview
      • Pt 1: Changing concepts of time
      • Pt 2: The 'new' time in literature
      • Pt 3: The 'new' time in painting
    • Early influences of photography >
      • Pt 1: Initial impacts
      • Pt 2: Photography as a working aid
      • Pt 3: Photographic effects
      • Pt 4: New approaches to reality
  • Authenticity and meaning
    • Carpaccio's Miracle on the Rialto
    • Masters of All they Survey -- Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews
    • Bruegel's Peasant Wedding Feast
    • Understanding Petrus Christus’ A Goldsmith in his Shop
    • Lost in Translation: Bruegel’s Tower of Babel
    • Perception and Blindness in the 16th Century
    • "All life is here": Bruegel's 'Way to Calvary'
    • Carpaccio’s double enigma: Hunting on the Lagoon and the Two Venetian Ladies
    • Bruegel's Icarus and the perils of flight
    • Michelangelo's disputed Entombment
    • Titian, Prudence and the three-headed beast
    • The origins of an Australian art icon
  • FINDING INFO
  • Most recent articles
  • Most popular articles
  • Country-by-country guide
  • Art timeline
  • Copyright and permissions
  • Contact us
Follow us on Twitter

End Notes
Bruegel’s White Christmas: The Census at Bethlehem

To return to your place in the text, jus press your Back button

[1] Museum Van Den Burgh, “The Census at Bethlehem” 
 https://www.museummayervandenbergh.be/en/page/census-bethlehem
[2] A donkey and ox are traditionally depicted in Nativity scenes
[3] It appears that there is very little non-Biblical evidence that Augustus did in fact decree an Empire-wide census in which everyone had to return to their “own city”: Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don’t Know About Them, Harper Collins, 2009
[4] For example, The Way to Calvary
[5] Alexander Wied, Bruegel (transl Anthony Lloyd), Bay Books, Sydney 1980, at 146; see further discussion in our article on Hunters in the Snow
[6] Wied, op cit at 144
[7]  Many of the extreme close-ups of the painting that are used in this article are drawn from Google Arts and Culture https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/the-census-at-bethlehem-%C2%A0/zQKyGcrY3z1hKQ]; and Ginny Burges, https://rhapsodyinwords.com/2018/12/24/whats-in-a-painting-taking-a-closer-look-at-pieter-bruegel-the-elders-masterpiece-the-census-at-bethlehem-c-1566/
[8] Wied, op cit at 144
[9] Wied, op cit at 144
[10] Wied, op cit at 144
[11] Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, chapter “A Village in Winter”, What Great Paintings Say. Vol 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2003, at 186 
[12] Hagen, op cit at 184
[13] Wied, op cit at 144-45. It’s also been suggested, by the way, that the structure is possibly based on the towers and gate of Amsterdam Castle
[14] Hagen, op cit at 84
[15] It is interesting how many spoked wheels appear in the painting
[16] Wied, op cit at 144
[17] The 14th was only discovered in 2013: Jan Dalley: “Pieter Breughel the Younger: The Census at Bethlehem”, Financial Times, 12/10/2013 https://www.ft.com/content/20ac37e8-30da-11e3-b991-00144feab7de
[18] In association with members of his studio. His surname was by then being spelt with an “h”
[19] It is also possible that some differences emerged because the son may only have had access to Bruegel’s preparatory sketches, not the original painting
[20] Timothy Foote, The World of Bruegel: 1525-1569, Time- Life International (Nederland) NV, 1971 at 104
[21] See Jacques Keilo, “The coat of arms of the Empire in Bruegel’s Census at Bethlehem, Continuity of the Centre” in Hypotheses, 23/11/2016  https://centrici.hypotheses.org/1000
 
© Philip McCouat 2021
​RETURN TO HOME