I just finished Michael Frayn’s Headlong, a novel given to me by a friend. She and I saw “Top Girls” on Broadway last year, and we were both intrigued by Dulle Griet, one of the characters in the play, and the namesake of one of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s more bizarre paintings.

Headlong is an art history “who done it”; in this case the mystery is whether or not a supposed sixth painting in Bruegel’s series of seasonal paintings (of which only five are extant), might be languishing unrecognized in the country estate of an unsuspecting, down-at-the-heels landowner who’s looking to cash in on items he’s stolen from his dying mother. A college professor who’s just arrived with his scholarly wife and their baby to spend “a month in the country” thinks he recognizes the painting as the missing Bruegel, but keeps the thought to himself so as not to tip off the landowner. Instead, he plots to spirit the painting away and into the hands of a grateful art world, who will presumably heap laurels upon him. But first he must prove to his wife that the painting is indeed what he believes it to be.

Our poor professor nearly kills his marriage in the process, but along the way we get to play art history sleuths. We go to London, where we visit libraries and museums to closely examine reproductions of Bruegel’s paintings, and read conflicting art historical interpretations of his work. We learn about the violent world in which Bruegel lived, where what you believed determined whether you survived or died — and dying was neither quick nor easy. Frayn brings to life the realities of the Netherlands in the 16th century and cross-references these to the imagery in Bruegel’s paintings. Our faulty professorial protagonist convinces us that certain of Bruegel’s religious beliefs — beliefs that could easily have gotten him burned alive — are hidden in plain sight, in the guise of innocent depictions of seasonal peasant life. In reading Headlong, I was reminded that media activism did not begin in the 20th century; and that far more dangerous forms of culture jamming existed in the 16th century.

As I read Frayn’s novel, I was reminded of the nonfiction The Cheese and the Worms, by Carlo Ginzburg. Unlike Headlong, Worms is historian Ginzburg’s investigation into the life and beliefs of one heretical Friulian miller (Menocchio) whose words were recorded in great detail during his inquisitions (unfortunately for him, there were two). It wasn’t customary to record the words and thoughts of ordinary millers in the 16th century. Ginzburg conjectures the poor man entered the record because of his highly imaginative cosmology. Suffice it to say that the cheese in the book’s title refers to his belief that the world was like a ball of cheese, where worms spontaneously appear. The world, like the ball of cheese, spontaneously brought forth angels, and from angels came human beings. For Menocchio, God most closely resembled a benevolent landowner, not an all powerful king of the universe. It’s an essentially pagan viewpoint, not created in a vacuum. Ginzburg makes a good case for there having been a long tradition of pre-Christian and downright unchristian beliefs that thrived among common folk, concurrent with the spread of Christianity.

The Inquisition records — released by the Vatican just a few years before Ginzburg wrote The Cheese and the Worms — listed several books that were in Manocchio’s possession at the time of his first incarceration and trial. Ginzburg argues that we can infer from this that unauthorized, nonreligious books were commonly passed from neighbor to neighbor in the small towns surrounding Venice; that many locals were literate and many had an ongoing curiosity about the world that was not satisfied by Church doctrine. Then as now, powerful alternative narratives reached its constituency through alternative media. (I hope to go into more detail about the books that Menocchio was reading in a future post on this blog.)

>The image above is a detail from Bruegel the Elder’s painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562)