"Martín y muchos pobres":
Grotesque Versions of the Charity of St Martin in the Bosch and Bruegel Schools

Martin W. Walsh

Begging is not the product of poverty. In a perfect state there would be as many beggars as in an historical state. The professional beggar is a permanent feature of life. As long as there will be crossroads, gates, and pity, he will come out of nowhere.
E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

The inventory of the Spanish monarch Philip II's art works, drawn up after his death in 1598, mentions three paintings attributed to Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1469-1516) having to do with St Martin of Tours. One is labeled Sanct Martín y muchos pobres and a second, a grisaille and probably only another version of the same, Sanct Martin con muchos pobres y desparates.1 The third Bosch is more fully described by Vasari as S. Martino con una barca piena di diavoli in bizarrissime forme.2 None of these paintings survive, but much of their design and content passed into a tapestry and an engraving of the mid-sixteenth century which have been loosely attributed to the "School of Bosch." Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569), that novus Hieronymus Boschius, also created a Martinian composition, "The Wine of St Martin," a substantial fragment of which survives together with a derived engraving and two versions of the theme by Bruegel follower Pieter Balten (ca. 1525-ca. 1598). These St Martin subjects of the Bosch-Bruegel schools can be largely reconstructed and considered as a related group since all reflect contemporary secular celebration of the feast of Martinmas (11 November). I have elsewhere treated the subject of this Martinmas bacchanal, very common in the Low Countries and German-speaking areas, as a kind of prelude to the Yuletide and Carnival seasons. Meat from the autumnal slaughter and the new-wine of the season were prominent features of this last harvest celebration and first winter feast.3 The compositions deserve attention as well for the fact that they represent the most extreme appropriations of a very familiar icon of Western art, the "Charity of St Martin," that image of the young cavalier severing his cloak to share it with a naked, shivering beggar. An ironic tension between the Charity of St Martin and the excessive festival bearing his name seems to be the central "message" of these enigmatic compositions.

Background of the Charity of St Martin

The image of the Charity derives from Sulpicius Severus's Vita S. Martini (ca. 396), one of the most influential saintly biographies of the medieval West. Written during Martin's lifetime, it likely incorporated many of the saint's own reminiscences. The incident of the cloak-severing took place in winter at the gates of Amiens, where young Martin was stationed as a Roman cavalry officer, his father having been a military tribune. The young catechumen was in the habit of performing extravagant acts of piety often compromising, as in this case, the dignity of his military rank—Sulpicius even reports laughter on the part of the spectators. After the encounter with the shivering beggar, Martin had his equally famous dream of Christ in majesty appearing with the severed fragment and proclaiming Martin's deed. These linked episodes propelled the young Martin to receive baptism and thus enter into a life of saintly achievement as hermit, abbot, bishop of Tours and "Apostle to the Gauls."
Representations of the Charity of St Martin along with other scenes from his life are documented in his basilica at Tours from as early as the Merovingian period—inscriptions for them by poets Paulinus of Perigueux and Fortunatus survive. The earliest extant images come from Ottonian sacramentaries (ca. 995 and ca. 1030) from the Fulda scriptorium and portray the two characters on foot in front of a city gate. The "Dream" is represented to the side of the Charity or directly above it. Martin does not acquire his splendid mount until well into the Romanesque period. In some early images he only stands beside his horse. Martin probably acquired his full equestrian pose under the influence of such Crusader imports as St George. It took medieval artists some adjusting to render successfully this now complex ensemble of characters. By the Gothic age the characteristic elegant backward turn of saintly rider toward the beseeching beggar below had become established, both in painting and in sculpture (see especially the "Bassenheim Rider" by the thirteenth-century Naumburger Master).4
In the late-medieval period the link with the "Dream of St Martin" became less important, almost as if it were simply understood as the second part of the diptych. (In some Iberian examples the beggar wears a halo as if he were Christ himself in disguise.) The gate of Amiens was not always represented either. Having achieved truly iconic status, the equestrian image plus beggar, linked together by the sword-rent cloak, was rendered in every conceivable artistic medium and for multiple purposes devotional and decorative. By the mid-fifteenth century, genre interest in the Charity began to manifest itself in two quite contradictory ways. The saint lost what little he had of military trappings and became a fashion-plate for the youthful aristocracy or the aspiring burgher class, often with a corresponding loss of the winter setting. Martin was not a knight, simply a gentleman. This de-emphasis probably reflects the general decline of the chivalric code with the rise of mercenary armies and consequent widespread pillage in the "calamitous" fourteenth century. At the same time, and reflecting the same century's many bouts with famine, severe winters, and the Black Death, the beggar began to multiply around the saint and manifest, not just nakedness, but all sorts of handicaps and disease.5 Bosch, as might be expected, would take this multiplication of the Martin beggar and his grotesquery to a new extreme.

The Boschian St Martin Tapestry (Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid)

It is documented that Antoine Perrenot, Cardinal Granvelle, received four tapestries on Boschian subjects from a Brussels workshop in 1566. They comprised versions of two famous paintings, "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and "The Hay Wain," as well as a "Temptation of St Anthony" and our Martinian subject. In 1567 the notorious Duke of Alba borrowed the Cardinal's tapestries to copy, and it is evidently this copied set which eventually passed into the royal collection of Philip IV.6
The Martinian tapestry portrays the gate of Amiens (right) with a river flowing under it, together with a section of rocky landscape and, in the upper register, a series of outdoor and indoor scenes of sport and festivity.7 All portions of the composition are filled with beggar-grotesques which, in a general way, correspond to the studies of beggar figures in two early Bosch drawings.8 The central figure of the tapestry is a young rider on a light-colored horse. Draped about him is an ample cloak and several of the beggars are appealing directly to him. We are, nevertheless, several frames before the actual severing moment of the classic Charity of St Martin. Indeed the Spanish art historian who first published photos of the tapestry in 1903 assumed, incorrectly, that this was another scene from the life of St Anthony the Hermit portraying the rare subject of his "journey into retirement."9
The huddled group of four beggars above right of the mounted saint appear to be lepers, one of whom indeed appears to have already expired. One beggar in the middle ground is so directly in the path of the rider that he has to scramble away from the horse's hooves, much like the figure about to be crushed under the the right front wheel of Bosch's "Hay Wain." Many crutches are evident, and a group of three in the foreground haul themsleves about by means of scabelli ("little stools"), small hand-held tripods. Several of the beggars have musical instruments slung upon them—a lute on one clamoring beggar directly behind the horse, a fiddle on the companion of the nearly trampled man, a tabor with a snare on the plump cripple in the center foreground, a harp-like instrument on the one over by the riverbank. Prominent in the far lower left is a sturdy blind beggar playing a hurdy-gurdy and supporting an elderly withered figure, perhaps a glancing reference to the posthumous Martin miracle of the Blindman and Cripple.10
The scenes in the upper register are uniformly carnivalesque and have been associated, particularly by Otto Kurz, with the secular celebration of Martinmas which ushered in the winter reveling season. From left to right they include an outdoor arena in which the sport of "boar-bashing" is being practiced. This carnivalesque entertainment, amply documented by the Flemish art historian Bax, involved blindmen in ornate armor (or sighted contestants in blind helmets) attempting to club to death a staked boar and mauling each other in the process.11 In the tapestry twelve contestants struggle in an area set off by a wooden fence. To the right of this melée there is a concerted assualt by more crippled beggars upon the courtyard and doorway of a dining hall. A wine (?) jug is being poured out upon them from the gate turret. Fighting beggars spill into the hall where a Martinmas new-wine carousal is well underway. A figure sits guzzling on top of an enormous wine tun, and what is evidently the traditional Martinmas roast goose (or perhaps it is pork from the arena) appears on the dining table. A bagpiper and a peg-legged lutenist entertain the head of the table, and the mitred figure seated next to a lady there I would take to represent some sort of mock "Martin Bishop" as lord of the feast.12 One figure is already vomiting into the river that runs beneath the hall. A quote from William of Orange may give some idea of the pervasive drunkeness associated, ironically, with this feast day of the ascetic missionary saint. In a 1563 letter he writes: "Nous avons tenu la S. Martin fort joieulx, car il y a avoit bonne compaigne. Monsr. de Brederode at este ung jour que pensois certes qu'i debvoit mourir, mais il se porte mieulx" ("We celebrated St Martin's [at Breda] very jovially, for there was good company. For a day Mons. de Brederode seemed certain to die but he is better now").13 The common Martinmas bonfire also seems to be represented just inside the city gate.14
While obviously employing many Bosch-like motifs, the cartoon of the tapestry seems too diffusely organized to reflect a mature work of the master. The degree of accuracy of this copy of a presumed Bosch original, then, remains an open question.

Bosch's St Martin Engraving (Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels)

More typically Boschian in style is the curious nautical St Martin scene surviving in an engraving which evidently derives from that Martin con una barca recorded in the Spanish royal inventories (though Martin and his horse are not in separate boats as the entry claims). Bosch is directly credited as inuentor on the plate, which is also identified as coming from the prolific Antwerp printshop of H(ieronymus) Cock. The Flemish inscription identifies St Martin among "this foul, impoverished spawn," a saint who, for lack of money, parted his cloak only to have this "evil sort" fight among themselves for the windfall.15 Like the tapestry, the engraving employs an imposing gateway (on the opposite side) with a multitude of grotesque beggars in the foreground. It likewise has, in its upper register, scenes of combat sport and revelry in the form of a costumed water-joust (left) and a festival barge loaded with wine barrels and a banquet table and accompanied by naked swimmers (right). The bateau ivre has close parallels in Bosch's "Ship of Fools" (Louvre) and his "Allegory of Gluttony and Lust" (Yale University) with its fat peasant straddling a floating wine barrel. Another bonfire blazes on the quayside at the top of the composition. The water joust might not seem appropriate for the November weather of Martinmastide (though Martin also had a prominent summer feast, his Translation, on 4 July), but the other elements appear to evoke the bacchanal of the Martinian holiday.16 It is possible that the secular activities of both Martinian festivals are meant to be combined here.

The beggars around Martin are far more belligerent than those in the tapestry scene, tussling with each other in great tangled heaps or swarming over the saint's long-suffering horse. Crutches are raised in anger, and at least one knife is drawn. Musical instruments are in evidence again as well—two harps and at least four lutes or gitterns. Some fools' caps are also in evidence. These beggars are far more grotesquely conceived in their acts of self-contortion and mutual mayhem. They are definitely moving away from genre interest toward those infernal fantasies Bosch made famous. One cripple in a basket, for example, propels himself on a low cart by means of scabelli and evidently holds and strums his lute with his bare feet. A naked female harpist with two children paddles along in the water, her long emaciated legs sprouting out of a great kettle.
The Charity itself is very oddly conceived. Again we are frozen in a moment before the actual cloak-sharing. The saint ports his sword and extends his open right hand toward the shore, the drapery of his long garment uniting him with the creatures who there crowd the gateway. The single naked beggar of Sulpicius is replaced by a triple-decker monstrosity, a bald hulk of a man in a paenula with deeply shadowed eye sockets, a dwarfish figure in what is evidently a wimple, on his shoulders, and the ubiquitous Boschian owl topping the pile. We seem to have a reprise of the team of Blindman and Cripple of the Martin miracle, here in their characteristic piggyback position. Directly beneath Martin's extended garment is a small spoonbill, one of those enigmatic waterbirds also deeply ingrained in Bosch's symbolic repertory.17
Bruegel's "Wine of St Martin" (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels)
Pieter Bruegel's St Martin subject, while not following the horizontal orientation and spacial layering of the Boschian scenes, nevertheless has much in common with them thematically. The surviving fragment, now in Vienna, represents only about one quarter of the whole, a part of the far right but short of the actual edge of the composition. We have the saint himself but only half his horse and none of the beggars with whom he interacts. A later engraving by N. Guerard gives a clear idea of Bruegel's overall design, although in reverse.18 Two versions of the theme by Pieter Balten (in Anvers and Utrecht) are rather uninspired copies.19 Balten, however, adds a flag at the top of his wine-barrel scaffold which bears the design, much like the arms of a trade guild, of the same "crossed crutches" we find on the banners of the watercraft in the Bosch engraving.
There must have been some degree of continuity, then, between the Bosch and Bruegel "schools" right through the sixteenth century.
Bruegel's scene is set in the outskirts of a village with a large castle in the background. Many naked trees are in evidence, betokening the November Martin holiday. The young lad in the right foreground holds a turnip, and the thin white objects stuck in some hats (like the signature Bruegel spoons) may represent the long roots of the wild radish, also autumnal fare. The artist presents a free-for-all of peasants as they attempt to fill their wine pots and dishes with the special largesse of the Martinian feast, an enormous tun of new-wine set on a high scaffold. The effect is that of a swarming mountain of gluttonous humanity, a kind of drinking man's Tower of Babel, with vignettes of guzzling, spewing, sharing, jubilating, shoving and fighting throughout. The young, the old, and women with children, weary pilgrims, barefoot peasants, and a pickpocket are all represented. Among the many receptacles used to gather the new-wine spurting from the bunghole are a hat and a shoe. St Martin's Charity is enacted well off to the side—the beneficiaries are two severe, contorted cripples with another pair of peasants beseeching the saint from behind—but the vast majority of the population ignores the scene in favor of their own instant gratification. It is no accident that directly opposite the triangularly patterned Martin scene we find a circular arrangement of peasants engaged in a hair-pulling tussle, with another staggering drunk and yet another passed out on the ground in his own vomit, while a mother feeds wine to her infant. Behind them in the middle ground are a pair of male dancers capering, a portly sleeper, and a couple who are evidently retiring into the bushes. All these figures are no doubt meant to be taken as polar opposites of the youthful, heroic saint on his magnificent horse.

The Icon Subverted

Bruegel is not here indulging in his earlier penchant for replicating the Boschian grotesque. We have an essentially realistic scene, though the presence of the saint, in his definitive attitude, assures us that we are still in an allegorical mode rather than in a strictly reportorial genre scene. Bruegel's teaching appears identical to Bosch's, however. Both share an almost pathological aversion to these mendicant hordes. Bosch scholars agree on the generally negative connotation of musical instruments in the works due to their association with vagabond minstrels or higher-status slaves to Luxuria. They are conspicuously the instruments of torture in the right wing, Hell panel of "The Garden of Earthly Delights." Margaret A. Sullivan's recent study Bruegel's Peasants: Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994) dispells any lingering notions as to Bruegel's romantic empathy for his subjects in his famous scenes of peasant revelry. Both artists, the one in a highly charged symbolic/allegorical mode, the other in a seemingly purely realistic mode, employ the "bacchic peasant" and the crippled beggar as highly negative exempla.
Such visions of a swarming beggar world were not strictly private obsessions, moreover. The proliferation of wandering mendicants at the end of the Middle Ages is amply documented by Michel Mallot in Les Pauvres au Moyen Age (Paris, 1978). Deep anxiety over this social phenomenon was reflected in such characteristic works of the period as the Liber vagantorum (1509), for which Luther felt compelled to write a preface warning good citizens against the "verlauffenen, verzweyffelten büben" (vagabonds and desperate rogues) and the "ausslendische oder frembde bettler" (outlandish or strange beggars).20 Robert Copland's poem "The Hye Way to the Spyttell Hous" (ca. 1536), which takes place "about a fourtenyght after Halowmas," that is at Martinmas, presents a similar vision of the profusion of "trewant beggars" in an English landscape.21
For both Bosch and Bruegel, however, the beggar hordes and hopelessly drunken peasants can also stand for sinful, fallen humanity in general. The nautical scene of the Bosch engraving likely reflects the pervasive influence of Sebastian Brant's broad, moral satire Das Narrenschyff or Ship of Fools (1494) rather than exploiting any direct Martinian associations with harbors.22 Satirical targets, both the specific (the mendicant hordes) and the general (sinful mankind) are unambiguously presented, but at the same time, and perhaps unintentionally so, the saint's venerable image is compromised, indeed rendered impotent.
The tapestry, if it reflects Bosch's original image of the saint, portrays a moment before commitment to the act of charity, perhaps even a moment of alienation or doubt. The figure's facial expression certainly does not radiate saintly activism. The engraving is equally ambiguous in this regard. Is Martin offering his cloak, or is it being drawn out of his hands into the grotesque world of the beggars? The saint stands in a curiously passive pose. He is not severing the cloak, for the sword is at rest. The famous iconic event is held in suspense.
In the Boschian tapestry and engraving, but especially in the engraving, we have scenes that, far from traditional Charities of St Martin, appear more like "Temptations of St Anthony," the saintly figure appearing overwhelmed by a demonically charged mendicant environment. Bruegel's strategy, on the other hand, is to marginalize his St Martin, relegating him to the far edge of the composition, to be viewed from behind. This is an essentially different strategy from Bruegel's "hiding" of sacred characters in a broad landscape as in his "Census at Bethlehem" or "Christ Carrying the Cross." Martin quite literally turns his back on the bacchic festival which bears his name but over which, apparently, he has no control.
In these Northern Renaissance images we appear to have lost confidence in the simpler, heroic image of the Charity of the Gothic age. The causes are multiple: the Reformation's theological difficulties with the cult of the saints and with the spiritual efficacy of good works (for which Martin's Charity was a conspicuous emblem); a sense of paralysis at the overwhelming socioeconomic problems of the age, perhaps coupled with the new attitude of Christian stoicism; or the general "overripeness" diagnosed by Huizinga in his Autumn of the Middle Ages (1921). It is of course legitimate to read these works simply as Erasmian satire on the excesses of the old saints' feast days, as moral didactic documents where Gula is placed first among the Seven Deadly Sins. But these images, generated in the eighty years between 1480 and 1560, are also barometers for the profound spiritual crisis, that painful transition from medieval to modern in Northern Europe, in which one of the premier saints of Western Christendom devolves into a kind of Hamlet losing the "name of action." The great exemplum of Charitas is, to use a current phrase, "disempowered" within these newly empowered depictions of the sinful theatrum mundi.

Later Examples of the Tradition

Although these grotesque variations and ultimate compromises of St Martin's Charity belong to a specific era, there was something of an afterlife for the motif in their region of origin. In 1611 Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568-1625), son of the great Pieter, painted a small village scene now in the National Gallery, Prague. It is set in an open area near the edge of a village. There are many figures but no other evidencce that this is a market or festival day. A young, clean-shaven Martin on horseback in the center foreground provides the only vivid color, a golden yellow tunic and matching feathered hat with a bright red cloak, already divided into two fairly modest pieces. The figures crowding in around him are in much duller greys and earth tones. Facing Martin on the left are two beggars, one standing with a crutch and the other with his stumps on a sled-like tray. They appear to be yelling, perhaps arguing over the proffered cloak-half. Two other beggars, unseen off to Martin's right, are holding out their hats. All the figures hemming in the horse and rider are doing poorly: old people, women with babies in slings, other vagabonds. They seem to gravitate inward toward this font of charity—one figure behind the group is even being hauled in by means of a small handcart—but it is clear that all cannot be satisfied. There is what might be interpreted as a look of desperation on the young rider's face. He simply cannot cope with them all. This "compromised" reading of the Charity of St Martin is underscored by the framing figures in the foreground. On the left, more prosperous peasants look on from beside their wagons as passive spectators. On the right, a group of women with children are eating porridge in a tight circle on the ground. They are self-sufficient and do not react at all to the Charity. Despite the bright red and gold center of the composition, an air of resigned melancholy pervades the scene. The poor are so many and the resources so few, even for a saint.23
A decade later we find similar tendencies in a major painting by Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot, "St Martin Dividing his Cloak" (1623), now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.24 The sky and bare trees of a bleak November day dominate a typical Dutch village with the Martin scene in the foreground. The saint is mounted on a chestnut horse and wears the helmet, cuirass and leg armor of the contemporary heavy cavalryman. Both horse and rider, just left of center, are facing away from the viewer as if to de-emphasize the act of charity and draw attention to the three groups of beggars spread across the foreground. Those around Martin include a partially naked man, obviously a nod to the older tradition. Below him is a legless cripple with two scabelli who apparently propels himself about in a large earthenware dish. The group to the right of the painting includes another legless man and beggar women with small children slung in front of them. The group to the left, on the other hand, is engaged in a full-scale peasant donnybrook. Crutches are raised in anger. Other crutches and a water-bucket lie scattered about.
This typical "peasants fighting" genre scene of the Dutch Golden Age functions in much the same way as the swarming grotesques in the Bosch and Bruegel compositions, although transposed, as in the Jan Bruegel, to a more completely realistic mode. The fracas goes on literally behind Martin's back and qualifies, indeed compromises, the heroic act of charity which is the ostensible subject of the painting. A Martin in full armor also strikes a somewhat ominous, discordant note. It is extremely rare to find full military regalia in representations of the Charity.25 Martin had always been a pacifist saint, despite his military background, very much the civilian complement to warrior St George. Droohsloot's painting was executed in 1623 as the first phase of the traumatic Thirty Years' War was reaching its climax. Extensive fighting had already taken place in Bohemia and the Rhineland Palatinate, and the 1623 Battle of Stadtlohn brought the war to the very borders of Gelderland. In 1621, moreover, the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the breakaway Netherlands was renewed. The armored cavalryman, then, is a rather ambiguous choice here. While he engages in an act of charity, he simultaneously reminds the contemporary audience of mercenary depredations. Coupled with the negative exemplum of "fighting peasants," the overall teaching of Droochsloot's painting seems particularly bleak.26 Even if the armored horseman miraculously turns to good, man's essentially aggressive nature cannot be tamed.
Although such artists as El Greco or Van Dyck might execute a major image of Martin's Charity in a perfectly straightforward, unambiguous manner, it is clear that by the mid-seventeenth century the icon had undergone serious "slippage." In its time the Charity was an important mediating image, between classes and generations, and between the well-off, whole and healthy and the crippled, sick and destitute. This mediating function had broken down and the icon had lost the clear, heroic lineaments of the Gothic era. For one thing, it could not be viewed in iconic isolation any longer. Set within the Early Modern landscape and against the new and complex times, Martin's gesture could not but appear impotent. It might even seem arrogant and presumptive at the same time. St Martin's Charity had always been available for ironic play, but it is significant that in earlier centuries artists and poets, particularly the so-called Goliards, played with the icon through the image of the Beggar, placing themselves in that suppliant role.27 In the Early Modern era, it was the Saint himself who seemed to be the source of the irony. It was left to Bertolt Brecht in our time to deliver the coup de grace. Here is a stanza of the "Solomon Song" from that re-imagined Thirty Years' War of Mother Courage and Her Children: