Alive
Painted around 1567. The feast is in a barn and the harvest is still stacked against the back wall. The bride sits in front of the green cloth, under a paper crown hanging on a string above her. Her hands are folded and her eyes are down. She is not eating. Which man is the groom has never been settled, and one reading is that he is not in the room at all. The food comes in on a door lifted off its hinges. It is porridge and bread. The piper on the left has stopped playing to watch it go past. On the floor at the front a child in a hat several sizes too big is licking out a bowl. At the far right two men in better clothes sit apart from the rest, and one of them is wearing a sword. Karel van Mander wrote Bruegel’s life in 1604, 35 years after he died. He says Bruegel and a friend used to dress as peasants, bring gifts like everyone else, and turn up at village weddings claiming to be relatives of the bride. Historians have been pulling that story apart ever since and it will not die. The panel is 114 cm by 164 and hangs in Vienna, a few rooms from The Hunters in the Snow.
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The bride sits under a paper crown with her hands folded and her eyes down. She is the only person at that table eating nothing.
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