Alive
Painted in 1575, when falling snow was still nearly new. Bruegel had put the first flakes into a European painting about 12 years before. Valckenborch followed him all his working life, and here he makes the snowfall itself the subject. The flakes are dabs of lead white, flicked over the finished picture. They fall on the sky, on the frozen river, on the cathedral tower fading into the distance, and on the one house that is on fire. Winters like this were real. Europe was deep in the Little Ice Age and the river froze hard enough to carry half of Antwerp: skaters, sledges, men swinging clubs at a ball, a family warming their hands at a fire where the mill wheel is stuck in the ice. Valckenborch signed the panel in the snow at the lower left. The next year Spanish troops sacked the city he had painted, and within 10 years he had left for good. The panel hangs in Frankfurt now, the city where he died.
look closer
A house burns in the middle of the snowstorm. The flakes fall white across the flames, and on the ice below the games go on.
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