Snow before Christmas is Christmassy (however hard the news purveyors work to make it a scare story). But snow and ice in January are bleak. It makes me wonder: what is the bleakest snow scene in all art?
Let's put away all the heartwarming Dickensian Christmas-card pictures of peasants playing in the snow. Instead, what is the bitterest winter's painting? My candidate is The Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in the Royal Collection. There is another version of this painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, but Her Majesty's is the one that startled me when I first chanced on it in an exhibition. It still haunts me.
Armoured horsemen bear down on a frightened crowd of peasants in the main street of a snowbound village. A soldier is kicking at a door while another man brings a battering ram. Mothers are pleading, fathers begging. Red-coated officers supervise the slaughter.
It could be a scene from a 21st-century war. But it portrays a realistic moment in Bruegel's own 16th-century Flanders. The painter is picturing the wars that ravaged the country in his time, wars in which the Spanish Catholic armies of the Habsburg empire tried to crush Protestant resistance.
He is the master of snow, this painter who gave us the lovely Hunters, but here he deploys that whiteness in the blankest way imaginable. The emptiness of the white covering, the deathliness of the stripped trees, the frozen ground, suggest a world betrayed and nature itself turning on the innocents.
You feel winter's cruelty in this painting: you feel the pain of those peasants when they tried to dig into the frozen earth, their hunger when there were no birds to catch and the streams were locked with ice. And then this final assault, this murder by soldiers with no pity, no compassion. Men with snow in their hearts.
