Le Dénombrement de Bethléem

Bruegel painted this in 1566, and he moved the Bible into his own cold world. The story is Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem for the Roman census, but everything here is a Flemish village under deep snow. You have to hunt for the holy couple. Mary rides a donkey in a blue cloak toward the crowd pressing at an inn where officials are collecting names and money. The winter is real too. It came right after the brutal freeze of 1565, and this is one of the first proper snow scenes in Western painting. The census clerks taking coin from ordinary people would have carried a sharp edge for Bruegel's viewers, living under heavy Spanish taxes. It hangs in Brussels, where the museum acquired it in 1902.