O Cortejo ao Calvário

By 1564 the Low Countries were a Spanish possession, and the men who arrested and executed people for the wrong faith wore red coats. Look at the crowd Bruegel painted, more than 500 figures spread across the hills, and you keep seeing those red-coated riders herding everyone along. They are the militia of Bruegel's own Antwerp, not of ancient Jerusalem. He has taken the walk to the Crucifixion and set it in the countryside outside a 16th-century Flemish town, complete with a windmill on a crag and children playing. Christ carries the cross near the exact centre of the panel, small and easy to miss, sinking under the weight while the day's business goes on around him. Down in the front, apart from all of it, Mary and the mourning women are painted in the older, stiller style of devotional art, as if they belong to a different picture.