I found myself thinking the other day of Peter Breughel the Younger’s 1564 painting, “The Procession to Calvary.” I used to teach it when I taught aesthetics in college. As is probably obvious, it’s a depiction of Christ’s being taken to be crucified. It reminds me of so many things happening now, and vice versa.

What’s telling and poignant about it is how the people in the scene react to the “main event,” which, though in the middle of the canvas, is almost treated as an afterthought. Some weep. Some exult. Some are oblivious. Some find it an occasion for their own personal frivolities or aggressions. It’s a disorderly “procession” toward an inscrutable but sinister destination. Whether they mean to or not, everyone’s somehow headed there, proceeding from the brightness of ordinary daylight into a darker, weirder landscape that’s harder to characterize.

The viewer is half part of the procession and half not–at the cusp of joining in, but still at a remove. Part of us is curious to see how it all turns out, or even tempted to join the procession even though we do. And part wants to hang back, whether out of prudence or revulsion.

If pushed to describe the shape at the center of the painting–the path of the procession from “Jerusalem” to “Golgotha”–I guess I’d at first be inclined to describe it as a jagged semi-circle. But when you see the circle toward the right and in the distance, it occurs to you that what looks at first like a semi-circle is probably a half-hidden circle. Suddenly, the circular, wheel-like objects in the painting start to stand out. So what we’re observing is not a one-time event, but a perpetual or recurring cycle. Maybe what seems at first like a destination is really just a waystation, a psychopathic inversion of the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa. And that, I suppose, is a sobering thought—which is what makes this a sobering painting.

Picture credit: Pieter Brueghel the Elder – 1. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202. 2. Christian Vöhringer – Pieter Bruegel. 1525/30–1569, Tandem Verlag 2007 S.70 ISBN 978-3-8331-3852-2 3. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Bilddatenbank. From Wikipedia commons.