Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca 1525-1569), The Census at Bethlehem, 1566, oil on oak, 116 x 164 cm.
Volkstelling te Bethlehem

Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts/Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels

The naming of this painting, The Census at Bethlehem, is some kind of pretext for its real intention, a political message straight from Bruegel’s time. According to the biblical story, Caesar Augustus ordered by decree, that everyone in the Roman Judaea Province should be registered in his own city. However, Bruegel incorporates the biblical story into a contemporary political event, the regular collection of heavy taxes, weighing down the well being of the population and ordered by the Spanish administration in the name of the Habsburg emperor Philip II of Spain, then ruler over the southern Netherlands. Hence the little plaque on the wall behind the tax-collector table, hardly noticeable, bearing the Habsburg coat of arms, a double-headed eagle, the symbol of Philip II’s father, Charles V. Undoubtedly, the ruler Bruegel had in mind is not Caesar Augustus, but Philip II.

In the mid-foreground but without deserving much attention, Joseph and pregnant Mary, seated on a donkey, are painted, on their way to be enrolled as Bethlehem citizens and in search of a room at the inn on the left, as Mary is approaching her labour. They are just people amongst a crowd, none of them noticing their presence.

Like in his painting The Massacre of the Innocents (see next 4 pictures), Bruegel has set the present nativity story in a northern winter landscape. Before the inn on the left, peasants are pressing to pay their heavy taxes. In front of the door, a pig is being slaughtered and to the right of the gathering crowd, the inevitable carts of beer barrels are lined up, in contrast with the people’s burden of taxation. On the right and behind Mary and Joseph, average people’s life in an average village during winter is illustrated. To the right, villagers are walking, skating or sledging on a frozen pool, while a young man is pulling on his skates at the pool’s edge. In the background, youngsters are having fun in a snowball fight, while their elders are scratching out a living from their daily hard wintry labour