Brueghel and contemporaries: art as covert resistance?

For artists, the Carrying of the Cross offered many striking details, a rewarding subject for painting or carving in wood. Initially, in the late Middle Ages, we see the image mainly as part of the Passion, the series of events that led to Christ's "death on the cross, with the Crucifixion as the "culmination".

Like Father, Like Son?

Brueghel the Elder died in 1569, three years after the Iconoclasm. Under the reign of Fernando Àlvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alva, and his Blood Council that followed, religious and political dissidents were relentlessly persecuted. While still on his deathbed, Pieter the Elder is said to have told his wife to burn his drawings, because the caustic satire could bring the family into trouble.

Decades later, his son Peter II gave the soldiers who accompany Christ to Golgotha ​​the banner of the Habsburgs. Did he do this to make the religious image more tangible for his contemporaries? Or did he paint in the mind of his father, and is the weapon a veiled reproach to the authority that puts reformers to death? We will never know for sure, the painter must have deliberately left his intentions open to multiple explanations.