Anecdotes

By general consensus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder was born around 1525, and certainly died in 1569. He painted "The Procession to Calvary" (Dutch: "Kruisdraging", German: "Kreuztragung Christi"), the centerpiece of this film, in 1564, when he was less than 40 years old. Yet Rutger Hauer, who portrays him, was in his mid-sixties. Some confusion may have arisen out of his pen drawing "The Painter and The Buyer (or: The Connoisseur)", which some critics believe is a self-portrait. This drawing shows an artist looking rather old and disheveled, and is more likely a caricature or an allegory of the serious, idealistic artist versus the greedy, undiscerning patron.

The apparently random games that Bruegel's children and other youngsters play throughout the movie don't just add to the local period color. They also refer to specific vignettes from another large, so-called genre painting by Bruegel, "Children's Games" (1560) (Dutch: "De Kinderspelen"). These include riding a fence in a row as if it were a horse (in the movie they are riding a large bed), stilt walking, playing with a rag doll, hoop rolling, piggyback riding, buck-buck jousting on each other's backs, playing with a whirligig (toy windmill), rolling around wrestling, knucklebones, trying to grab a hat held high, and hide-and-seek.

There is also at least one citation from yet another of his genre paintings, "Netherlandish/Dutch Proverbs" (1559) (Dutch: "De Spreekwoorden"), which shows two kids pulling each other's noses, which is the Dutch expression for "pulling one's leg (deceiving)", in Dutch: "elkaar bij de neus nemen".

In the movie, the two large paintings displayed behind Nicolaes Jonghelinck (Michael York) and his wife (Dorota Lis) in their house, are also works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "The Tower of Babel" (1563) and "Hunters in the Snow" (1565). They were indeed commissioned or at any rate owned by Jonghelinck at the time.