Inside Bruegel

A professor of English at Rice University, Snow is mainly noted for his good, honest translations of Rilke's New Poems and Uncollected Poems (also North Point) and a study of Vermeer. In 1979, though, he began an essay that developed into the present book with a few incarnations in some U.S. literary journals like the Kenyon Review and Raritan. Snow concentrates on a single work, Pieter Bruegel's 1560 painting, ""Children's Games,"" a landscape that shows a vast variety of children playing specific games, a painting that has had many detailed interpretations over the years. While experts like Erwin Panofsky, Walter Gibson and Max Friedlander (the latter oddly absent from Snow's bibliography) have gone a considerable way to explain Bruegel's work, other art historians with more literary pretensions, like Charles de Tolnay, have shown the pitfalls of that approach. Snow turns pitfalls into land mines in chapters with titles like ""Moral Fixities and Connotative Play,"" ""Coagulation"" and ""The Sexual Relation."" His writing tends to graceless academic jargon: he talks of ""having to restrict an unmanageable plurality of images in order to stabilize an object of analysis""; and of ""imposing moral categories precisely where they are in abeyance. The affective charge of the image is overwhemingly positive: it suggests an oasis of pre-volitional well-being."" A detailed examination of this picture may be admirable, but readers will learn more, with greater pleasure, from the studies by Gibson, Panofsky or Wolfgang Stechow. (Nov.)