They did, and some might still remain, it wasn't unusual to construct a mill atop of sheer outcrops of rock, but they were built of massive stones, so they wouldn't blast away at the first gale of wind.The mill in Bruegel's painting looks like a homely flimsy wooden post mill, a house of cards, which led historians/scholars to aver that the mill historically did not exist.The question is, why did the painter paint a flimsy unstable post mill on a rocky spindle perched precariously on top of an impossibly tall and dangerous craggy precipice that nearly topples backwards out of the frame? Which represents G-d's Eye and Fortune's Wheel and perhaps Man's Own Hand (Science/Mechanics/Labour)?The exteriour is a house of cards, and in the film we are privy to the vast cavernous rockywalled grottosque bowels of the mill, with its revolving clockwork wooden wheel and clogs, the powerful monumental iconic stature of the wheel and its workings emphasized by how their forefront angular position is swathed against the richly-layered voluminous blackness of the cavernous backdrop.Outside, flimsy, a messianic (man-made) contraption, inside, an awe-inspiring divine scientific drama where the most important and grueling (pun intended....) labour occurs and the most important stuff of life is made. A contraption which, despite it's monumental interiour, can be blown away at any minute because of its flimsy unstable exteriour. Jesus, monumental intellect (interiour), exteriour corporeality persecuted and punished and crucified.Protestants, monumental doctrinal (interiour) reformation, exteriour corporeality persecuted and executed.G-d on the Crag, monumental theology of intellect and spirit (interiour), external presence per the painting and film distant and impersonal and indifferent all of which expose the shallowness of the religion of religion and blow it away.Eerily, an empty execution wheel stands in the right foreground.The mill on the crag is more real than the historians and scholars think, it exists beyond their quotidian reality, it is each and every one of us.
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benman46
11 years ago
A very detailed answer but nonsense. Breughel himself explained the mill in the film itself. Previous paintings showing God showed him in the sky parting the clouds and looking disapprovingly at the people below. He decided to replace this imagery with a mill perched atop a mountain, with the windmill blades fixed as a cross. The miller was God surveying the scene below, his face and emotions unknowable. It is a metaphoric depiction of God in his heaven, milling the wheat that is baked into the bread that becomes the sacramental body of Christ.
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