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Although not yet 500 years old, this painting is nearly as mysterious as the hieroglyphs of the pyramids and requires no less a Rosetta stone. Although it depicts some eighty different sports and games, scholars have only been able to identify thirty-two with certainty.

John Thorn is the author and editor of many books, mostly about sports, as well as occasional pieces for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe. He lives in Saugerties, New York. Copyright © John Thorn.

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Walking through the European wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my son Mark, home from college for the holidays, we glided from gallery to gallery at a leisurely pace. He had seen many of these glorious paintings before, but only as color plates in an art history textbook. I had visited them at the Met before, but never with him; our earlier visits, when he and his older brothers were still living at home, had tended not to stray far from the mummies, the hieroglyphs, and the Temple of Dendur, unless it was to check out the medieval armor and, as a sop to me, the American wing. Now we were two adults, with his interest in Northern Renaissance and Flemish painting far exceeding mine. His newfound passion would determine our path, as it had the very idea of a full-day ascent of this cultural Matterhorn. We were still father and son, I was still the guide and he the willing initiate, but the gap had narrowed. We were near, if not at, the point at which my relationship had twisted and turned with his brothers—from parent to grownup friend and, enduringly, to peer. Our mission was to gawk until we dropped. Sometime during our second hour we paused to discuss lunch plans, unwittingly right in front of Bruegel the Elder’s “Corn Harvest” (1565), one of the world’s great paintings of everyday life. Bruegel is a marvel not only for his craft, but also for his bottom-up approach to story that tells us more about the human condition than paintings of battle and royalty; his dedication to landscape tells us more about heaven, too, than dreamy depictions of an anthropomorphic deity. Why, you may ask, is “Corn Harvest” the title when the crop is obviously wheat? Because a generic name for grain in German is korn, and the term—mistranslated—labeled this painting early on. Turning ninety degrees to the wall, my view fell upon a tiny tableau at the left-center of the painting, in which young men appear to be playing a game of bat and ball in a meadow distant from the scything and stacking and dining and drinking that make up the foreground. Mark agreed: there seems to be a man with a bat, a fielder at a base, a runner, and spectators, as well as participants in waiting. The strange apparatus opposite the batsman’s position might have been a catapult serving as a pitching device. As I was later to learn, this detail is unnoted in scholarly studies. Now, it could be argued that as a historian of early sport, particularly games of bat and ball, I may tend to see instances of my specialty popping up everywhere, like hobgoblins. Or I may just be lucky. It might be argued, as well, that the title of this column is misleading, as it is less about Bruegel than it is about me. But I would rejoin that is about both of us, and all three of my children, and you and yours too. Winter break is a great time to reconnect with your kids, whether they live at home, are away at college, or are grown and live at great distance. It’s also a time to connect with how children everywhere view the world—not as a series of milestones to be marked, honors to be won, and rewards to be earned, but as an arena for new experiences. And in the end, it’s a great time to connect with your own childhood, and thus who you are and always have been. Seeing this mysterious game of ball depicted in Bruegel’s “Corn Harvest” recalled for me another of the master’s great works, his “Children’s Games” of 1560. Although not yet 500 years old, this painting is nearly as mysterious as the hieroglyphs of the pyramids and requires no less a Rosetta stone. Although it depicts some eighty different sports and games, scholars have only been able to identify thirty-two with certainty. A few of these will be familiar to modern readers: blindman’s buff, bowls, crack the whip, follow the leader, hoops, king of the hill, leapfrog, marbles, mumblety-peg, tug-of-war. Others are in the realm of lexicographers and ghosts. We play fewer games today than a century ago, and fewer still than in sixteenth-century Europe, just as the evolution of species has produced the dubious triumph of fewer and not necessarily superior survivors. Increasingly our children exercise their minds and thumbs in play, but not their limbs, so young men and women must build suppleness and mass through the simulated play of fitness routines that translate, upon reflection, to just another form of work. We are overstimulated mentally, underutilized physically, and—bombarded with media messages—discontented with our daily lives more than ever before. Or at least that is what has often been reported, and not only in these days of virtual reality. The New York Times of December 30, 1883, published a story headed “Boyhood’s Merry Games; Some of the Sports in Which Our Fathers Indulged; The Healthful Games of a Generation Ago of Which the Boy of Today Knows Little or Nothing.” The anonymous author was stunned to learn that the only game his ten-year-old son played was marbles. “Now, marbles is all right,” he wrote, “but I don’t like the idea of a steady diet in that line. It isn’t broadening. It’s a sort of one-sided development. Boys are dying out in this country, or at least the boy I’m bringing up is of a different species from what I used to know.” How we play is ever changing. Play is a constant. Today we still have a few things to teach our children, and a lot to learn from them.

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