| The Triumph of Death | |
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| Artist | Pieter Bruegel the Elder |
| Year | c. 1562 |
| Medium | oil on panel |
| Dimensions | 117 cm× 162 cm(46 in× 63.8 in) |
| Location | Museo del Prado, Madrid |
The Triumph of Death is an oil panel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted c. 1562. [1] It has been in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1827. [2]
The painting shows a panorama of an army of skeletons wreaking havoc across a blackened, desolate landscape. Fires burn in the distance, and the sea is littered with shipwrecks. [3]
A few leafless trees stud hills otherwise bare of vegetation. Fish lie rotting on the shores of a corpse-choked pond. Art historian James Snyder emphasizes the "scorched, barren earth, devoid of any life as far as the eye can see." [1]
In this setting, legions of skeletons advance on the living, who either flee in terror or try in vain to fight back. In the foreground, skeletons haul a wagon full of skulls. In the upper left corner, others ring the bell that signifies the death knell of the world. People are herded into a coffin-shaped trap decorated with crosses, while skeletons on horseback kill people with a scythe. This is one of four horses ridden by skeletons that are depicted in the painting, probably alluding to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The painting depicts people of different social backgrounds – from peasants and soldiers to nobles as well as a king and a cardinal – being taken by death indiscriminately. [4]
A skeleton parodies human happiness by playing a hurdy-gurdy, while the wheels of his cart crush a man as if his life is of no importance. A woman has fallen in the path of the death cart. She has a slender thread which is about to be cut by the scissors in her other hand—Bruegel's interpretation of Atropos. Nearby, another woman in the path of the cart holds in her hand a spindle and distaff, classical symbols of the fragility of human life—another Bruegel interpretation of Clotho and Lachesis.
A starving dog nibbles at the face of a dead child lying still within its dead mother's embrace. Just beside her, a cardinal is helped towards his fate by a skeleton who mockingly wears the red hat, while a dying king's barrels of gold and silver coins are looted by yet another skeleton, oblivious to the fact that a skeleton is warning him with an empty hourglass that his life is about to literally run out of time. The foolish and miserly monarch's last thoughts still compel him to reach out for his useless and vain wealth, seeming unaware of the need for repentance. In the centre, an awakening religious pilgrim has his throat cut by a robber-skeleton for his money purse. Above the murder, skeleton-fishermen catch people in a net.
In the bottom right-hand corner, a dinner has been broken up and the diners are putting up a futile resistance. They have drawn their swords in order to fight the skeletons dressed in winding-sheets. No less hopelessly, the court jester takes refuge beneath the dinner table. The backgammon board and the playing cards have been scattered, while a skeleton thinly disguised with a mask (possibly the face of a corpse) empties away the wine flasks. Of the menu of the interrupted meal, all that can be seen are a few pallid rolls of bread and an appetiser apparently consisting of a pared human skull. Above the table are two women. The one on the left struggles in vain while being embraced by a skeleton, in a hideous parody of after-dinner amorousness. The woman on the right is horrified with the realisation of mortality when a skeleton in a hooded robe mockingly seems to bring another dish, also consisting of human bones, to the table. [5]
In the bottom right-hand corner, a musician plays a lute while his lady sings. Both are oblivious to the fact that, behind both of them, the skeleton that plays along is grimly aware that the couple can not escape their inevitable doom. A cross sits in the centre of the painting. The painting shows aspects of everyday life in the mid-sixteenth century, when the risk of plague was very severe. Clothes are clearly depicted, as are pastimes such as playing cards and backgammon. It shows objects such as musical instruments, an early mechanical clock, scenes including a funeral service, and various methods of execution, including the breaking wheel, the gallows, burning at the stake, and the headsman about to behead a victim who has just taken wine and communion. In one scene, a human is the prey of a skeleton-hunter and his dogs.
In another scene at the left, skeletons drag victims down to be drowned in a pond. A man with a grinding stone around his neck is about to be thrown into the pond by the skeletons—an echoing of Matthew 18.6 and Luke 17.2. On the bridge just above at the right, a skeleton is about to strike a prostrate victim with a falchion.
Bruegel combines two distinct visual traditions within the panel. These represent both the native tradition of Northern woodcuts of the Dance of Death, and the Italian conception of the Triumph of Death . Classic examples of his frescoes can now be seen in the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo and in the Camposanto Monumentale at Pisa. [6]
The Triumph of Death appears as a background image for the text intro of the second part of the Monty Python sketch The Spanish Inquisition .
Heavy metal band Black Sabbath released a compilation album titles Black Sabbath Greatest Hits in 1977 which used the painting as the front and back covers. [7]
In Underworld , a 1996 novel by Don DeLillo, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover becomes utterly intrigued by the painting after seeing it reproduced in torn pages of Life magazine and eventually obtains a print of it.
The painting plays a pivotal role in The Rich Man's House , 2019, the final novel by Australian writer Andrew McGahan, with its theme of inevitable mortality. The rich man of the title (called Richman) has acquired the painting from the Museo del Prado and it hangs in pride of place in his mountaintop house. [8]
Pieter Bruegelthe Elder was among the most significant artists of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, a painter and printmaker, known for his landscapes and peasant scenes ; he was a pioneer in presenting both types of subject as large paintings.
Jan Brueghelthe Younger was a Flemish Baroque painter. He was the son of Jan Brueghel the Elder, and grandson of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, both prominent painters who contributed respectively to the development of Renaissance and Baroque painting in the Habsburg Netherlands. Taking over his father's workshop at an early age, he largely painted the same subjects as his father in a style which was similar to that of his father. He gradually was able to break away from his father's style by developing a broader, more painterly, and less structured manner of painting. He regularly collaborated with leading Flemish painters of his time.
A skeleton is a type of physically manifested undead often found in fantasy, gothic, and horror fiction, as well as mythology, folklore, and various kinds of art. Most are human skeletons, but they can also be from any creature or race found on Earth or in the fantasy world.
The Harvesters is an oil painting on wood completed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1565. It depicts the harvest time set in a landscape, in the months of July and August or late summer. Nicolaes Jonghelinck, a merchant banker and art collector from Antwerp, commissioned this painting as part of a cycle of six paintings depicting various seasonal transitions during the year.
The Fight Between Carnival and Lent is an oil-on-panel painting executed by the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1559. It is a panorama of contemporary life in the Southern Netherlands. While the painting contains nearly 200 characters, it is unified under the theme of the transition from Shrove Tuesday to Lent, the period forty days before Easter.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas measuring 73.5 by 112 centimetres now in the Oldmasters Museum in Brussels. It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. However, following technical examinations in 1996 of the painting hanging in the Brussels museum, that attribution is regarded as very doubtful, and the painting, perhaps painted in the 1560s, is now usually seen as a good early copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel's lost original, perhaps from about 1558. According to the museum: "It is doubtful the execution is by Bruegel the Elder, but the composition can be said with certainty to be his", although recent technical research has re-opened the question.
The Peasant Wedding is a 1567 genre painting by the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel the Elder, one of his many depicting peasant life. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Pieter Bruegel the Elder enjoyed painting peasants and different aspects of their lives in so many of his paintings that he has been called Peasant-Bruegel, but he was an intellectual, and many of his paintings have a symbolic meaning as well as a moral aspect.
The Magpie on the Gallows is a 1568 oil-on-wood panel painting by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is now in the Hessisches Landesmuseum, in Darmstadt.
Netherlandish Proverbs is a 1559 oil-on-oak-panel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder that depicts a scene in which humans and, to a lesser extent, animals and objects, offer literal illustrations of Dutch-language proverbs and idioms.
The Blind Leading the Blind, Blind, or The Parable of the Blind is a painting by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, completed in 1568. Executed in distemper on linen canvas, it measures 86 cm × 154 cm. It depicts the Biblical parable of the blind leading the blind from the Gospel of Matthew 15:14, and is in the collection of the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy.
The Wine of Saint Martin's Day is the largest painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is currently held in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, where it was identified as a Bruegel original in 2010. Like much of Bruegel's work it depicts peasant life, in this case a festival known as St. Martin's Day, which involves drinking the first wine of the season.
Peeter Baltens, Pieter Balten or Pieter Custodis, was a Flemish Renaissance painter, draughtsman, engraver and publisher. Baltens was also active as an art dealer and poet. He was known for his genre paintings, religious compositions and landscapes.
The Misanthrope is a tempera painting on canvas by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, created in 1568. It is now in the National Museum of Capodimonte, in Naples.
The Adoration of the Kings is an oil-on-panel painting of the Adoration of the Magi by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in 1564. It is held in the National Gallery, in London.
The Peasant Dance is an oil-on-panel by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted in circa 1567. It was looted by Napoleon Bonaparte and brought to Paris in 1808, being returned in 1815. In is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The Procession to Calvary is an oil-on-panel by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder of Christ carrying the Cross set in a large landscape, painted in 1564. It is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The Fall of the Rebel Angels is an oil-on-panel painting of 1562 by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The painting is 117cm x 162cm and is now in the Oldmasters Museum in Brussels, Belgium. The Fall of Rebel Angels depicts Lucifer along with the other fallen angels that have been banished from heaven. Angels are falling from the sun in a stacked manner along with ungodly creatures that Bruegel created.
Landscape with the Flight into Egypt is a 1563 oil on wooden panel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, showing the biblical Flight into Egypt of Mary and Joseph with the infant Jesus. It measures 37.1 by 55.6 centimetres and is held in the Courtauld Gallery, in London.
Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, also known as The Bird Trap, is a panel painting in oils by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, from 1565, now in the Oldmasters Museum in Brussels. It shows a village scene where people skate on a frozen river, while on the right among trees and bushes, birds gather around a bird trap. It is signed and dated at the lower right: "BRVEGEL / M.D.LXV’1". There are more early copies of this than any other painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, many by his much younger son Pieter Brueghel the Younger, or other members of the Brueghel family dynasty and workshop. The art historian Klaus Ertz documented 127 copies in his comprehensive monograph on the artist's son in 2000.
Alpine Landscape is an oil-on-canvas painting by Flemish painter Tobias Verhaecht. The painting was completed between 1600 and 1615, and is now in the Museum of Prado in Madrid.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Breughel, Pieter". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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