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| Triumph of Death by Bruegel ca.1562 |
When I think of the Coronovirus leaping around the globe and
adding to the daily death count, I think of one of the most terrifying
paintings in history, the Triumph of Death, an oil-on-wood-panel
painting, created in 1562. It has something, like this virus, of everyone’s
worst nightmare. Set along a coast in a village with commerce, the scene looks
like a premonition of hell. Flames and smoke dot the horizon. It’s an
eco-horror. There isn’t a sign of any green life in the landscape. Trees are
being chopped down. The land is scorched and rust colored. A bloated fish gasps
on the shore. The painting is of a jumbled panicked populace surrounded by almost
quaint little scenes of victims stuck in torture contraptions, and coffins
sinking into the mud in the surrounding fields. It looks like the cursed forecast
of what we can expect if the stores run out of medical masks, or you are stuck
in an airplane full of coughing aliens.
Not enough is known about Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the
artist from the Netherlands who worked in the 1500’s. No one knows his birth
date, but the time he was registered in an art guild (1551) to his death (1669)
he executed 40 paintings and 60 prints. This particular painting is hung at the
Prado Museum in Madrid.
In The Triumph of Death, the hysteria is loud and
panoramic. Men, women, babies, the rich, the poor, the laborer, the gamblers, soldiers,
monks, and kings, are all tormented and terrified. Skeletons arrive in massive
numbers and outnumber the living. They
arrive on boats and by horseback. They interrupt meals, disrupt commerce and dismantle
forts. They amass an army, creating a wall of coffin-shaped shields. They pull wagons piled high with skulls,
trampling over victims, and herding crowds into a large dark door: a death trap
in the side of a hill. They wield long slivered scythes and blow on trumpets, even drumming percussion with bones. A woman, face down, cradles her
baby while dogs eat it’s face. A man is hung with his pants down. A bewildered
king is taunted by a skeleton holding up an empty hour-glass.
Everyone in the painting is in the throes of death except
for two young lovers in the lower right corner. They are seemingly oblivious and feeling immortal as
they play music and read. But, behind them, a skeleton has picked up an
instrument and is playing along.
On a barren hill to the left, two skeletons ring a large
black bell.
