The Triumph of Death

• 1. The Triumph of Death

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  The Triumph of Death arrived at the Museo del Prado in Madrid in 1827, and it has remained there ever since. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted it around 1562 on an oil panel. Art historian James Snyder described what lies below the action as "scorched, barren earth, devoid of any life as far as the eye can see." Fires burn in the distance. The sea is littered with shipwrecks. An army of skeletons advances across this wasteland. What did Bruegel believe the living deserved? Who does death actually spare? And why has this image continued to find new audiences for more than four centuries?

• 2. No One Is Spared

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  The king in Bruegel's painting reaches for his barrels of gold and silver coins even as a skeleton loots them. A second skeleton holds an empty hourglass beside the dying monarch. The warning arrives too late. Nearby, a cardinal is guided toward his end by a skeleton wearing its victim's own red hat in open mockery.

  In the upper left corner of the painting, skeletons ring a bell to mark the death knell of the world. Elsewhere, people are herded into an enclosure shaped like a coffin and decorated with crosses. Skeleton riders on horseback swing scythes through the living. These figures likely allude to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. A religious pilgrim is robbed and killed for his money purse. Skeleton-fishermen spread a net to haul in the living as if they were fish.

  A starving dog gnaws at the face of a dead child lying in the arms of its dead mother. Between these scenes, Bruegel cataloged execution methods drawn from his own century: the breaking wheel, the gallows, and burning at the stake. A headsman waits over a victim who has already received wine and communion. A cross sits in the centre of the painting, a still point in the carnage around it.

• 3. The Classical Fates

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  One woman in the path of the death cart holds a slender thread that scissors in her own hand are about to sever. This is Bruegel's interpretation of Atropos, the Greek fate who ends each life. A second woman nearby carries a spindle and a distaff, Bruegel's interpretation of Clotho and Lachesis. In Greek myth, those two Fates spin and measure the thread of life before Atropos cuts it.

  The Bible provides another layer. One man has a grinding stone tied around his neck, and skeletons are about to throw him into a pond. The image echoes Matthew 18.6 and Luke 17.2. On a bridge just above that scene, a skeleton raises a falchion over a prostrate victim. In another scene at the left, skeletons drag further victims down to a pond.

  Among the objects Bruegel placed in the scene is an early mechanical clock. The risk of plague was very severe in the mid-sixteenth century. His contemporaries would have recognized the clock, the clothes, and the instruments as part of the world they moved through daily. Bruegel also depicted a funeral service among the painting's many episodes, setting burial rites beside executions within the same landscape.

• 4. The Interrupted Dinner

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  Swords have been drawn by the guests at a dinner interrupted by skeletons wrapped in winding-sheets. The backgammon board is overturned and the playing cards are scattered. A skeleton wearing a mask, possibly shaped like a corpse's face, pours away the wine. What remains on the table includes a few pallid rolls of bread. Another item on the menu appears to be a pared human skull.

  The court jester has crawled beneath the table for cover. His hiding place offers no safety. Two women sit above the table. One struggles in the grip of a skeleton mimicking a romantic embrace. The other recoils as a skeleton in a hooded robe carries another dish to the table, this one also made of human bones.

  In the same corner, a musician plays a lute while a woman sings beside him. A skeleton has joined their music from behind. Neither of them notices. Bruegel did not invent this vision alone. An older vocabulary of images about death had been accumulating in European art for centuries before him.

• 5. Two Traditions

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  Northern European woodcuts of the Dance of Death provided one of Bruegel's sources for the painting. This tradition depicted death leading figures from every rank of society toward the grave. The Italian conception of the Triumph of Death contributed the other source, casting death as a military conqueror on a vast scale. Classic examples of frescoes in this Italian tradition survive in the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo and in the Camposanto Monumentale at Pisa.

  Bruegel drew on both traditions at once, pulling the panoramic scale of the Italian Triumph into the social world of the northern Dance of Death. The BBC later included the painting in its list of 100 Great Paintings. By the late twentieth century, the image had also begun appearing on album covers, in novels, and in film opening credits.

• 6. A Painting That Keeps Moving

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  Sylvia Plath wrote about the painting in her poem "Two Views of a Cadaver Room." She paid particular attention to the lovers in the lower right-hand corner. In 1977, the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath used the painting as both the front and back cover of their greatest hits compilation. Bruegel's image had moved from the Prado into mass culture.

  William S. Burroughs placed the painting on the cover of Cities of the Red Night for its first-edition printings, published in 1981. Don DeLillo's 1996 novel Underworld gives FBI director J. Edgar Hoover an encounter with the work. Hoover first sees it reproduced in torn pages of Life magazine and becomes utterly intrigued, eventually obtaining a print. In Andrew McGahan's 2019 novel The Rich Man's House, a character named Richman acquires the painting from the Prado. He displays it in his mountaintop home.

  Anne Rice placed the painting in Interview with the Vampire as a mural. It decorates the entrance to the vampire Armand's realm, located beneath his Paris theatre. A grayscale version of the painting serves as a motion background in the opening credits of the 1991 film The Pit and the Pendulum. The text introduction to the second part of the Monty Python sketch The Spanish Inquisition uses the painting as a background image. In 2017, the late Chicago rapper Juice WRLD chose it for the cover of NOTHING'S DIFFERENT, an EP released on SoundCloud. Somewhere in Bruegel's panel, a skeleton-hunter pursues a human with his dogs.