Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca 1525-1569), The Triumph of Death (ca 1562), oil on panel, 117x162 cm.
Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The spectacle shown depicts a huge skeleton army invading the living world, pursuing and killing each one of its individuals. This is by far the most terrifying painting of Bruegel, known by most people for his winter landscapes and peaceful peasant life scenes. The painting dates from c. 1562, five years before the arrival of the ruthless Duke of Alba in the Southern Netherlands. However, the Spanish suppression of the Dutch Protestant rebellion, had already been felt for decades. Nevertheless, the painting does not show any reference to the Spanish suppression and stays independently with a general grim warning against the madness of the war making mankind.

With the advance of the death’s hordes, chaos becomes widespread, people fleeing in terror, some trying to fight back. In the middle distance to the left, an emaciated horse is pulling a cart full of skulls, ignoring a woman that out of fear has fallen in its path. Nearby a starving dog is nibbling at the face of a child, which is embraced in an arm of its death mother. To the left, a skeleton is helping a cardinal towards his fate, not before having put the cardinal’s hat on its own dome. In the corner, a dying royalty in his white and red fur-trimmed robe sees his barrel of gold coins looted.

In the centre of the painting, Death on horseback, waving a scythe, his typical attribute, drives the living crowd into a rectangular tunnel, so as to send them straight to their deaths. On either side of the tunnel entrance, skeletons holding coffin lids as shields with the sign of the cross, preclude any escape possibility. Bruegel's representation of people being rushed into a collective death inevitably reminds us the Nazi mass extermination.

In the middle foreground, a skeleton is cutting a man’s throat, having fleeced him previously. Nearby are two corpses in a shroud, one lying in a coffin, another beneath. To the right, a red-dressed officer draws his sword in an attempt to fend off death’s attendants. In the right corner, a dinner has abruptly been broken up. The nobles which had participated, also brandish their swords by the menacing approach of skeletons, some of them dressed in winding-sheets. A jester takes refuge beneath the dinner table. Nearby, a masked and yellow-dressed death attendant empties two wine flasks which were intended for the dinner’s feast, a backgammon board and playing cards lying apart. In the extreme corner, a man is playing lute and a lady is singing, while behind her a skeleton echoes with false tunes on some stolen string instrument. Behind the almost empty dinner table, a lady is harassed by an attendant and a second one disguised in a hooded blue-grey robe, mockingly brings another dish, but only filled with a skull and human bones.

Death is an inevitable fact of life, unsparing of all different levels of human society, which Bruegel excels in rendering almost brutally with a great amount of detail scenes.


For several details of the painting, see next pictures