JF Ptak Science Books Post 2834a
Somehow I was drawn to take a close look at Pieter Bruegel (the elder's) massively complex painting, The Triumph of Death (painted ca 1562), in which people were skeletonized by skeletons, killed in fantastic grotesqueries. No doubt I found my way there thinking about COVID-19, and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and naturally to the time of the London plague and then the Black Death, winding up on Bruegel's bitterblack doorstep. In the painting's many nooks and crannies and its deep minutiae, there is no regard for hope to be found, no possibility of god's grace to comfort and possibly save the doomed, nothing by the delivery of myster-horrories leading to the lake of fire.
There is just so much going on in this painting, so many scenes that you'd expect to see an overall narrative, except that there is none, just hundreds of people being taken by Death and its skeleton minions, led off to the gate of Hell. There are dozens of individual passions being crushed and morals observances being made, but they all seem to stand apart and clear.
I did a quick survey to see if there was an overall census of this apocalypse, but I didn't find one, surprisingly, which probably means I didn't look hard enough. That said I thought it would be quicker to make my own scan of what is going on in the painting, starting in the near-center, where we see the spiked opening of the cave of Hell, surrounded by the armies of the dead. In the foreground is a very bad litany of very bad things, people being hanged and burned and drowned and stabbed and knifed and strangled broken on the wheel, those looking out to a deeper field of burning houses and a burning armada, everything burning or set to burn—everything was on fire, leading to the place where the fire was on fire.
Continuing the survey in the image's far left-bottom, we see a king in his finery being shown an empty hour glass; to his left a skeleton in armor poking around in bags of gold and silver coins, while just nearby is a cardinal being led to eternity by a skeleton wearing a cardinal's hat. Further on we see a very strong denial of the absence of mercy, in this case a starving dog nibbling on the face of a dead baby still in its dead mother's arms, and this right next to someone being overpowered and having his throat slit.
Behind the king there is a skeleton crew operating a wagon full of the dead—one of the skeletons plays a hurdy gurdy while the other sits daintily astride the starving horse pulling the dead crate. Nearby people are being gathered in a net—like, well, people being led of to hell in a net—which seems a better end than what is going on around them, a diatribe of death by hackings and assorted other nastiness.
On the opposite side of the painting from the king, on the far right corner, is a pair of, what, friends or something singing and playing, completely oblivious to the larger scene and even to the lute-playing skeleton leering and hovering over them. To their left is particularly disturbing figure—a skeleton wearing a human face with no eyes is tipping over a brazer filled with flasks, this taking place next to an upset backgammon board and a fallen deck of cards.
Rounding it all out, in the center of the painting, we finally see Death itself, riding a red horse, horse of war, the symbol of fire, of blood, and one of the four horses of the apocalypse. Death charges on, and in this horrible commotion leads his hundreds of skeletons into what was probably a generic scene of generic people doing generic things appropriate to their generic-icity, the great an overwhelming triumph over mortals seeming abandoned by their god.
So, there it is—I just ran out of steam in thinking of a census of what was happening in the painting, settling for a summary. Its just a little too nasty for right now.
The cure for this painting is to have a look at Bruegel's superb painting of children's games, which comes up next.
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