The Triumph of Death

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This article is about the painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. For the painting attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco, see Buonamico Buffalmacco.


The Triumph of Death
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c. 1562
oil on panel
117 × 162 cm, 46 × 63.8 inches
Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Triumph of Death is an oil on panel, approximately 117 by 162 centimeters (46 x 63.8 in), painted c. 1562 by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. It currently hangs in the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The painting is a panoramic landscape of death: the sky in the distance is blackened by smoke from burning cities and the sea is littered with shipwrecks. Armies of skeletons advance on the hapless living, who either flee in terror or try vainly to fight back. Skeletons kill people in a variety of ways - slitting throats, hanging, drowning, and even hunting with skeletal dogs. In the foreground, skeletons haul a wagon full of skulls, and ring the bell that signifies the death knell of the world. A fool plays the lute while a skeleton behind him plays along; a starving dog nibbles at the face of a child; a cross sits lonely and impotent in the center of the painting. People flee into a tunnel decorated with crosses whilst a skeleton on horseback slaughters people with a scythe. The painting clearly depicts people of different social backgrounds - from peasants and soldiers to nobles and even a king - being taken by death indiscriminately.

The painting serves a useful historical purpose in that it shows aspects of everyday European life in the mid-sixteenth century. Clothes are clearly depicted, as are pastimes such as playing cards. Uniquely, the painting shows a common method of execution for sixteenth-century criminals: being lashed to a cartwheel mounted on a vertical pole. Objects such as musical instruments and an early mechanical clock, and scenes including a funeral service provide historians with a deeper understanding of the lifestyle of the 1560s.

Unlike his predecessor, Hieronymus Bosch, the artist who painted the Hellscape called The Garden of Earthly Delights, Brueghel's hordes are composed of skeletons, not demons, suggesting a distinctly atheistic pessimism, and one untempered by any belief in Heaven.

It has been suggested that the painting was inspired by the worsening political climate before the Eighty Years' War (started in 1568), although the painting itself predates this war. Another interpretation is that the painting is an allegorical depiction of the horrors of war, much like his Mad Meg (Dulle Griet in Dutch), also painted around 1562.

[edit] References in modern culture

In the novel Underworld, contemporary American author Don Delillo depicts J. Edgar Hoover as fascinated with this particular painting. It also provides the title for the novel's prologue.

The Triumph of Death is also the name of a song by Hellhammer.

This painting was featured in the mystery novel, The Flanders Panel, by Arturo Perez-Reverte

It is also mentioned in Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire.

The painting is described in the second stanza of Sylvia Plath's poem "Two Views of a Cadaver Room."

It is used as a background image for scrolling text to introduce Part Two of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch.

A detail from the painting was used as the cover of the anti-war album Balaklava by Pearls Before Swine in 1968.

"The Triumph of Death" is shown on the album cover of "Black Sabbath Greatest Hits" (1980). However, the image on the album cover is a mirror (reversed) image of the actual painting. The album refers to the painting as "El Triunfo de la Muerte".