Magpie on Gallows. The Magpie on the Gallows is a 1568 oil-on-wood panel painting by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
It is now in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. The painting shows a world landscape, with the foreground a woodland clearing containing three peasants dancing to a bagpipes, next to a gallows upon which a magpie is perched.
The gallows stands in the centre of the picture, dividing the painting in two, a Mannerist composition with the right side more open and left more closed, with the magpie close to the exact centre of the painting. The gallows appears to form an impossible object, similar to a Penrose triangle, with the bases of the posts seemingly planted side by side, but with the right side of the cross-member receding into the distance, and contradictory lighting.
Another magpie sits on a rock at the base of the gallows, near the skull of an animal. The only people occupy the left foreground: a man defecates in the shadows to the left, while others watch the three dancers.
To the right stands a cross with a watermill behind. The background opens on to a view of a river valley, with a town to the left and castle on a rocky crag above, and a tower on a rock outcrop to the right, and distant hills and the sky beyond. Behind the dancers rise two intertwined trees, a motif used by Bruegel in an earlier drawing of bears playing in a forest. An
It is now in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. The painting shows a world landscape, with the foreground a woodland clearing containing three peasants dancing to a bagpipes, next to a gallows upon which a magpie is perched.
The gallows stands in the centre of the picture, dividing the painting in two, a Mannerist composition with the right side more open and left more closed, with the magpie close to the exact centre of the painting. The gallows appears to form an impossible object, similar to a Penrose triangle, with the bases of the posts seemingly planted side by side, but with the right side of the cross-member receding into the distance, and contradictory lighting.
Another magpie sits on a rock at the base of the gallows, near the skull of an animal. The only people occupy the left foreground: a man defecates in the shadows to the left, while others watch the three dancers.
To the right stands a cross with a watermill behind. The background opens on to a view of a river valley, with a town to the left and castle on a rocky crag above, and a tower on a rock outcrop to the right, and distant hills and the sky beyond. Behind the dancers rise two intertwined trees, a motif used by Bruegel in an earlier drawing of bears playing in a forest. An
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