Triumph of Death. The Triumph of Death is an oil panel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted c. 1562.
It has been in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1827. The painting shows a panorama of an army of skeletons wreaking havoc across a blackened, desolate landscape.
Fires burn in the distance, and the sea is littered with shipwrecks. A few leafless trees stud hills otherwise bare of vegetation; fish lie rotting on the shores of a corpse-choked pond.
Art historian James Snyder emphasizes the scorched, barren earth, devoid of any life as far as the eye can see. In this setting, legions of skeletons advance on the living, who either flee in terror or try in vain to fight back.
In the foreground, skeletons haul a wagon full of skulls; in the upper left corner, others ring the bell that signifies the death knell of the world. People are herded into a coffin-shaped trap decorated with crosses, while a skeleton on horseback kills people with a scythe. The painting depicts people of different social backgrounds-from peasants and soldiers to nobles as well as a king and a cardinal-being taken by death indiscriminately. A skeleton parodies human happiness by playing a hurdy-gurdy while the wheels of his cart crush a man like he's nothing. A woman has fallen in the path of the death cart; she has a slender thread which is about to be cut by the scissors in her other hand, Bruegel's interpretation o
It has been in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1827. The painting shows a panorama of an army of skeletons wreaking havoc across a blackened, desolate landscape.
Fires burn in the distance, and the sea is littered with shipwrecks. A few leafless trees stud hills otherwise bare of vegetation; fish lie rotting on the shores of a corpse-choked pond.
Art historian James Snyder emphasizes the scorched, barren earth, devoid of any life as far as the eye can see. In this setting, legions of skeletons advance on the living, who either flee in terror or try in vain to fight back.
In the foreground, skeletons haul a wagon full of skulls; in the upper left corner, others ring the bell that signifies the death knell of the world. People are herded into a coffin-shaped trap decorated with crosses, while a skeleton on horseback kills people with a scythe. The painting depicts people of different social backgrounds-from peasants and soldiers to nobles as well as a king and a cardinal-being taken by death indiscriminately. A skeleton parodies human happiness by playing a hurdy-gurdy while the wheels of his cart crush a man like he's nothing. A woman has fallen in the path of the death cart; she has a slender thread which is about to be cut by the scissors in her other hand, Bruegel's interpretation o
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