WALLACE STEVENS wrote of dying as “absolute and without memorial.” This is Pieter Bruegel’s circa 1562 world masterpiece painting The Triumph of Death, a panoramic pandemonium of an army of skeletons laying waste to a barren burning landscape while murdering every human being in sight. Lately, I have spent so much time contemplating this painting, I feel I have almost been living inside it. The painting hangs inside Madrid’s Prado Museum—for me, the greatest museum of Western painting on earth, and one whose collection is enthralling even from the distance of a keyboard.
No one gets out of this painting alive—except those already dead. From the left, a cart pulled by an emaciated horse and filled with a mountain of skulls is driven by a skeleton ringing a bell and holding an hourglass that has run out of the sand. Directly above, a chorus of skeletons clad in Roman togas or mock angel robes throws a man into a moat; a bloated body floats by. Some in this group blow trumpets signaling this godless apocalypse. A skeleton sticks his head out of the face of a clock; midnight is nigh. Two skeletons nearby ring two large bells. They toll for us all.
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