The Triumph of Death

An army of skeletons lays waste to the living across a scorched, smoke-blackened plain: they herd crowds into a giant coffin-trap, toll the death-bell, cut throats and haul nets of skulls, sparing no one - a king clutches his gold as a skeleton empties his barrels, while lovers play music oblivious at the lower right. Bruegel updates the medieval dance of death into a panoramic apocalypse, part Bosch and part his own cold observation. Every rank and age is swept up together. It stands among the most relentless visions of mortality in European painting, a memento mori on the scale of war.