The Imaginarium of Death Pieter Bruegel’S the Triumph of Death

Chapter 6 The Imaginarium of Death Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death

Anna Pawlak

As she walked, the shapes and lighter tones of Brueghel’s painting began to emerge. That painting had always held a peculiar fascination for her. The tragic tone that informed every brush stroke, the eloquence of the innumerable figures shaken by the mortal, inexorable breath, the many scenes that made up the macabre whole, had for many years stirred her imagination […]. In the end all paintings were paintings of the same painting, just as all mirrors gave the reflection of the same reflection, and all deaths were the death of the same Death. Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel (1994) ∵

Death as far as the eye can see: death by hanging, death by decapitation, death by drowning, death by being broken on the wheel, death by being beaten … Death taking on every imaginable form, brought about by an omnipresent, archaic force that manifests its absolute omnipotence at a singular site of hor- ror. An unfathomable catastrophe descends violently upon men, women and children, farmers, noblemen, mercenaries and dignitaries that make up a mir- ror image of society as a whole in an act of collective dying. It is a sinister terror that unexpectedly and also brutally seeks to destroy humanity and whose evi- dent manifestation can be found in the equestrian figure of death in the cen- tre of the painting and his seemingly innumerable retinue of the deceased. Nobody and nothing, neither man nor nature, can stand against the destruc- tive vehemence of this monstrous army that hunts, tortures, and murders without regard to age, gender, origin, religion or status. The Triumph of Death (Fig. 6.1) painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder around 1562 visualises the com- plete and utter agony of all living beings, the apocalyptic extent of which causes the devastated world landscape with all its characters to become a Theatrum Mortis, which the viewer observes from a raised position as if he were watching

Figure 6.1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, oil on panel, 117 × 162 cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

a stage.1 In this elaborately produced tragedy, several of the dead imitate the behaviour as well as the rituals of their victims with an almost protean capac- ity by wearing their clothes and interacting in such a way that we can assume they will take the place of the living. They play musical instruments, drive a wagon full of bones, hold trials, ring bells and, disposing of the consequences

1 The starting point for these considerations is my doctoral thesis, Anna Pawlak, Trilogie der Gottessuche: Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. “Sturz der gefallenen Engel,” “Triumph des Todes” und “Dulle Griet” (Berlin: 2011). The latest publication on Bruegel’s Triumph of Death is Larry Silver, “Morbid fascination: Death by Bruegel,” in The Anthropomorphic Lens, eds. Walter S. Melion, Bret Rothstein, and Michel Weemans (Leiden: 2015), 421–454. By focusing on the role of the myriad skeletons in the Triumph of Death, Silver demonstrates how Bruegel’s ‘active, hostile anthropomorphism’ alters the medieval Christian concept of death and dying. Without a clear moral message, the painting steers the viewer’s attention, as the author suggests, along different paths by which humanity comes to its inescapable end, to its ultimate annihilation.