The Triumph of Death

By the time this panel was painted, the scene on it was already about 65 years old. Pieter Bruegel the Elder set out his army of the dead around 1562, and that version still hangs in the Prado in Madrid. This is a later repetition of it, made in Antwerp in the 1620s. The museum in Basel calls it the work of a follower of the elder Bruegel, while catalogues often give it to his son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, whose workshop turned out copies of the father's inventions. Which hand held the brush here is not settled.

The scene itself is one of the bleakest in Netherlandish painting. Skeletons overrun a scorched land and spare no one, from a king in his ermine to card players and lovers who have not yet noticed. A skeleton on a pale reddish horse swings a scythe through the crowd and drives the living toward a huge coffin-like box. In a corner a choir of the dead sings under a crucifix, while small red fires burn along the horizon.