A Pega no Patíbulo

In the middle of a wide green valley Bruegel puts a gallows, and on top of it a magpie. Peasants are dancing to bagpipes right beside it, on ground that leads pleasantly up to the scaffold. He painted this in 1568, the year after the Duke of Alba arrived to put down the Dutch revolt, when a gallows was not a symbol but a working piece of equipment. The magpie carries an old meaning here, the bird of gossip, and there was a saying that idle talk could lead a man straight to the gallows, so the two sit together on purpose. Look at the scaffold itself and its beams do not add up, an impossible shape lit from two directions at once. Bruegel died the next year. He asked his wife to burn some of his paintings, but this one he told her to keep for herself.