Война

Bocklin painted this in 1896, when he was 69 and living in Italy in poor health, out of step with the confident, industrial Europe of his day. He reaches back to Albrecht Durer's woodcut of the Four Horsemen from the 1490s and sends his own riders, War, Plague and Death among them, charging low over the rooftops of a burning classical town. There is no particular battle here and no nation named. It reads as a general dread about where the century was heading, painted almost 20 years before the war that would seem to prove it. Bocklin made a second version too, with fewer riders and a medieval city in place of the antique one.