瘟疫

Bocklin finished this in 1898, at 71 and near the end of his life in Italy, and he gave Death a body: a skeletal rider swept down a narrow medieval street on the back of a bat-winged dragon. He built almost the whole thing in a sickly pale green, the colour of things going bad, so the one patch of real colour stops you, the red dress of a woman fallen across another woman already dead in the rider's path. Bocklin had lost several of his own children over the years and returned again and again to war, pestilence and death. This is a plague in no particular year, a nightmare rather than a report. He died three years later.