死亡的胜利

Bruegel painted this around 1562, in a Netherlands that still carried the memory of plague and lived under the hard rule of Catholic Spain, with religious executions a fact of ordinary life. Across the whole panel an army of skeletons overruns a scorched land, and Death spares no one by rank. A king clutches at his gold while a skeleton tips over his hourglass. Cardinals, soldiers, lovers, a fool hiding under a table, all get swept toward a giant coffin lid. Look for the dinner in the lower right corner, where a couple still play music, not noticing the skeleton who has joined in on a stringed instrument just behind them. When the Prado cleaned the panel a few years ago, the colours came back sharp in front and thin and smoky in the distance, the way Bruegel had graded the light of a burning world.