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Bruegel's The Triumph of Death Reconsidered*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Peter Thon
Peter Thon*
Affiliation:
Princeton, New Jersey
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Abstract

'In all his works more is always implied than is depicted.'

—Abraham Ortelius, ‘Epitaph’ for Pieter Bruegel

If, in a sense, all artists comment on their times, only a few do so deliberately. Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the first great example of the latter type, the artist as social observer and critic. His detailed scenes of everyday life, his illustrations of proverbs and moral lessons in contemporary settings are all well known. Recently, however, art historians have become increasingly aware of less obvious social and political overtones in Bruegel's work. Paintings from the last ten years of his life, ranging from the tiny Chained Monkeys to vast scenes like The Suicide of Saul, The Conversion of Saint Paul, and The Massacre of the Innocents, have all been interpreted as veiled but pointed commentaries on conditions and events in the Netherlands during the mid-sixteenth century. The facts of history, it appears, may be highly pertinent to Bruegel's art.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1968 , pp. 289 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1968

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Footnotes

*

I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Robert A. Koch, whose course in Northern Renaissance Art provided the initial stimulus for this paper, and to the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, for subsidizing the cost of the accompanying illustration.

References

* I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Robert A. Koch, whose course in Northern Renaissance Art provided the initial stimulus for this paper, and to the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, for subsidizing the cost of the accompanying illustration.

1 Cited in Stechow, W., Northern Renaissance Art 1400-1600. Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p. 37.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Delevoy, R., Bruegel, tr. Gilbert, S. (Lausanne, 1959), pp. 69 ff.;Google Scholar Zupnick, I., ‘Bruegel and the Revolt of the Netherlands,’ The Art Journal, XXIII No. 4 (Summer|1964), 283–289;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ferber, S., ‘Peter Bruegel and the Duke of Alba,’ Renaissance News XIX No. 3 (Autumn|1966), 205–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Stechow, W., Bruegel (London, 1954), p. 3;Google Scholar de Tolnay, C., Pierre Bruegel L'Ancien (Brussels, 1935), pp. 78–79.Google Scholar Grossmann, F., Bruegel. The Paintings(London, rev. ed. 1966), p. 191,Google Scholar suggests a date around 1562 without, however, giving any reasons.

4 Estimates range down to Michel's, E. of 1566-69. Bruegel(Paris, 1931), p. 59.Google Scholar

5 De Tolnay's attempt (p. 31) to relate The Triumph of Deathto The Fall of the Rebel Angels(1562) on the basis of similar color schemes is tenuous at best; and his argument for the spatial and compositional affinities of these works (apparently accepted by Zupnick, pp. 286, 289 n.12) ignores the sharp difference between the crowded Boschian disarray of the 1562 work and the spatial and organizational clarity in The Triumph of Death.Delevoy (p. 89) thinks this mastery of large-scale pictorial space is the keynote identifying the latter painting with such works as The Conversion of Saint Paul(1567).

6 Cited in Delevoy, p. 93.

7 Carel van Mander, the sixteenth-century critic and biographer, notes it simply as ‘a picture … in which expedients of every kind are tried out against death’ (Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 40).

8 De Tolnay, p. 31.

9 See Meiss, M., Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death(paperback ed., New York, 1964), pp. 74 ff.Google Scholar and de Libero, L., Il Trionfo delta Morte(Palermo, n.d.).Google Scholar

10 See Clark, J. M., The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance(Glasgow, 1950). pp. 24 f., 60 ff.Google Scholar and Holbein's Dance of Death(London, 1947).

11 See, however, De Tolnay, p. 79 and ill. 153. Death is represented in the Italian frescoes as the Grim Horseman with a scythe who cuts down the living with his sword or arrows, but this is very symbolic violence in comparison to Bruegel's gruesome realism. Among the Dances of Death only Holbein's depicts armed and violent skeletons (and this only in the two natural cases of the Knight and Soldier), whereas Bruegel has generalized and intensified this conflict.

12 Delevoy, pp. 19 ff.

13 Geyl, P., The Revolt of the Netherlands 1555-1600.(London, 1932, 1958), p. 57.Google Scholar

14 These agrarian and demographic events were paralleled by serious commercial and financial recessions. van der Wee, H., The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy(The Hague, 1963), n, 213 ff., 229 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Geyl, pp. 56-57, 79 ff., 99 ff.

16 Delevoy, pp. 23-24; Ferber, pp. 216 f. Bruegel—need it be said again?—was hardly just the talented rustic ‘Pieter the Droll’ portrayed by van Mander.

17 Zupnick, p. 288.

18 In this connection it is interesting to note the striking similarity between the skeletons in The Triumph of Deathand the following contemporary description of Spanish soldiers in the Netherlands, which in fact seems almost to conceive of them as impersonal agents of death: ‘They neither spared age, nor sex: time nor place: person nor country: professions nor religion: young nor old: rich nor poor: strong nor feeble: but without any mercy did tyrannously triumph, when there was neither man nor mean to resist them. They slew great numbers of young children. The rich was spoil because he had, and the poor were hanged because they had nothing: neither strength could prevail to make resistance, nor weakness more pity to refrain their horrible cruelty.’ G. Gascoigne, The Spoyle of Antwerp, in Complete Works, ed. Cunliffe, n, 590 f., quoted in Routh, C. R. N., They Saw It Happen In Europe 1450-1600(Oxford, 1965), p. 370.Google Scholar

19 ‘The towns must be punished for their rebelliousness,'recommended Alva, ‘with the loss of their privileges; a goodly sum must be squeezed out of private persons; a permanent tax obtained from the States of the country… . Everyone must be made to live in constant fear of the roof breaking down over his head.’ Cited in Geyl, p. 102.

20 It would not be unlike Bruegel to include such a revealing clue in the background, just as he hid Alva among his horsemen in The Massacre of the Innocents.See Ferber.

21 It seems significant, in the light of S. Ferber's recent proof of Alva's presence in The Massacre of the Innocents, that the emblem on the standard over Alva is a cross quite similar to the type on the deathtrap in The Triumph of Death.Ferber (p. 208) considers the emblem too undetailed to allow ‘positive identification,’ yet the emblem in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum version is clear enough to associate it—if not with a historical cross—at least with The Triumph of Death'scross. Any historical or iconographic information would of course be very helpful, but it seems unlikely that Bruegel would include any obvious or distinctive symbol related to the Spanish. This does not preclude, however, his using a seemingly innocuous cross as a secret identifying emblem within his works.

22 Van Mander records that, where his meanings became too explicit, Bruegel had the potentially offensive works destroyed (Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, p. 40).