ABSTRACT
Bruegel's painting seems to consolidate the full panoply of woodcuts from Hans Holbein's Pictures of Death illustrations, first published in Lyons in 1538, into one single, horrific nightmare of shared mortality, without any promise of salvation. Gibson correctly insists upon the distinctive ferocity of Bruegel's Triumph of Death, and he connects it to a pictorial tradition that depicts a confrontation between the Three Living and Three Dead. Bruegel's Triumph of Death richly presents the devastation of war by arming the irresistible forces of Death against the vain resistance of living soldiers and other civilians. In The Triumph of Death, the skeletal army arrives not only in great numbers but also with the discipline of an infantry phalanx, displaying the coordinated drill that William McNeill identifies as the most fundamental change in ground warfare by the turn of the seventeenth century.
