ABSTRACT
Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Triumph of Death is in many ways the culminating work of his early years, an original pictorial satire in which past and present, pagan and Christian, the topical and the philosophical are joined in a work of extraordinary power and visual complexity. Bruegel follows tradition in The Triumph of Death with the skeleton, a conventional figure, but in other respects the painting is a departure from the pictorial traditions for representing death. Death as a perspective on life was an important point of con vergence between the Christian and the classical traditions. In the sixteenth century classical art and literature continued to serve as a rich source for death imagery. By the sixteenth century the popularity of Lucian's satires provided an added incentive for creating a satire in which death was treated as an "earnest jest," an entertaining way to treat a difficult and serious subject.
