Everyone in This Painting Is About to Die

Every person dying in this painting is being killed by something you could name. A sword, a rope, a net thrown over a group of them the way you would throw one over fish. Water, a thin dog, a knife held at the throat of a man at the edge of a pond. And on the right hand side, a wooden box the size of a barn, with a crowd being driven into the open end of it. Skeletons are holding the lids. Peter Bruegel, the elder, painted this on oak around 1562. It hangs in Madrid. It is smaller than you expect, close to a metre and a quarter across. And every one of the several hundred people inside it is about the size of your thumbnail. And there are drums. Start in the bottom left corner because that is where the picture starts sorting people. A man lies back in ermine and a crown. His money is beside him in an open barrel, and there is a skeleton crouched over it with both hands in the coins, doing the arithmetic. A second one holds an hourglass up beside his face, close enough to read if he turned his head. He is not going to turn his head. A few feet away, a woman has gone down with her spindle still in her hand and the thread still on it. Whatever she was making, she was making it this morning. There is a broom on the ground, a candlestick, a spill of playing cards, a backgammon board with the counters still sitting in their places, because nobody had time to clear the game. A thin dog has found a child. The objects are the part that hurts. Bruegel painted an ordinary afternoon, stopped it mid-sentence, and left everything lying where it fell. It reads, like a room somebody has just run out of. Follow the dropped things to the right, and they run out, because on that side nobody is dropping anything anymore. They are being herded. A soldier in full plate has drawn his sword and is swinging it at a skeleton the most useless swing in the picture, and Bruegel gives it exactly as much room as he gave the broom. Behind him, one of them has thrown a fishing net over a knot of people and is dragging them in like a catch. At the table in the corner, the cloth is still white and the coins are still stacked, and a man in pink has come up out of his chair holding a dish. Under that table, a jester has crawled in to hide. He is the only person here who has understood the situation, and he has still got it wrong. And in the last few inches of the panel, two people are making music, a lute, a woman singing from a book. Away from the crowd, it gets quieter and much worse. A cart goes past loaded to the rim with skulls, with a lantern hung on the side of it for working after dark. At the water's edge, a barge is being filled by figures in white shrouds. There are dead fish rotting on the bank, and a man going headfirst off a rock on the far right with nobody watching him do it. In a dead tree at the top, left a skeleton is ringing a bell. The bell a parish rings when somebody in it has died. Somebody is still ringing it, for all of them. And on the skyline, wheels raised on poles, gallows, ships burning in the bay. This was painted to hang in a house, and the country that house stood in had that skyline. Those wheels were real. A man was broken on a wheel, and the wheel was hoisted up a pole with him still on it, and left standing where the road went past, sometimes for months. Bruegel's neighbours would have recognised every piece of ironwork on that horizon. In the early 1560s, the Low Countries were a few years short of open revolt. The executions were running, and the smoke behind this painting is not weather. Then go back to the drums. There are two of them, up on the right, and somebody is beating them. Everything around them is arranged in order. There is a line of shields held edge to edge, and the shields are coffin lids. Behind the line, a hedge of pikes. Cavalry. A horse coming through the crowd, with a rider swinging aside like a sabre. The cart with the lantern is a supply wagon. The box the size of a barn has an open end, and the crowd is being driven into it, and the whole right-hand third of this painting is one manoeuvre, carried out in order, at a pace somebody is keeping with a drum. Everything in here is being done to these people by hand, with equipment, by a force that has done it before, and knows how long it takes. There is no plague in this picture anywhere. No swellings. No sickbeds. Nobody dying in their own house. Death did not arrive here as an illness. It marched in. Their equipment came from somewhere. The lids on the box are painted with crosses. The bell in the dead tree is a church bell, and the hand on the rope is bone. Every piece of religious furniture in this painting has been requisitioned, the cross, the bell, the burial itself. They are all on one side, and it is the side with the drums, which does something horrible to the box. Stand where the crowd is standing, with a line of skeletons behind you, and a wall of pikes on your left, and the thing in front of you is a tall panelled structure with crosses on it, and an opening in the middle. It looks like the one building in the painting you would run towards. There is a crucifix standing on its own out in the water in the middle distance, and there is nobody at it, and above the horizon, nothing. Pictures of the end normally keep a corner of the sky open. A judge. A set of scales. Somebody being lifted out of the crowd. The top of this panel is smoke, and the only light in it is a fire. Bruegel learned his trade making pictures for a printing press. For years, his designs went out as engravings, sold cheap by an Antwerp publisher, printed in numbers, and looked at the way you look at a page held close, gone over slowly, corner by corner. On a page like that, nothing is allowed to be small and unimportant, because the buyer is going to find it. Every figure has to survive being read at the size of a fingernail. He also went to Italy, and the thing he did not bring back is the tell. Italian painting was built on the idea that a picture has a main figure, that the important person is larger, better lit, put in the middle, and everything else is dimmed down to make room for him. Try to find the main figure in this painting. The eye goes in, and is never told where to settle. Bruegel gave the king, the card player, and the dog exactly the same amount of paint. That is the argument, and he made it in the size of things. The crown in the bottom left corner is about as big as one of the coins in the barrel beside it. There is something else strange about the size of this panel. Around the same moment, Bruegel painted two other pictures, on almost exactly the same measurements. One of a woman in armour, marching into the mouth of hell. One of the rebel angels falling out of heaven and turning into insects on the way down. All three are within a couple of centimetres of each other, the same height, the same width. They are in three countries now, this one in Madrid, the woman in Antwerp, the falling angels in Brussels. Scholars have argued for a long time about whether they were made as a set for one collector, and nobody has produced the document that would settle it. Which leaves a real possibility that this painting is one panel of something, that it was meant to hang beside a picture of hell, and a picture of the war in heaven, and has been read on its own for four centuries, only because the other two panels went to other cities. And this one travelled the furthest. It went south, into Italy, through one princely collection after another, and ended up of all places in the hands of a Spanish queen, Isabella Farnese, who hung it in a royal palace outside Madrid. A Flemish panel about the whole world being herded into a box spent the 18th century as a decoration on a bourbon wall. It has been in the Prado since 1827. The country it was painted in never got it back. He did not have long after this. A generation after he died, the writer who collected the first account of his life put down that Bruegel, near the end, had told his wife to burn a stack of his drawings. They were too sharp, too dangerous, and he did not want her to suffer for them after he was gone. She burned them. Whatever was in them is the one part of him nobody is ever going to see. Now go back to that corner. The two musicians at the very edge, the lute, the woman with her book of songs open in front of her. The table behind them has already gone over. The soldier is already swinging at nothing. The jester is already under the furniture. And the two of them are still playing. There is a third musician in that corner, and he is made of bone. He has come up behind the two of them with an instrument of his own, and he is playing along in time, in the same song, at the last table in the world. They have not turned round. They do not know he is there yet. Go and find him. Bottom right. Past the cards. Past the dog. Past the man with the sword. Two people playing, and one thing playing with them. In a picture this crowded, with several hundred people being killed every possible way at once, that corner is the only place where anybody looks like they have company.