THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH
This painting, located in Palermo’s palazzo Abatellis, represents the arrival of death with the Black Death plague. The scene is located in the 12th Century in a square where we can see the main sitters, the skeletal horse and the horseman of the apocalypse, with many other people of different socio-economic conditions.
1. Form and balance
The structure of this painting is simple. All the secondary characters are situated along an ideal line around the two mains, except for the lady with two dogs oin the upper left side. Due to this choice, a great part of the people surrounding the horse is above the imaginary line that cuts the painting in two halves. We can also notice that the main characters are arranged in a triangular composition: the head of the skeleton is the vertex of the triangle, the horse’s legs and the dead people under him, including the queen and the king, are its sides.
2. Lines and their meaning
Frequent use of both curved and straight lines can be noticed in the whole painting. They give us a sensation of dynamicity, which perfectly matches one of the artist’s aims: to make a situation of a mess full of crowds. However, lines in this painting are very simple and mostly oblique, to make the scenario even more energetic. We can still find some horizontal and vertical lines in the huge skeleton-horse in the middle of the painting and in the fountain, to confer rigidity. Only the horse and the skeleton’s contour lines seem to be thick which is probably to highlight their darkness. All the other lines are simple and thin.
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Detail of the skeleton and the horse’s marked contour line.
3. Shapes and their meaning
In the painting, we have lines that surround a space thus creating a shape, like the lines that surround the horse, located in the centreer of the painting, making a regular shape. The same cannot be said for the dog, which is located in the upper left corner of the painting. His is an irregular shape, as the dog's body is very flattened. Other forms symbolize daily events that happen every day around the world, such as death and mourners, as depicted in the lower-left
corner of the painting.
4. The line of sight
We can see two perpendicular lines (which seem to divide the painting into 4 parts) that pass through the belly of the horse underlining the figure of Death engulfing the horse.
Despite the richness and complexity of the subject, the scene is composed in a unified manner, thanks to an effective linear stylization and to the full-bodied brushstrokes that manage to convey the material consistency of the colour.
5. The use of light
In this painting, light is the element used by the artist to model, colors and space. The light source comes from the top left, we can see it for example from the shadows underlined in the fountain. The shapes are distinct, while the space is delimited and the colors are distinct and perceptible.
↑ We can deduce that the light comes from the upper left because that part of the painting is more illuminated ã…¤than the other parts.
6. The use of colour
The artist used a type of colour depending on the situation. In fact, the artist used dark colours to represent the incoming of death and plague. Also, a hierarchical meaning can be found in the painting: most important people, like the women in the right part, are wearing more colourful clothes than less important people, like the men oin the left sidepart of the painting.
The use of a hierarchical structure would be a clever choice by the artist, since we can deduce that illnesses don’t care about your socio-economic condition.
Expressive function
Through this painting, the artist tells us that he is more than sad, because this painting, as we can see, represents the sadness, in the guise of death, of the people who mourn these deaths; of people who seek help in prayer; of a person playing an unhappy song with a mandolin in front of the horse; and, finally, a person at the middle-bottom of the painting trying to escape through the crowd and carrying a heavy object.
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Detail of the sad mandolin player.
Our comments and impressions
“It is clear that this painting gives me sad feelings. We are now facing this kind of situation, so the painting looks even more depressing than it could have been in normal times. Having watched the painting during this period made me reflect about the dramatic situation of pandemics and made me realize better that we must keep the distance and wear masks if we want to win the battle against the virus”.
“What I deduced from the painting is that the artist mainly conveys sadness to me, but also gives me a general chaotic effect”.
“It is a representation of moral nature; a warning addressed to everyone, which expresses the fragility of human life and it remembers that the burden of death concerns everyone, regardless of the social class which we belong to.
It is a medieval allegory that contains the essence of everything: life and death, beauty, old age, poverty, sadness, indignation, compassion, love and hope”.
“This painting is beautiful, has a strong meaning and made me reflect a lot”.
Realized by: Marco Messina, Sanfilippo Sofia, Elisabetta Lamattina e Gabriele Savona, 3oH.
