Before the afternoon slipped away entirely, Fovel led me to another corner of Gallery 56a. Incredibly, not a single soul had crossed our path while we spoke. It was almost five in the afternoon and we were still completely alone. Out of caution, I said nothing, and neither did Fovel. It didn’t occur to me then that we had experienced the same thing once before, when we had appeared to be the only two people in a museum that receives more than two million visitors a year.1 If I had just thought at the time to calculate the odds of experiencing two events like that within a month of each other, I’d have been aware of the magnitude of what was happening. However, dense as I was, it would be a while before I connected the two experiences.
“You mustn’t go without seeing this,” Fovel said, oblivious to the knot that was forming in my stomach for no reason I could think of. The painting that he led me to would do nothing to improve my state.
To our left, on an exquisitely painted panel approximately five feet in length, an army of skeletons looked set to engage in combat with a handful of humans who were fighting for their lives.
Fovel had chosen a truly extraordinary work.
Death’s forces had taken their positions and would give no quarter. One of their carts, overflowing with skulls, crossed the main square. An ominous war machine advanced, flames leaping from it, driven by a sinister hooded figure. Nearby, skeletons brandishing swords slaughtered men and women pitilessly, while others busied themselves hanging the condemned, or slitting their throats with knives, or hurling them into the river, where their naked bodies swelled like balloons.
Speechless at this horrific sight, I turned my attention to a kind of fortified enclosure that gave onto the sea. It was filled to bursting with the walking dead, all exultant and happy, and beyond those walls nothing in the surrounding picture allowed even the smallest room for hope. The rearguard positions were painfully denuded and ruined, clumps of putrefying remains lay everywhere, and smoke rose from the wreckage of various ships and coastal embattlements, adding emphatically to the sense that this was the end. Worst of all, on the horizon you could just make out new skeletal battalions breaking through, marching implacably toward the ruins of civilization. It dawned on me that no one would survive the onslaught of the armies of the dead.
The Triumph of Death is absolutely devastating. Pieter Brueghel the Elder painted it in 1562, long before anyone had even conceived of a zombie apocalypse. It would be just over two hundred years before Goya—that genius of unease—appeared, though Brueghel more than holds his own against him. Both artists were products—you might say victims—of their time.