Death and the Miser is a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It is currently in the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., USA. The painting is the inside of
the right panel of a divided triptych. The other existing portions of the triptych
are The Ship of Fools and Allegory of Gluttony and Lust, while The Wayfarer
was painted on the external right panel.
Death and the Miser belongs to the tradition of the memento mori, works that
remind the viewer of the inevitability of death. The painting shows the influence
of popular 15th-century handbooks on the art of dying (Ars moriendi), intended
to help Christians choose Christ over sinful pleasures. As Death looms, the
miser, unable to resist worldly temptations, reaches for the bag of gold offered
by a demon, even while an angel points to a crucifix from which a slender beam
of light descends.
There are references in the painting to dichotomous modes of life. A crucifix is
set on the only (small) window of the room. A thin ray of light is directed down
to the bottom of the large room, which is darkened. A demon holding an ember
lurks over the dying man, waiting for his hour. Death is dressed in flowing robes
that may be a subtle allusion to a prostitute's garb. He holds an arrow aimed at
the miser's groin, which indicates that the dying man suffers from a venereal
disease, which itself may be associated with a love of earthly pleasures.
In the foreground, Bosch possibly depicts the miser as he was previously, in full
health, storing gold in his money chest while clutching his rosary. Symbols of
worldly power such as a helmet, sword and shield allude to earthly follies —
and hint at the station held by this man during his life, though his final struggle
is one he must undergo naked, without arms or armor. The depiction of such
still-life objects to symbolize earthly vanity, transience or decay would become
a genre in itself among 17th-century Flemish artists.
Whether or not the miser, in his last moments, will embrace the salvation
offered by Christ or cling to his worldly riches, is left uncertain.
Each scene of the painting depicts a different sin.
In the Pride scene, a demon is shown holding a mirror in front a woman. In
anger, a man is about to kill a woman symbolizing murder as an effect of Wrath.
The small circles also have details. In Death of Sinner, death is shown at the
doorstep along with an angel and a demon while the priest says the sinner's Last
Rites.
In Glory, the saved are entering Heaven, with Jesus and the Saints, at the gate of
Heaven an Angel prevents a demon from ensnaring a woman. Saint Peter is
shown as the gatekeeper.
In Judgment, Christ is shown in glory while angels wake up the dead, while in
the Hell demons torment sinners according to their sins.
Further examples include Gluttony, where a demon "feeds" a man food of hell.
Another example is the Greed scene, in which misers are boiled in a pot of gold.
“Ship of Fools” now on display in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. The painting is
dense in symbolism and is indebted to, if not actually satirical of Albrecht
Dürer's frontispiece of Sebastian Brant's book of the same name.
The painting as we see it today is a fragment of a triptych that was cut into
several parts. The Ship of Fools was painted on one of the wings of the
altarpiece, and is about two thirds of its original length. The bottom third of the
panel belongs to Yale University Art Gallery and is exhibited under the title
Allegory of Gluttony. The wing on the other side, which has more or less
retained its full length, is the Death and the Miser, now in the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C. The two panels together would have represented the
two extremes of prodigiality and miserliness, condemning and caricaturing both
In recent decades, scholars have come to view Bosch's vision as less fantastic,
and accepted that his art reflects the orthodox religious belief systems of his age.
His depictions of sinful humanity and his conceptions of Heaven and Hell are
now seen as consistent with those of late medieval didactic literature and
sermons. Most writers attach a more profound significance to his paintings than
had previously been supposed, and attempt to interpret it in terms of a late
medieval morality. It is generally accepted that Bosch‟s art was created to teach
specific moral and spiritual truths in the manner of other Northern Renaissance
figures, such as the poet Robert Henryson, and that the images rendered have
precise and premeditated significance. According to Dirk Bax, Bosch's paintings
often represent visual translations of verbal metaphors and puns drawn from
both biblical and folkloric sources.[12] However, the conflict of interpretations that his works still elicit raise profound questions about the nature of
"ambiguity" in art of his period.
In recent years, art historians have added a further dimension again to the
subject of ambiguity in Bosch‟s work. They emphasized his ironic tendencies,
which are fairly obv