Death and the Miser
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Death and the Miser is a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It is currently in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 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.
Death and the Miser belongs to the tradition of the memento mori, which works to warn the beholder of the inevitability of death. The painting also shows the influence of popular 15th-century handbooks on the art of dying (the Ars moriendi), designed to remind Christians that they must choose between sinful pleasures and the way of Christ. As Death looms on his threshold, the miser, unable to resist worldly temptations even in his last minutes of life, reaches for the bag of gold offered to him by a demon while an angel points to a crucifix, inviting the man to turn to Christ.
We can see a reference to the broad way and the narrow way : A crucifix is set on the only (small) window of the room. A thin ray of light is breaking through. The bottom of the large room is darkened and a demon holding an ember is lurking over the dying man, waiting for his hour. The darkness seems ready to engulf the entire scene. Anger is represented by a curtain of the bed folded like a fist. Because of it, the dying man can't see both the face of Death (dressed in such a way that it can be an allegory for a prostitute) ready to impale his groin (indicating that the dying man suffers from venereal disease, which itself may be further conflated with a love of earthly pleasures) and the last ray of light that could have driven his attention to the only window. The outcome, whether or not the miser will embrace the salvation offered by Christ in the moments before his death, or ultimately cling to the emptiness of worldly riches, is uncertain.
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.
