Death and the Miser – (Hieronymus Bosch) Previous Next


Artist:

Style: Renaissance

Topic: Birth And Death

Date: 1490

Size: 31 x 93 cm

Museum: National Gallery of Art (Washington, United States)

Death and the Miser is a Hieronymus Bosch painting. It is currently in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. This 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. In the foreground, Bosch depicts the miser storing gold in his money chest while clutching his rosary. Symbols of worldly power a helmet, sword, and shield allude to earthly follies. 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.

This artwork is in the public domain.

Artist

Download

Click here to download

Permissions

Free for non commercial use. See below.

Hieronymus Bosch – Most viewed artworks

Public domain

This image (or other media file) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired. However - you may not use this image for commercial purposes and you may not alter the image or remove the watermark.

This applies to the United States, Canada, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.


Note that a few countries have copyright terms longer than 70 years: Mexico has 100 years, Colombia has 80 years, and Guatemala and Samoa have 75 years. This image may not be in the public domain in these countries, which moreover do not implement the rule of the shorter term. Côte d'Ivoire has a general copyright term of 99 years and Honduras has 75 years, but they do implement that rule of the shorter term.