Plague (painting)

Painting by Arnold Böcklin

Plague

Artist| Arnold Böcklin
Year| 1898
Type| tempera on wood
Location| Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel

Plague is an 1898 painting in tempera by the Swiss symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin (1827 – 1901), held in the Kunstmuseum Basel. It exemplifies the artist's obsession with nightmares of war, pestilence and death. The painting shows Death riding on a bat-like winged creature who travels through a street in a medieval European town.

Plague is rendered mostly using shades of pale green, a colour often associated with decomposition. The other predominant tones are black and dull browns; for example, in the clothes worn by the figures shown in the mid-ground and background as they dive for safety before Death's path. The red cloth of the woman shown in the mid-foreground is the only vivid colour seen; she lies across the corpse of a woman who was also cut down.

## Sources

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* Eco, Umberto. On Ugliness. Rizzoli, 2007. ISBN 0-8478-2986-3

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Arnold Böcklin

Paintings|

* List of paintings
* Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (1872)
* Roger Freeing Angelica (1873)
* Spring Evening (1879)
* The Sanctuary of Hercules (1884)
* Isle of the Dead (1880–1901)
* The Homecoming (1887)
* War (1896)
* Odysseus and Polyphemus (1896)
* Plague (1898)

Related|

* Arnold Böcklin
* Vier Tondichtungen nach A. Böcklin (four poems songs)

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Death and mortality in art

Themes|

* All flesh is grass
* Carpe diem
* Consolatio
* Danse Macabre
* Death and the Maiden
* Lamentation of Christ
* Macabre
* Memento mori
* Mono no aware
* Sic transit gloria mundi
* Ubi sunt
* Personifications of death
* Vanitas

Forms|

| Architecture|

* Cenotaph
* Memorial
* Tomb

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Music|

* Funeral march
* Requiem

Poetry|

* Death poem
* Dirge
* Elegy
* Elegiac
* Pastoral elegy
* Keening
* Lament
* Obituary poetry
* Threnody

Prose|

* Epitaph
* Funerary text
* Tragedy

Visual arts|

* Calavera
* Funerary art
* Cadaver monument
* Death mask
* Gravestone
* Post-mortem photography
* Wreath

Other|

* Mummy

Artwork|

| Architecture|

* Capela dos Ossos
* Capuchin Crypt
* Catacombs of Paris
* Sedlec Ossuary
* Skull Chapel
* Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo

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Film|

* The Seventh Seal

Music|

* Danse macabre
* Death and Transfiguration
* Der Tod und das Mädchen
* Erlkönig
* Totentanz

Painting|

* Et in Arcadia ego
* Guercino
* Poussin
* Death and Fire
* Death and Life
* Death and the Maiden
* Death and the Miser
* Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May
* La Calavera Catrina
* Plague
* Pyramid of Skulls
* Roman Widow
* Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle
* Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
* Sleep and His Half-Brother Death
* The Ambassadors
* The Garden of Death
* The Shadow of Death
* The Three Ages of Man and Death
* The Triumph of Death

Poetry|

* "And death shall have no dominion"
* "Because I could not stop for Death"
* "Erlkönig"
* "Do not go gentle into that good night"

Prose|

* Ars moriendi
* Bardo Thodol
* Book of Job
* Book of the Dead
* Left Ginza
* Hamlet's soliloquy
* The Masque of the Red Death

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