Requiem

Requiem is a dark, crowded painting attributed on this site to Ignacio Trelis, a Spanish contemporary painter and gallery owner best known today for figurative portraits, often set against gold or silver leaf. It reworks one of the oldest subjects in European art, the danse macabre or Dance of Death, in which Death leads people of every station to the grave. Its date, size and owner have not been published in sources we could find.

What you're looking at

At the top center, glowing against a sky of smoke and embers, floats Death. It is a skull-faced figure swathed in a pale, billowing white shroud that trails down like a column of mist, and it plays a violin, bow drawn across the strings, head tilted to the instrument. This is the music of the title: a requiem, the Mass for the dead, played by Death itself.

Below, a ring of small red figures in pointed jester's hoods or devil's caps links hands and spins in a frenzied dance, their bodies the brightest color in the picture. Around and beneath them, a crowd is swept along. At the lower left an old, bearded monk in a brown habit stumbles forward; at the lower center a man in a gray eighteenth-century coat and powdered wig is thrown off balance, one arm out to break his fall. On the right a naked, flayed-looking figure twists upward, and beyond him dark riders and armored figures crowd the edge. At the far left, pale hooded faces, almost ghosts, watch from the shadows, while sparks drift across the upper left as if from a fire.

The painting is built on contrast: Death's cold white light at the top, hot red at the center, and murky browns and grays for the living as they are dragged into the dance.

Meaning

Like the medieval danse macabre, the picture insists that death comes for everyone: churchman, aristocrat, soldier and sinner alike. The violin is a traditional attribute of Death in this imagery, from Hans Holbein's woodcuts to Arnold Böcklin's Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (1872), and it was immortalized in music by Camille Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre, in which Death tunes his fiddle at midnight. The red dancers turn the scene into a carnival as much as a judgment.

The title is not unique. The Italian painter Roberto Ferri, for example, made a large Requiem on commission in 2012, showing an angel received by demonic figures; it is a different work from the one shown here. For Ferri's related imagery, see The Angel, the Death, and the Devil.

For related works, see Paul Rumsey's Danse Macabre, The Triumph of Death by Bruegel and Dante and Virgil in Hell, with the theme explored in Danse Macabre.