In a lecture on the different spaces of history, Foucault spoke of what he calls the ‘localisation’ of space in the Middle Ages, superseded in the 17th century with the spread of Galilean knowledge:

‘It could be said, to retrace very crudely this history of space, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchized ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places, protected places, and, on the contrary, places that were open and defenceless … It was this whole hierarchy, this opposition, this interconnection of places that constituted what might be called, very roughly, medieval space – a space of localisation.’ 1

In The Triumph of Death precisely those boundaries of thought that are the sign of localisation make themselves apparent, but go much further.

At the top of the picture, running all across it, punctuated by the body that hangs from a lonely tree, is the horizon, a break from brown to burnished yellow. That horizon is the double of the picture’s relation to us who look in upon it, in neither case is the border made permeable: we can not save anyone within from death’s dance, nor does that dividing line offer a way out, indeed, its only gateway is the noose that points the loneliest of ways to heaven. The localisation of space is assured by the constraint of death’s triumph to a limit upon the illusion of depth- we cannot go in to it, it does not invite our participation, nor does it offer its participants the possibility of other spaces behind into which they can flee. As such the space of The Triumph of Death is available to us only as part of the ‘interconnection of places’ that Foucault spoke about. Interconnection here means differentiated series, hierarchised alternatives that run all the way from the most sacred to the most profane. When Foucault says all this – and this is no more than a crude sketch of the larger shapes of his thought, as he says – he is enabling a way of interacting with this type of painting, if not perhaps the middle ages in general, that consciously reverses the potency of its localisation. Because it devotes the marking of its spatial indices to cutting off entry and escape, it is also marking itself as complete, and without the need of variable relations that any assumption of a viewer’s emplacement within the situation of art automatically leads to. Like a brilliant but very few other works, King Lear, there is a giving up of the rights of passage in Breughel’s painting, which cement it as a domain of thought that philosophy’s constraints should have been altered by.

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