This is what the end of the world looks like when Pieter Bruegel paints it.

Across a burned, smoking landscape, armies of skeletons advance. They drive the living into a huge box like a coffin, hang them, drown them and cart them away. Kings, soldiers, pilgrims and peasants — nobody is spared. A skeleton on a scrawny horse mows the crowd down with a scythe.

Europe in Bruegel's time knew plague, war and famine intimately, and the "triumph of death" was a familiar theme. But no one had painted it like this: a vast panorama crammed with hundreds of tiny scenes of horror.

And yet, in the bottom right-hand corner, two lovers sit making music together, absorbed in each other — while a skeleton plays along behind them.