* The Triumph of Death (1563) - Pieter Brueghel
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
What are you doing, moon in the sky? Tell me, what you do,
silent moon?
rise in the evening and go,
Contemplating the desert, then you lay.
Even you're not paying
to revisit i sempiterni calli?
Ancor non prendi a schivo, ancor sei vaga
Di mirar queste valli?
Somiglia alla tua vita
La vita del pastore.
Sorge in sul primo albore
Move la greggia oltre pel campo, e vede
Greggi, fontane ed erbe;
Poi stanco si riposa in su la sera:
Altro mai non ispera.
Dimmi, o luna: a che vale
Al pastor la sua vita,
La vostra vita a voi? Dimmi: where tents
This my brief wandering,
Your immortal course?
G. Leopardi, Song of a night wandering shepherd Asia
in Works, I, Utet, Torino 1948, p. 141 vv. 1-20
Leopardi takes us into a timeless world, the lands of Asia, where the song compares two similar movements, the pastor of the day in the cycle that seems to mimic that of moon. The wandering of the one is short, lasting another. The failure appears unbridgeable. On both, however, lies another question dismayed: what worth? Where tents?
mortal or immortal, wander the universe of men and overlooks nothing, an abyss that swallows up everything.
* In a bleak and barren landscape, the men met death in different ways, depending on their condition. In the left foreground the death of a king, a cardinal and a pilgrim, and behind these figures, group scenes with the wagon of death carried out by a skeleton on horseback and the network used to trap people in flight.
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