[355] 25) FRENCH, 15th Century...--This is one of the most famous ones in the Middle Ages. And if it came today to many board-of-directors or trustees of churches, they would say this is blasphemous, the Son of God cannot appear in such an ugly position. Now the people of that time didn’t mind it because they felt that this is the depth of suffering which is expressed not in a beautified man hanging assumedly on the cross, but feeling very well [some laughter], but it is already the reality of destruction, of the region of the divine in the human, which we

have here. And such pictures have more religious power than all of the later pictures I showed you in the third level together. 26) BRUEGHEL^a, ADORATION--Now the divine unites with the demonic. 27) We will go immediately to the next which is also a Breughel [sic.], TRIUMPH OF DEATH--Now this picture is the world of the demonic^b ruling the earth. Here you have the depth dimension towards "below" and not towards "up" but towards "down." If you look at it, you have here not [a] realistic or beautiful picture; it is the triumph of death, which it really means, is expressed in everything, and everything in such a way that the demonic background of the feeling of the later Renaissance^c is tremendously expressed in such a picture, and you can say it is the predecessor of surrealism. The special things are also very photographic sometimes, but the composition of the parts into the whole is something of a demonic imagination as it has hardly reached in any painting of the 20th century.