Art in the subterranean room of the Théâtre des Vampires
It was the terrible ‘Triumph of Death’ by Breughel, painted on such a massive scale that all the multitude of ghastly figures towered over us in the gloom. Those ruthless skeletons ferrying the helpless dead in a fetid moat or pulling a cart of human skulls,
beheading an outstretched corpse or hanging humans from the gallows.
A bell tolled over the endless hell of scorched and smoking land,
towards which great armies of men came with the hideous,
mindless march of soldiers to a massacre.
I turned away, but the auburn-haired one touched my hand and led me further along the wall to see ‘The Fall of the Angels’ slowly materializing, with the damned being driven from the celestial heights into a lurid chaos of feasting monsters (...) above to the very height of the mural, where I could make out of the shadows two beautiful angels with trumpets to their lips. And for a second the spell was broken.
The candle rose. And horrors rose all around me: the dumbly passive and degraded damned of Bosch, the bloated, coffined corpses of Traini, the monstrous horsemen of Dürer
The very ceiling writhed with skeletons and moldering dead, with demons and the instruments of pain, as if this were the cathedral of death itself. - Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice, in the Vampire Companion:
I was very interested in the Northern European artists at that time - Brueguel, Dürer, Bosch - painters who I felt were absolutely grotesque in many regards.
