conflict depicted here casts doubt on who exactly the man is supposed to portray. A lombard would not worry about his afterlife or any façade of piety, as they were excommunicated from the Church, publicly shamed, and denied sacrament and Christian burial. That this man is worried with at least an illusion of piety suggests that he may be a surreptitious pawnbroker rather than an obvious lombard. This concept is strengthened by the setting; an official lombard in Augsburg or Bruges, both hubs of Northern Renaissance merchants and artists, would have a normal place of business, akin to a small warehouse with a public facing office and storerooms to house and organize goods. The man in Death and the Miser does not have that, shown instead with pawned items scattered in his room and locked in a trunk, which indicate that he may want to keep these items and his activities a secret. The Foreground The meaning of the foreground is still unclear and debated by art historians, though they're reasonably certain about the symbolism inside the room. The Ars moriendi does not contain a depiction of armor, or even pieces of it, and no other influence has satisfactorily explained their presence. Most hypotheses fall into two schools of thought; the fabric, weapons, and armor are of symbolic significance, or they represent the miser's former life, before Death came to take him. Art historians' opinions have seem to run the gamut of possibilities just in the 20th century alone, which include the following by no less than a dozen art historians: The objects represent an evil or malevolent force, the vanity of earthly goods, and the folly of earthly desires. They are placed there to be traps by the devil, to tempt you away from the Christian path, but their disregard in the scene shows that these earthly goods cannot help you against death. The depiction of such inorganic objects to symbolize earthly vanity, transience or decay would become a genre in itself among Flemish artists. They symbolize power, potentially even anger, and how the miser came to be wealthy. The miser died as a knight; the weapons and armor are representative of his station. The man might have been a knight, but he was also a dishonest steward and death has come for him. Gold is more useful than a knight's courage and bravery, implied by placing the gold