The painting depicts a virago, Dulle Griet, who leads an army of women to pillage Hell,[1] and is currently held and exhibited at the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, in Antwerp.

At the same time he castigates the sin of covetousness: although already burdened down with possessions, Griet and her grotesque companions are prepared to storm the mouth of Hell itself in their search for more.

In an incisive historical and critical interpretation of the painting, Margaret Sullivan concludes that in it Bruegel allegorizes the ideological zeitgeist's “madness and folly.” She notes that “in the sixteenth century ‘dulle’ had two meanings.

While her female followers loot a house, Griet advances towards the mouth of Hell through a landscape populated by Boschian monsters (see detailed images).

Griet wears male armour — a breastplate, a mailed glove and a metal cap; her military costume is parodied by the monster in a helmet beside her, who pulls up a drawbridge.

A book of proverbs published in Antwerp in 1568 contains a saying which is very close in spirit to Bruegel's painting:One woman makes a din, two women a lot of trouble, three an annual market, four a quarrel, five an army, and against six the Devil himself has no weapon.

The script was written by his son, Yves H. The story is a fictional narrative set against the historical backdrop of the Catholic Inquisition's persecution of Lutherans in Flanders at the beginning of the 16th century.