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Painting the Plague, 1250–1630

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Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times

Part of the book series: Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History ((MBSMH))

Abstract

No civilisation has produced more painted representations of plague than Europe (and particularly Italy) during the period of the second pandemic (roughly 1347–1772). The images produced in these centuries reveal profound changes in the conception of the disease in the collective imaginary, as well as shifts in the kinds of responses that societies believed to be appropriate to an outbreak’s impact. As artists developed new potentialities for visual depictions of plague, using images as a means of influencing beliefs, actions, and emotions, they played a role in their society’s efforts to shield itself from some of the devastating impacts of epidemic disease

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The study of coeval plague imagery to gain insight into the history of epidemics was pioneered by Louise Marshall, ‘Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy, Renaissance Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1994): 485–532. Here, orienting our inquiry in a subtly different direction, we will interrogate images to reveal pervasive mentalities and the social imaginary over the longue durée, rather than to draw inferences about cultic and religious response to specific plague events.

  2. 2.

    The geographical limitation of this chapter to Western Europe and the focus on Italy roughly reflects the historical conditions of the production of plague imagery. As affirmed by Dionysios Stathakopoulos, ‘Crime and Punishment: The Plague in the Byzantine Empire, 541–749’, in Lester K. Little (ed.) Plague and the End of Antiquity. The Pandemic of 541–750, pp. 99–117 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 111: ‘There is no trace of the disease and its impact in any Byzantine work of art.’

  3. 3.

    Jeffrey H. Tigay, ‘Exodus. Introduction and Annotations’. In Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler, and Michael A. Fishbane (eds.), The Jewish Study Bible, pp. 102–210 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  4. 4.

    Bucher, Pamplona Bibles 1:3–4, 9–10. Kurt Weitzmann, ‘Die Illustration des Septuagint’, Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 3–4 (1952–1953): 96–120, pp. 116–117.

  5. 5.

    On the description of the disease, see Lawrence I. Conrad, ‘The Biblical Tradition for the Plague of the Philistines’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 2 (1984): 281–287, p. 285.

  6. 6.

    Compare the use of dark windows here to the open doors in later paintings to symbolise the decimation of the urban population, as described in: Louise Marshall, ‘Plague in the City: Identifying the Subject of Giovanni di Paolo’s Vienna Miracle of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino’, Renaissance Studies 27, no. 5 (2012): 654–680, pp. 674–675. For the reference to rats in the biblical source, see: P. Berger, ‘Mice, Arrows, and Tumors: Medieval Plague Iconography North of the Alps’. In Franco Morando and Thomas Worcester (eds.), Piety and Plague from Byzantium to the Baroque, pp. 23–63 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2007), p. 24.

  7. 7.

    Kay P. Jankrift, Brände, Stürme, Hungersnöte. Katastrophen in der mittelalterlichen Lebenswelt (Darmstadt, 2003) pp. 151–166.

  8. 8.

    In regard to Italian cities, see: Roberto Greci, ‘Il controllo della città. L’ufficio dei fanghi e strade a Bologna nel XIII secolo’, Nuova Rivista Storica 75 (1991), 650–651; Duccio Balestracci, ‘The Regulation of Public Health in Italian Medieval Towns’ In Helmut Hundsbichler, Helmut, Gerhard Jaritz, and Thomas Kühtreiber (eds.), Die Vielfalt der Dinge: Neue Wege zur Analyse mittelalterlicher Sachkultur, Forschungen des Instituts für Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit: Diskussionen und Materialien 3, pp. 345–357 (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998); Roberta Magnusson and Paolo Squatriti, ‘The Technologies of Water in Medieval Italy’. In Paolo Squatriti (ed.), Working with Water in Medieval Europe. Technology and Resource-Use, Technology and Change in History 3, pp. 217–266 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 253, 256. For French examples, see: Jean-Pierre Leguay, L’eau dans la ville au moyen âge (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2002), pp. 117, 119, 136 ff. For Spanish ones, see: L. García-Ballester et al. (eds.), Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  9. 9.

    The presence of a peasant was first noted in Berger, ‘Mice, Arrows, and Tumors’, p. 24.

  10. 10.

    On the intersection between communal memory and plague, see: Ann G. Carmichael, ‘The Last Past Plague: The Uses of Memory in Renaissance Epidemics’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 53, no. 2 (1998): 132–160.

  11. 11.

    The circumstances of its commission are not known. It replaced an earlier altarpiece for the same altar, which had been commissioned by Florence’s bishop, Filippo dell’Antella, in 1362 in order to observe the cult of the saint whom he credited with his salvation from case of plague he contracted while in Avignon in 1348. See: Detlev von Hadeln, Die wichtigsten Darstellungsformen, pp. 8–9 and Sheila Barker, ‘The Making of a Plague Saint. Saint Sebastian’s Imagery and Cult Before the Counter-Reformation’, in Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (eds.), Piety and Plague from Byzantium to the Baroque, pp. 90–131 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2007), pp. 99–100.

  12. 12.

    On the mortality rates in Florence during the Black Death, see, for example: D. Cesana, O. J. Benedictow, and R. Bianucci, ‘The Origin and Early Spread of the Black Death in Italy: First Evidence of Plague Victims from 14th-Century Liguria (Northern Italy)’, Anthropological Science 125, no. 1 (2017): 15–24, p. 17. Given the tremendous mortality caused by these late fourteenth-century plagues, it is not surprising that some societies at this very same time began developing record-keeping practices that allowed for the analysis of mortality rates. According to Ann G. Carmichael, ‘Contagion Theory and Contagion Practice in Fifteenth-Century Milan’, Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1991): 213–256, p. 214, ‘death itself became a meaningful social event to Renaissance Italians, who first began to keep records of mortality during the late fourteenth century’.

  13. 13.

    On the irregularity of this burial and this theme as a trope for other medieval plague imagery, see: Marshall, ‘Plague in the City’, pp. 669–674.

  14. 14.

    Riccardo Simonini, ‘Il codice di Mariano di Ser Jacopo sopra “Rimedi alibi nel tempo di pestilenza”’, Bolletino del Istituto Storico Italiano dell’Arte Sanitaria 9 (1929): 161–169.

  15. 15.

    See: Luciano Patetta, ‘Nuove ipotesi sul lazzaretto Quattrocentesco di Milano’, Bollettino d’arte 71, no. 35/36 (1986), p. 25.

  16. 16.

    Ann G. Carmichael, ‘Plague Legislation in the Italian Renaissance’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57, no. 4 (1983): 508–525, p. 512. Carmichael shows that whereas the medical community preferred corruption theory over contagion theory, Visconti and Gonzaga were able through their autocratic control of the state to impose measures based on the theory of human-to-human contagion.

  17. 17.

    Carmichael, ‘Plague Legislation’, pp. 512–513.

  18. 18.

    The plague-time Latin dictum ‘[Fuge] cito, [vade] longe, [rede] sero’ was also expressed, ‘Haec tria tabificam tollunt adverbia pestem: mox, longe, tarde, cede, recede, redi’.

  19. 19.

    Bertrand Lançon, ‘Maladie et médecine dans la correspondance de Jérôme’, in Y.-M. Duval (ed.), Jérôme entre 1’Occident et I’Orient: VIe centenaire du départ de saint Jérôme de Rome et de son installation à Bethléem. Actes du colloque de Chantilly, pp. 355–366 (Paris: Brepols, 1988), p. 361. The unwillingness of both family members and priests to give succor to plague victims because of their fear of catching the disease is discussed in relation to art and literature of the 14th and 15th centuries in Louise Marshall, ‘Affected Bodies and Bodily Affect: Visualizing Emotion in Renaissance Plague Images’, in P. Maddern, J. McEwan, amd A. Scott, Performing Emotions in Early Europe, pp. 73–103 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 81–82.

  20. 20.

    The related extant drawings are in the Gabinetto dei Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, inv. nos. 1348 F and 525 E, and in the Royal Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, RCIN 990117.

  21. 21.

    Raimondi’s engraving has been analysed in relation to plague imagery in: Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas W. Worcester (eds.) Hope and Healing. Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, (2005), cat. no. 5, pp. 186–187.

  22. 22.

    It has been noted that Raphael’s design was partly inspired in part by an illustrated late Antique codex of the Aeneid that was at that time in the possession of Pietro Bembo, and which is now in the Vatican Library (cod. Vat. Lat. 3225); see: David Herndon Wright, The Vatican Vergil: A Masterpiece of Late Antique Art (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 110–114. Regarding the passages describing the plague of Phrygia, the relative illustration in this manuscript is one showing Aeneas receiving the visit from the Penates at night (cod. Vat. Lat. 3225, fol. 28r), which Raphael imitated closely. The immediately preceding illustration (cod. Vat. Lat. 3225, fol. 27r) shows Aeneas’ ships docked on the shores of the city they founded, Pergamon. In my view, no signs of famine and pestilence are indicated in this illustration of Pergamon, and indeed, plague itself is not represented visually anywhere in the Vatican Vergil.

  23. 23.

    Vergil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), vol. I, book III, ll. 140–141, p. 359. See also note 15 for the late Antique codex that Raphael consulted.

  24. 24.

    Plague fever and other medical symptoms of pestilence, largely drawn from the writings of Avicenna, are described in plague treatises such as that by Petrus Pintor, Aggregator sententiarum doctorum de praeservatione curationeque pestilentiae, dedicated to Pope Alexander VI and published in Rome in 1499.

  25. 25.

    Only the first three of these are mentioned in Vergil’s account (bk. III, ll. 137–142): ‘[…] when on a sudden, from a tainted quarter of the sky, came a pestilence and season of death, to the wasting of our bodies and the piteous ruin of trees and crops. Men gave up their sweet lives, or dragged enfeebled frames; Sirius, too, scorched the fields with drought; the grass withered, and the sickly crop denied sustenance’ (Vergil, The Aeneid , trans. Fairclough, p. 359).

  26. 26.

    On the pinched nose as an indication of the theory of miasmic vapours, see: Katrin Achilles-Syndram, ‘“So macht nun Abbilder eurer Beulen und eurer Mäuse”: Die Pest als Thema der bildenden Kunst’. In Hans Wilderotter (ed.) Das grosse Sterben: Seuchen machen Geschichte, exh. cat., pp. 94–121 (Berlin: Jovis, 1995), pp. 100–101. For Raphael’s derivation of these symptoms and causes of plague from ancient medical treatises, see: Stefania Mason Rainaldi, ‘Le immagini della peste nella cultura figurativa veneziana’. In Venezia e la Peste: 1348–1797, pp. 209–286 (Venice: Marsilio, 1980), cat. no. a12, pp. 238–239. Raphael could have also found most of these ideas in contemporary treatises as well; for the miasmatic theory in medieval and early Renaissance medicine, see: Carmichael, ‘Plague Legislation’.

  27. 27.

    On Livy’s description of this and other plagues, see: Susan Satterfield, ‘Livy and the Pax Deum’, Classical Philology 111, no. 2 (April 2016): 165–176.

  28. 28.

    Livy, The Early History of Rome, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt (New York: 1984), bk.3.6, p.189. The imagery of dying livestock also recalls the ancient belief that pestilence among humans was generally preceded by a die-off of animals. There are many sources for this notion, from Homer until the Middle Ages, as demonstrated by Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Del governo della peste (Milan: 1832), pp. 3–6.

  29. 29.

    On the association between rotting flesh and plague, see the sources in note 9 above. On the growing interest of sixteenth-century physicians in the possible role of contagion in the transmission of plague, see: Carmichael, ‘Contagion Theory and Contagion Practice’.

  30. 30.

    On the longstanding medical concern about the role of corpses and even the breath of living plague victims in the generation of pestilence, see note 9 above. Closer to the era in which Raphael made his print, Pope Leo X was concerned about the danger to public health posed by plague victims and thus granted syndics the power to remove the incurabili to special hospitals, even against their will, with a 1515 bull; see: Jon Arrizabalaga, ‘The French Disease and the Hospitals for Incurables in Italy until 1530’. In Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox. The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2004), p. 157. It is possible that Raphael’s comparison of the dead sheep and dead humans was inspired by Boccaccio’s statement in the Decameron that plague victims were treated no better than dead goats; for a discussion of Boccaccio’s observation in relation to an earlier artwork, see Marshall, ‘Affected Bodies and Bodily Affect’, p. 84.

  31. 31.

    Anonymous practitioner of Montpellier, translation by Justin K. Stearns, Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p. 95.

  32. 32.

    Justin K. Stearns, Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 95–96. Horrible sights were thought to materially enter the body as visible ‘species’ carried by rays into the onlooker’s eyes, and from there into the faculty of the imagination where the images excited the passions of the soul and in turn caused deleterious perturbances in the body’s humoral balance. For the medical texts describing the danger of fearful images in the imagination, see: Martin Marafioti, Storytelling as Plague Prevention in Medieval and Early Modern Italy. The Decameron Tradition (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 11–15.

  33. 33.

    Charles Edward Armory Winslow and M. L. Duran-Reynals, ‘Jacme d’Agramont and the First of the Plague Tractates’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 22, no. 6 (1948): 747–765, p. 761.

  34. 34.

    An early, fundamental study of the use of images in Christian devotions is Sixten Ringbom, ‘Devotional Images and Imaginative Devotions: Notes on the Place of Art in Late Medieval Private Piety’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 73 (1969): 159–170.

  35. 35.

    Elizabeth Schröter, ‘Raffaels Madonna’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50, no. 1 (1987): 46–87, p. 71.

  36. 36.

    Elizabeth Cropper, ‘Marino’s “Strage degli Innocenti”, Poussin, Rubens, and Guido Reni’, Studi Secenteschi 33 (1992): 153; Sebastian Schütze, ‘Aristide de Thèbes, Raphäel et Poussin: La représentation des affetti dans les grands tableaux d’histoire de Poussin des années 1620–1630’. In ed. Alain Mérot (ed.) Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665): Actes du colloque organisé au Musée du Louvre, pp. 571–601 (Paris: Documentation Française, 1996), pp. 576–578.

  37. 37.

    The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, translated by K. Jex-Blake (Chicago IL: Ares Publishers, 1976), bk. 35.98: pp. 133–135.

  38. 38.

    On this term, coined by Aby Warburg in his Das Nachleben der Antike, see: Colleen Becker, ‘Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as Methodological Paradigm’, Journal of Art Historiography 9 (2013): 1–25.

  39. 39.

    It is no coincidence probably that the drawing of Raphael’s that Raimondi had engraved just a couple years earlier depicted the Massacre of the Innocents, a subject that also reveals an interest in the related Pathosformel involving infants, their mothers, and tragic death on a calamitous scale.

  40. 40.

    Criticism of those who fled from cities during the plague was as old as the history of this advice to flee, as shown in the important study by Heinrich Dormeier, ‘Religiös motiviertes Verhalten von Laien und Klerikern in Grenz- und Krisensituationen: die Pest als “Testfall wahrer Frömmigkeit”’. In Klaus Schreiner (ed.), Laienfrömmigkeit im späten Mittelalter Formen, Funktionen, politisch-soziale Zusammenhänge, pp. 331–392 (Munich: De Gruyter, 1992). Dormeier’s collection of source material suggests that the debate became particularly tense and politically charged among the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1480s.

  41. 41.

    Aeneas’ example was invoked as an argument by Giovanni da Bologna, a physician in Muggia, in 1395. See: Dormeier, ‘Religiös motiviertes Verhalten’, p. 350.

  42. 42.

    In her study of the image, Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (University Park, PN: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 92–96, also found this image to be noteworthy for its emphasis on the victims of plague.

  43. 43.

    In 1514, for example, Rome’s first hospital expressly for plague victims, and open to men of all trades, was established by a confraternity devoted to Roch, the saint famous for having tended to plague victims at the expense of his own health. See: Fiorani, 369; and Maroni Lumbruso, 343–345. Around 1475, Pope Sixtus IV had the hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia rebuilt. Alexander VI, however, was the first pope to establish an institution for the care of plague victims; see: E. Schröter ‘Raffaels Madonna: ein Pestbild?’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50, no. 1 (1987): 46–87, p. 68 n.117.

  44. 44.

    Maria Agnese Chiari and Moretto Wiel, ‘Il culto di san Rocco a Venezia: la Scuola Grade, la sua chiesa, il suo tesoro’. In Massimo Tirotti and Claudia Rossi (eds.), San Rocco nell’arte: Un pellegrino sulla Via Francigena, pp. 67–70 (Milan: Electa, 2000).

  45. 45.

    Louise Marshall, ‘A Plague Saint for Venice: Tintoretto at the Chiesa di San Rocco’, Artibus et Historiae 33.66 (2012): 153–187, p. 170.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., p. 173.

  47. 47.

    Although it is tempting to imagine that Tintoretto was illustrating remedies that his patrons at the Scuola di San Rocco offered to plague victims, this is not the case; nor did they operate a plague hospital; ibid., p. 184, n. 36. In ibid., p. 173, it is suggested that the image responds to criticisms levelled against the confraternity for not doing more for the city’s poor.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., p. 173.

  49. 49.

    For a discussion of plague imagery that features only idealised beauty and avoids almost altogether the disturbing signs of the disease, see: Sheila Barker, ‘The Making of a Plague Saint. Saint Sebastian’s Imagery and Cult Before the Counter-Reformation’. In Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (eds.) Piety and Plague from Byzantium to the Baroque, pp. 90–127 (Kirksville MO: Truman State University Press, 2007), pp. 114–119, 123–127.

  50. 50.

    The association of Roch’s cult with protection from plague was encouraged by the wide circulation of printed pamphlets with prayers. See: Pierre Bolle, ‘Saint Roch de Montpellier, doublet hagiographique de saint Raco d’Autun. Un apport décisif de l’examen approfondi des incunables et imprimés anciens’. In E. Rénard et al. (eds.) Scribere sanctorum gesta Recueil d’études d’hagiographie médiévale offert à Guy Philippart, pp. 525–572 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). On the use of the imagery of St Sebastian by hospitals and confraternities to incite fears of sudden death, ultimately for the purpose of inciting charitable donations, see: Elvio Lunghi, Il Martirio di San Sebastiano di Pietro Perugino a Panicale (Perugia: Fabrizio Fabbri Editore, 2005), pp. 135–138. More generally on the topic, see: Barker, ‘The Making of a Plague Saint’, p. 102.

  51. 51.

    On the attitudes towards terrifying imagery in the Renaissance, see Sheila Barker, ‘Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine’, The Art Bulletin 86, no. 4 (2004), 659–689; Elisabeth Hipp, ‘Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod. A Work of Art in Multiple Contexts’. In Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (eds.), Piety and Plague from Byzantium to the Baroque, pp. 177–223 (Kirksville MO: Truman State University Press, 2007).

  52. 52.

    It is well established that theoretical medical treatises of the Renaissance distinguished between male and female humoral constitutions, with implications for the passions. Nevertheless, this chapter, in describing the use of art to manage emotional responses to plague, has not considered women as a separate category of viewer in light of recent findings that early physicians did not treat women’s emotions differently in their practice of medicine. See: Na’ama Cohen-Hanegbi, ‘The Emotional Body of Women. Medical Practice between the 13th and 15th Centuries’. In Pioska Nagy and Damien Boquet, (eds.), Le Sujet des émotions au Moyen Âge, pp. 465–482 (Paris: Beauchesne, 2009).

  53. 53.

    Na’ama Cohen-Hanegbi, ‘The Matter of Emotions: Priests and Physicians on the Movements of the Soul’, Poetica 72 (2009): 21–42, pp. 28–31.

  54. 54.

    The following paragraphs summarise the ideas first put forth in: Barker, ‘Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine’.

  55. 55.

    Poussin referred to the work in his ‘Observations on Painting’. See: Barker, ‘Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine’, p. 667.

  56. 56.

    Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele volgarizzata e sposta, ed. Werther Romani, 2 vols. (Rome: Giuseppe Laterza e Figli, 1978–1977), vol. 1, 161.

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    Sheila Barker

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    Christos Lynteris

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Barker, S. (2021). Painting the Plague, 1250–1630. In: Lynteris, C. (eds) Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times. Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72304-0_3

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