Plague Art, to Rivet, Horrify, or Heal

Napoléon visits plague victims (and does not social distance), skeletons dance, an archangel intervenes.

I  read a story in the New York Times by Paul Theroux on the national lockdown, the one that’s crashed the economy and thrown more than 26 million Americans out of work. “This peculiarity we are now experiencing,” he wrote, “the nearest thing to a world war . . . is the essence of tragedy and an occasion for license or retribution.”

Is this “the nearest thing to a world war?” We can’t time travel to London during the Blitz, and don’t we think life in the trenches at the Somme was by a magnitude or two worse than life during COVID-19? After we get a vaccine, I hope our scientists work on a perspective pill.

I’ve heard the words “unprecedented threat” a million times, but, really, is much of anything “unprecedented?” Okay, Martians landing would be new. Oh, yes, a purpose-built Great Depression-by-choice is new. When Burke said, “There’s no such thing as a good new idea,” he might have had this in mind. Pandemics? In my lifetime, we’ve had a polio crisis, the 1957 and 1968 flu epidemics, AIDS, SARS, Ebola, MERS, the avian and swine flus — sorry, I guess I’m swinist — and the Cold War and terrorism.

Since I write about art, I started to think about how artists have addressed plagues from the Black Death in 1347 to the time of Napoléon. The art of AIDS — worldwide, it killed 770,000 people in 2018 — is poignant, rich, fascinating, and for another story. I picked a timeframe roughly commensurate with the art from Lombardy that I wrote about last week.

Plague art isn’t common — the subject’s a downer — but what we have focuses the mind and grabs the heart. The greatest plague picture is the biggest and grandest, Bonaparte Visiting the Victims of the Plague of Jaffa, from 1804, by Jean-Antoine Gros (1771–1835). The first worshipful hero opus of the Napoleonic era, it’s at the Louvre. At 25 feet in length, with warm colors, lots of chiaroscuro, and flamboyant gestures, it’s nothing less than operatic.

The Cairo Plague, which ran from 1799 to 1801, coincided with then–General Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt and Syria. It’s considered the 40th and final outbreak of the second bubonic plague that started with the Black Death in 1347. For 450 years, the bubonic plague was part of life.

The painting’s set in 1799 in a pest house, or quarantined camp hospital, for sick French soldiers. Ignoring a doctor, Napoléon touches a soldier’s bulbous, infected sore, a sign of bubonic plague. Lumps of sick humanity surround him, yet he’s fearless as well as loyal to his troops. He literally feels their pain. He glows in a shaft of light from the heavens.

It’s documentary since the events were supposed to have just happened, but the scene’s probably a dash of make-believe. It’s a political picture, primarily, commissioned shortly before Napoléon crowned himself emperor. Jesus healed lepers, and Napoléon — lion heart, soldier, and savior — was about to heal a strife-bedecked France, or so Napoléon and his boosters hoped.

The bubonic plague, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacteria, carried by fleas hitchhiking on rats and biting humans, is thought today to have appeared first as the Justinian Plague in a.d. 541. Lasting 200 years, it killed millions in Mediterranean Europe and Western Asia.

Plagues — real plagues — alter history. As that plague hit Constantinople, Justinian’s capital, he was planning to invade Italy and reunite the western and eastern halves of the old Roman Empire. The plague derailed his plan, creating the basis for the Ottoman Empire. It weakened armies and economies throughout Europe and forged an opening for the Goths to make merry.

The Black Death, the second Yersinia pestis plague, began in 1347 and killed half of Europe’s population. It took centuries to exhaust itself, and while deaths from the Cairo outbreak were small, it had outsized importance. Dozens of scientists and doctors accompanied Napoléon on his rampage. Their exacting account of the plague’s course from fancy-free rat to dead rat to happy, unsuspecting Egyptian to dead Egyptian, complete with demographics, is still a foundation of bubonic-plague studies. The third Yersinia pestis plague started in China in the 1850s and was deemed done in 1960.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, from 1353, is the earliest and best fiction about the Black Death. I listened to it over a week of hiking jaunts in Vermont last week. Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, from 1722, is very good. It’s documentary fiction about the devastating 1665 iteration of the bubonic plague in London. It’s London’s last plague. The fire the next year did many things, but the urban renewal that followed enhanced hygiene standards. The Betrothed, by Alessandro Mazoni, in three volumes published between 1840 and 1842 is a novel set in Milan during Italy’s 1629 plague. Next to The Divine Comedy, it’s Italy’s greatest fiction.

Plagues are as old as humanity — the world’s a germy, viral place, and we men, women, and non-binary types are prey — and as old as the earliest days described in the Old Testament. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) painted the engrossing Plague at Ashdod in 1629. It’s the plague of groin and underarm tumors, or buboes, described in 1 Samuel:5, and sent by God to punish the Philistines for swiping the Ark of the Covenant. It’s early Poussin, and it hangs in a Louvre gallery filled with superb French baroque and rococo art and that’s almost always empty.

It’s a panic scene. A crowd’s in chaos. A man in the foreground pulls a baby from his dead mother’s breast. Rats scurry — by the 1600s it was well known that rats weren’t our friends — and the dead are carried off. Men and women cover their faces, either from the stench or a rudimentary understanding that plague infested the dead’s last breath. The Ark sits awkwardly between columns on the left, the crowd beneath it in a tangle. These guys aren’t sick — yet. They’re arguing about whose bright idea it was to take the damn thing in the first place.

It’s a history painting and a religious painting, but it was also about the here-and-now, or there-and-then. Poussin painted it at the height of the Plague of Milan, or the Italian Plague, the 1629-to-1631 iteration of the bubonic plague. It killed 25 percent of Italy’s people, about a million deaths, and put the final nail in Venice’s mercantile coffin.

God punished Ashdod with a plague, that tried-and-true arrow in the divine quiver. Earlier, it took ten God-delivered disasters to pry the enslaved Jews from the grasp of Pharaoh, though not all of them were diseases. I would have told Pharaoh to throw in the towel after the frogs, lice, boils, and locusts, but he was stubborn, waiting until the first-born sons died.

In 1630, the Roman scholar and writer Agostino Moscardi, a Poussin friend, reported on Italian cities “exterminated by plague, emptied of inhabitants, filled with cadavers and fright,” noting that “commerce is poisoned, sleep is interrupted by death, nothing is seen except images of horror.” Unlike today, when the New York Times and the government are using every trick known to arithmetic to inflate COVID-19 death numbers, it was obvious that the Plague of Milan was devastating.

It was bad, but by then, theories about what caused the plague were moving, glacially, from divine punishment alone to other sources, such as local, discernible pathogens. Distraught imaginations, experts believed, might make the plague worse. That is, thinking about it brought it on. Yet if God sent the plague, how did it spread? Poussin’s painting enacts one of the big medical debates of his time.

Poussin was no piker in plague studies. His principal patrons, the Romans Cardinal Francisco Barberini and Cassiano dal Pozzo, were amateur epidemiologists who gathered the best infectious-disease scholars, all essentially amateurs, in studying the plague. Poussin’s figures reflect how plague victims looked: ashen, enervated, and arms raised to evoke the pus-filled boils found under them. A packed crowd, decidedly undistanced, conveys the artist’s understanding that plague spreads from human contact. It’s a sequential picture, too — the stages of plague unfold from a disputing crowd by the Ark to panic, sickness, and death.

Still, for Poussin and his contemporaries, plague comes when virtue is perverted. The theft of the Ark by the Philistines, a horrible crime, brings punishment. The dead mother in the foreground, spilling into our space, is the evil twin of the Lactating Virgin, an old Renaissance art trope. There, a beautiful, serene Mary nourishes the baby Jesus at her breast. In Ashdod, a Philistine mother, supine and ashen, punished by God, bearing only poisoned milk, leaves her baby now alone. Poussin was French, but he worked in Italy, where nothing’s worse than a bad mother.

Thucydides chronicled the Plague of Athens in 430 b.c. during the height of the Peloponnesian War. It killed half of Athens, including its visionary leader, Pericles. It then triggered a lawless, licentious time as survivors believed that they, too, would die — so why not live it up? The Antonine Plague between a.d. 165 and 180 killed millions in the Roman Empire, including half its army. The Justinian Plague, which started in 541, lasted a hundred years.

Nothing, though, exceeds the Black Death in death, horror, and disruption. It possibly entered Europe in 1347 via Caffa, a Black Sea settlement and Genoese trading outpost. Marauding Tatars carried the plague, which they got from Mongolia, to Caffa during their siege of the walled town. Fighting until they sickened, the invaders withdrew, saying bye-bye by catapulting their dead over the city walls into the local population. The dead carried both fleas and contagion. Weeks later, Genoese ships brought flea infested rats and sick sailors to Sicily, and from Sicily and Genoa issued a conflagration of indiscriminate, gruesome death.

Two hundred million deaths is a lot of death, but it’s a number. The Black Death strangled an emerging, vibrant capitalist economy. It hit all classes, and though many among the rich escaped to country houses, the plague was soon ubiquitous. If a rich family celebrated, say, New Year’s Day in 1349, a dozen later outbreaks over 50 years would likely have whacked many who escaped.

The Black Death scrambled fortunes. Second, third, and fourth sons became heirs and partied hardy. Heirless fortunes enriched churches, convents, monasteries, and the earliest European universities. Buyers and sellers, employers and labor, and entire communities were decimated. Labor shortages made a nascent union movement. Politics were scrambled.

Artists documented the Black Death. Josse Lieferinxe’s St. Sebastian Interceding for the Plague-Stricken in Pavia, from around 1500, is pure reportage. A prostrate man wails, a bubo the size of an apple on his neck. People prayed to St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows, to protect them from plague. His arrows were seen as lightning rods absorbing the plague before it reached humanity. The trope of dancing skeletons, the “dance macabre,” started around the time of the Black Death.

The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duke of Berry, is a magnificently decorated prayer book from 1404 owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s illustrated with scenes from the New Testament but also from contemporary life. There, amid a procession led by Pope Gregory, a man drops dead from plague as onlookers gape. On the next page, a reprise of the bubonic plague in 1403 ends only with the intervention of St. Michael the Archangel, but not before more death.

Among French and Italian baroque painters, Poussin is the most classicized, or order-driven. His Ashdod picture has passages of chaos, to be sure, but it’s controlled, paced chaos. It’s filled with classical architecture. Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, from 1562, is a melee of phantasmagorical proportions. The 1562 iteration of the Black Death had just started, but by then plague and mass, indiscriminate death were the norm. The picture’s packed, but the central vignette is a slinky Grim Reaper on horseback, his scythe herding a frenzied mass into a simple big, box structure. Armies of skeletons fortify his work.

For peasants, nobles, and bishops alike, their time’s up. The landscape’s barren, nuke-war barren. In the lower left corner, a king falls, and the skeleton pulling him holds an hourglass. In the lower right, a romancing young couple barely start the mood music — the man’s still strumming, but his face is starting to decay. Above, death interrupts a fancy dinner party.

Did the Black Death — the bubonic plague of 1347 and 1348 — change contemporary Italian art? Yes, no, and maybe are the answers we get from the tiny world of scholars of mid-14th-century Italian painting, all of whom are armed with magnifying glasses and strong opinions. Giotto (1267–1337), all agree, pioneered a new style marked by a sense of three-dimensional space, vibrant color, and narrative. Viewers could connect with Jesus and the saints because their look was our look, real people set in towns or countryside. Worshippers could imagine themselves walking with Jesus.

Giotto’s Lamentation, from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, painted in 1304, is an example. The supine Jesus has weight and form. Witnesses grieve, and Mary Magdalene caresses his feet. The scene’s set against blue sky, rocks, and a tree, not a flat, gold background. The figures are alive. They’re not flat, iconic spooks.

Scholars have deployed the Strozzi altarpiece from Florence, done in 1355, to fashion the Black Death’s impact. It’s the most impressive mid-century altarpiece in Italy, and its artist, Andrea di Cione, called Orcagna (1308–1368), was seen in Florence as Giotto’s successor in prominence and prowess. Gone in the Strozzi altarpiece are Giotto’s interest in expression and pathos, his sense of space, and his you-and-there narration. Replacing them are an aloof, stern, unforgiving Christ and a cadre of remote, ethereal saints. It’s the art not of this world but the next, a look of pessimism, and a style so conservative that it would have looked comfortable a hundred years before.

Other scholars argue that Florence, shattered by the Black Death, might have embraced the retardataire, but Pisa and Padua didn’t, maintaining the spirit of Giotto’s naturalism. So demolished was the art world, some think, that trends were interrupted and individual, with idiosyncratic styles privileged over established groupthink.

Some artists and patrons, depending on their individual psychology, saw the Black Death as God’s command to look soberly and mournfully to an abstract afterlife. Others were glass-half-full people, looking to the future as a pursuit of life’s joys rather than a reflection on death’s certainty. My take is that art heals. It’s a measure of our sublime, unique creativity. Italians bounced “con brio” from a most profound adversity to the Renaissance, budding a generation later, and soon an explosive, enriching, modernizing force. Take that, plague.