Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (review)

We tend to assume that cancer, stroke, and heart disease are the most threatening maladies to the typical citizen of an advanced country, the most frequent causes of death "in bed." Nonetheless, contagion is still a significant threat. The AMA held a conference on infectious diseases at the beginning of the millennium, and found that they are reckoned the third-largest cause of mortality in the United States. AIDS, Ebola, and speculations about the destiny of biological war materials make frightening news copy. The capabilities of our new technologies to manipulate images and massage us with their giant (or minuscule) glowing avatars lead our century likewise to an obsession with visual representations—so the title Images of Plague and Pestilence, joining these two topics, naturally attracts interest.

This short study provides a useful juxtaposition of modern medical photographs of the characteristic swellings ("buboes," characteristic of the "bubonic" human reaction to infection with Yersinia pestis via insect bite) with representations in medieval and early modern art, and there is much useful cultural literary and medical history information to help toward an understanding of the images. There are examples of neck, femoral, and axillary buboes—and the comparison is persuasive.

Considering that the present work grows out of the image collections, articles, and slide presentations developed by two professors at the Pasteur Institute, Henri Mollaret and Jacqueline Brossollet (as Brossollet herself explained in a preface to this book), it is unfortunate that the publishers found it impractical to offer us higher-quality reproductions of the images (and none are in color). I am still trying to find the doctor in the prophylactic bird-beak mask alleged to appear among the revelers in Johannes Lingelbach's Carnival in Rome (fig. 1.11), and the reproduction of Micco Spadaro's The Piazza Mercatello during the Plague of 1656 (fig. 1.12) is too small for us to recognize many of the horrific details mentioned by the author.

This problem is even more frustrating when we get to Dr. Boeckl's discussion of Poussin's The Plague at Ashdod: the interpretation is detailed and elaborate, and depends on very small areas of the work which are all but invisible in the illustration provided—a print based on Poussin's painting, reduced to cover only half a page (p. 50, fig. 3.2)! Boeckel tells us that "the key to Poussin's painting can be found in the tiny background figures that have been ignored in art historical literature. Their extreme reduction in size indicates the later mannerist convention of interpolating a related scene separated in time and place" (p. 130). She argues that Zadok the Priest, King David, and the Virgin Mary with her child appear among these figures, and that the latter hurry toward a "brightly lit obelisk" that "promises a brighter future" (p. 131)—but none of this is apparent in the illustration. Surely an expanded detail was called for. It would be wonderful if the collection of plague images at the Pasteur Institute could be made available for searching on-line. As it is, one needs to search art libraries for reproductions to appreciate and weigh the author's intriguing points.

After discussing the medical aspects of bubonic plague, the author capably summarizes literary and visual sources of plague imagery. She then discusses the iconography found in paintings, drawings, and prints of the periods 1347-1500, 1500-1600 ("The Sixteenth-Century Renaissance"), 1600-1775 ("The Tridentine World"), and 1760-1990s ("Revival of Plague Themes and Modern Reverberations"). Boeckl emphasizes the role of theology, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, attributing the popularity of such themes as "The Triumph of Death" and "The Dance of the Dead," once thought more closely related to plague experiences, to...