Hope and Healing: Painting in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800 (review)

In the mid-fourteenth century the plague appeared in Europe, and it remained a constant menace on the Continent until the early eighteenth century. The recurrent experience of the epidemic gave rise to a stunning variety of explanations about its causes. Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800 examined how a specific social group, professional painters, reacted to the ravages of the disease. Through thirty-seven paintings, it investigated the intricate relationship between artistic representations of the plague and contemporary religious discourse. The exhibition was limited to the work of painters in Italy; the favored genres of medical professionals—plague tracts, printed works, or engravings—were not represented, and responses to the plague from transalpine countries were also absent.

Starting with macabre scenes of dying, the exhibition quickly moved on to more hopeful themes. Two rooms contained paintings that asserted the importance of good works and spiritual exercises in the time of plague. The veneration of saints, the most helpful intercessors in time of plague, was the topic of the next section. Hope and Healing ended with depictions of the resurrection, a powerful allegory of how death and the plague can be conquered through faith. Throughout the exhibition, the religious imagination appeared to exert a major influence—partly, perhaps, because the major patron of professional painters in Italy was the church.

Hope and Healing did an excellent job of showing that, during the time of plague, the function of images was not limited to providing an occasion for aesthetic contemplation. Paintings like Jacopo Bassano's Saints Sebastian and Roch (ca. 1551; Francis Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College) could serve as ceremonial banners that were carried around in processions. Pompeo Batoni's Saint Aloysius Gonzaga (ca. 1744; private collection, New York) exemplifies how a devotional image could exhort viewers to perform spiritual exercises and to imitate Aloysius in turning their eyes toward the suffering Christ. Most importantly, paintings could also heal. Francesco Solimena's Miracle of Saint John of God (ca. 1690; Williams College Museum of Art) shows how a woman was cured when Saint John of God appeared in her dream with a painted image of himself in his hands. Paintings did not only depict the plague, but were a powerful tool in combating it.

Despite their various functions, paintings of the plague often drew upon a common iconography. The image of a young baby suckling his dead mother, first depicted by Raphael, was a standard symbol of the epidemic throughout the period. Paintings of Saint Sebastian or Saint Roch could cover the walls of churches in Paris, Marseille, Venice, or Naples—yet local saints played an equally important role in religious and artistic responses to the epidemic. In Palermo, the discovery of the remains of Saint Rosalie during the plague of 1624 gave rise to an active local cult and inspired several paintings by Anthony van Dyck. In Milan, Saint Charles Borromeo was venerated for his important role in the Counter-Reformation, and also for the penitential processions that he undertook during the plague of 1576–77. Local tradition often merged with universal iconography. Solimena's Madonna and Child with Saints Januarius and Sebastian (ca. 1700; Milwaukee Museum of Art) presented together Januarius, the patron saint of Naples, and Sebastian, a universal plague saint. Through the course of the seventeenth century, Saint Rosalie and Saint Charles Borromeo became widely known and were represented in paintings and churches throughout Europe.

Hope and Healing brought to the Worcester Art Museum an impressive variety of early modern Italian painting. It was complemented by an exhibition catalog with seven perceptive essays that combine historical and art-historical interpretations of the plague in early modern Europe. The exhibition...