Art provides insight into the emotional and psychological effects of death and disease as they were experienced by early modern people. The introduction considers how art making responded to the anxiety and despair caused by the plague and its aftermath as it reoccurred for centuries in Western Europe. It seeks to understand how images created an emotional dynamic with early modern viewers that helped them cope with disaster. It also considers how mystical eroticism played on a similar dynamic by conveying the divine desire to know God through very human expressions of emotion. The introduction situates the essays that follow in relation to the historiography of plague images and sets in motion a reconsideration of their impact on art and culture in Italy, France, Spain, and England.
The essays have been solicited by the editors to honour the life and work of Louise Marshall, whose contribution to the scholarship of plague art and mystic eroticism provides both the thematic and methodological inspiration of the volume. Marshall will be providing her perspective on the influence of Leo Steinberg on her approach to art history and thinking about the spiritual power of images. The authors will be sharing their draft essays at a workshop in February 2022, held to celebrate Dr Marshall’s retirement. That workshop provides the opportunity to ensure maximum coherency across the collection through collaboration and early peer review. Milam is an experienced editor, having published three essay collections and three special issues of journals. This experience will support the delivery of consistent quality and connections between the essays throughout the collection.
Death was understood more as a part of life in the Middle Ages than it is today. Mortality and especially child mortality rates were high under the best of circumstances. Frequent wars resulted in the deaths of many. Natural disasters like famines and disease further raised death rates and sometimes produced horrifying visible effects. In Christianity, the dominant religion in Italy during the medieval period and beyond, grieving over Christ’s death, as well as Mary’s suffering over her son, became an important key to achieving salvation by the twelfth century, and played an increasing role with the rise of the Mendicants and the notion of affective piety in the thirteenth. Nevertheless, grieving over the death of ordinary people was rarely depicted in visual art. I therefore turn to Passion images and a variety of contemporaneous texts that explicitly represent grieving and which were ubiquitous in the fourteenth century, to analyze what they can tell us about mourning in daily life. In particular, I analyze the ways visual imagery created principally for religious purposes also both reflected and shaped especially women’s expression of grief, gendered expectations, and roles. In this essay I focus on the theme of Crucifixion and the relationship between Tuscan Trecento painted images and the Planctus Mariae (or lament of Mary at the cross), performed in church every year on Good Friday. One of the most striking conclusions that emerges from my research is that in many images where scholars have interpreted Mary’s gestures as merely pointing to Christ on the cross, she is instead “speaking” to Christ, the Cross itself, or to the public, expressing much darker emotions than appear on her face in paintings but would have been well-known to Christian viewers from the Planctus and its variations.
Vitale da Bologna’s fresco program for the apse of the Benedictine Abbey of Pomposa, located in eastern Romagna, is most likely to have been painted just a few years after the Black Death of 1348 had wrought unprecedented destruction on European populations, exerting related pressures on traditional monastic life. The program, tragically now only partly legible in some places, is divided into three parts: at its lowest register, it offers viewers a poignant exemplar of saintly suffering in a rare retelling of the life of Saint Eustace, an obscure early Christian martyr saint. It continues through a middle register depicting the Doctors of the Church engrossed in their scholarly work, before concluding with a celestial vision of rousing joy, redemption and harmony in the semi-dome. This paper examines Vitale’s innovative narrative strategies and devices, in particular his unerring attention to the playful and whimsical possibilities of picturemaking. Through a compelling depiction of human emotion and clever manipulation of spatial modes, I argue that the Pomposa apse frescoes served as a powerful reaffirmation of monastic virtues, duties and eventual rewards in the face of terrestrial death, anxiety and loss. The frailty of the frescoes today has likely obscured much of their original power, but it also adds another dimension to an appreciation of their success: underscoring that while death and decay are universal, images offer our best chance of transcendence.
The death of the virgin martyr became a preferred subject of the Florentine sacre rappresentazioni from around 1480 and presented opportunities for “lots of torments both beautiful and delightful,” as the printer of the play of San Valentino e Santa Giuliana (c. 1515) promised. This essay looks at the mechanisms of martyrdom and death: how it they are done on stage and how they work on the audience, as well as how they are represented in contemporary visual arts. The saints often survive their torments only to be beheaded and borne into heaven as saints.
St Anthony the Abbot, an Egyptian monk of the fourth century, was one of the most frequently depicted saints between 1300 and 1700. Images of his life and especially the temptations and torments he suffered at the hands of demons had circulated since the seventh century. But from the twelfth century, they multiplied in a wide range of media, after the order of the Antonines (or Hospital Brothers of St Antony) was founded, apparently in thanks for the miraculous cure of a Dauphiné nobleman, Gaston of Valloire, from gangrenous poisoning caused by ergotism, then called St Anthony’s fire. As hundreds of hospitals founded by Antonines spread throughout Europe, Anthony’s cult also expanded as a saint protecting devotees from epidemics caused by ergotism, various skin disorders, and also syphillis. Images illustrating Anthony’s life proliferated, particularly north of the alps, reaching their height in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, when almost every major artist depicted the violent diabolical assaults on the saint. There was also an increasing emphasis on Anthony’s temptations, now depicting devils in seductive female form, often partially or fully naked, offering Anthony a precious vessel. This essay focuses on factors influencing such transformations through to the mid seventeenth century.
In a mysterious painting in Berlin, attributed to the Bergamasque painter Giovanni Busi Cariani and dated ca. 1520-22, a young woman reclines on a pillow, before an extensive landscape fraught with menace. The “giorgionesque” trope of a lovely lady in nature is here not quite right; the goddess/nymph, domestic lapdog at her side, is all too real, and dressed, if somewhat wantonly. She presides calmly not over bucolic green hills, but over a world of burning towns and invading Turkish soldiers, where two agitated rivers clash together. Equally disturbing is her demeanor, as she conceals her body, but turns to address us with a frank, emotionless gaze. Cariani, in a picture both engaging and demonic, has invested a by now commonplace Venetian image with new concerns. This painting will be investigated in the context of contemporary fears, both real and imagined, some specific to the region of northern Lombardy: heresy, natural disaster, Turkish invasion, prophecy, sorcery, and, more universal but perhaps most fearsome, the terrible power of female seduction.
When visions of Christian women involved the adult Christ, it is widely understood that there was an erotic component to their fervid imagination. But visions of the Christ Child have been relegated to the realm of sublimation, in which supposedly natural, universal and frustrated maternal desires are re-directed to the divine saviour. This brief investigation argues against that reductive and condescending view, instead teasing out other aspects of such visions, including their endowment of privilege, offering of sensual intimacy, and tactile effects on mystics’ bodies, especially their breasts. Mary, actual human mother but also Queen of Heaven, often plays the crucial role of intercessor and mediator. One case study will be the visions of St. Francesca Romana (1384-1440), painted shortly after her death and still of interest in the early seventeenth century. Images of The Mystical Marriage of St Catherine insist on Mary’s managerial role, sometimes presenting tender bonding between the two women as well as illustrating nuptial exchange with the infant Christ. Yet St Francis of Assissi’s visions of the Christ Child, especially at Greccio, occur without her active presence; in Lodovico Carracci’s rendition of one Franciscan vision Mary is shown, but thoroughly disengaged. This essay will explore gendered differences and erotic components of the relationship between mystics, Mary and the Christ Child.
The anonymous Madonna del Suffragio today in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College (ca. 1520), depicts a standing Virgin Mary with the Christ child resting on one arm and both her breasts exposed. Milk drips from one breast down to a small nun who holds a rosary and kneels on the painting’s left side, almost hidden within the folds of the Virgin’s dress, and a scene of purgatory on the lower right side. The painting once formed the central panel of a triptych (the other panels showed the Nativity and the Visitation) and is said to have come from a convent in Sorrento. What would contemporary viewers have made of this painting showing the Virgin with her breasts bared and why was this iconography chosen for a painting intended for a convent? The subject of the painting is the Madonna of Purgatory, an immensely popular cult in sixteenth-century Naples (and thus not far from the AMAM’s assumed origin in a Sorrento convent). Images of the Madonna of Purgatory like the AMAM painting established the Virgin as a powerful intercessor, someone who could circumvent God’s wrath and alleviate suffering. The focus on the Virgin as intercessor, along with the erotic power of the representation, made images like the AMAM painting common subjects for attack by Protestant reformers, including Luther and Zwingli. But the cult of the Madonna of Purgatory remained strong in Naples throughout the sixteenth century, its power evident in the Inquisition’s focus on prosecuting believers during 1580s and their removal of images from original settings—often rural—to be placed in parish and monastic churches where clerics could control their display. This essay will consider the appeal of this iconography for the presumed audience of the AMAM painting, nuns from a convent in Sorrento. How would the female viewers of this painting have approached this image, particularly its erotic potential? Drawing from visions recorded in the trial of lesbian-nun Benedetta Carlini (rare source material for lesbians in sixteenth-century Italy), this essay will propose a reading of the AMAM painting as an example of mystic eroticism, one in which the eroticism is female and queer.
This essay examines three early fresco votives found on the eastern wall of the Oratory of San Giovanni Battista in Urbino, the meeting place of a homonymous flagellant confraternity founded in 1350. The frescoes, completed before 1416, comprise the earliest, a Baptism of Christ and the Neophytes (now partly lost), framed on either side by later votives to the Virgin Mary, a Madonna of Humility and a Madonna Enthroned. The presence of Saint Sebastian and the presentation of the Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse in the Madonna votives suggests that protection from the plague through the auspices of the Virgin and the confraternal patron, John the Baptist, was a primary consideration in the commissioning of these works. It will be argued that these frescoes, while commissioned at different times, should be viewed as a series in which the confraternity constructed a powerful statement of belief, intended to seek protection from plague but also to guide their membership to the means by which they would secure their own salvation, through their ritual practice of self- mortification. In this, it will be argued that, by depicting Sebastian in an unusual and explicit display of agony, the confraternity was electing to link Sebastian’s protective powers to their devotional practice. Similarly, in placing the scene of the baptism of Christ and the neophytes at the centre of the series, the confraternity was making a powerful articulation of the spiritual regeneration offered by John’s act of baptism to their disciplinary practice, the ritual simulation of Christ’s passion.
In 1562, the Arciconfraternita della Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini e Convalescenti was officially granted the new chapel on Via Ostiense, built by four confratelli, which honored the sacred site where Saints Peter and Paul, the Princes of the Apostles, had tearfully embraced and commended themselves to one another before being led to their respective martyrdoms. The papal deed stipulated that all alms and oblations left by devout visitors were to be donated to the confraternal hospital where indigent pilgrims and poor, weak convalescents were sheltered, clothed, and fed – the Trinità’s major philanthropy. This essay focuses on the two extant fragments from the chapel’s late sixteenth-century exterior: an inscription and a marble relief depicting The Final Embrace of Saints Peter and Paul, both formerly immured above the entrance. The inscription was recorded in an eyewitness description from 1568. However, there has been little consensus about the date of the relief – ranging from the fifteenth century to 1568 – on account of its badly weathered condition and stylistic anomalies, denigrated by scholars as “coarse” but displaying “a certain folk-like grace.” Now, an unpublished document reveals its execution to have been far later than expected, in 1582. This evidence offers the opportunity to reconsider the relief as part of the sodality’s ongoing and highly self-aware desire to substantiate, both physically and spiritually, Rome’s authoritative apostolic past – here, by consciously emulating early Christian sculpture – not only to identify, but to “stylistically” verify a foundational event in Church history. That choice complemented the sensational discovery of the “Santa Priscilla” catacombs in 1578 and the newest early Christian archaeological studies by renowned Catholic theologians and scholars. Moreover, it magnified the Trinità’s acclamation of the living memory of the Apostles’ Roman deeds and martyrdom, its own exemplary philanthropic good works, and its dynamic agency in shaping Catholic devotional culture in the face of Protestant challenges.
El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz was painted in 1586-88 for the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo, Spain. Located directly above the count’s grave in a chapel in the church’s narthex, the painting portrays the mystical intervention of saints Augustine and Stephen at the funeral of Don Gonzalo Ruíz, señor of Toledo and Count of Orgaz, in 1323. The painting was commissioned by Andrés Núñez, the parish priest of Santo Tomé, during a period of considerable conflict hundreds of years after the count’s death. Traditionally, the painting is understood to celebrate the local parish’s legal victory over the small town of Orgaz after the latter attempted to abandon its annual bequest to Santo Tomé, promised in perpetuity in Don Gonzalo’s will. There is no doubt that the painting’s subject matter, size, and inscription all serve to reassert the parish’s prerogative in this regard. However, by re-evaluating the whole site (painting, epitaph, tomb, and its audience) within its broader politico-religious context, the essay argues for further motivations for the commission. It suggests that, in the volatile atmosphere of Counter-Reformation Spain, Núñez specifically chose the heightened aesthetic of El Greco to stimulate an affective bond between the magnanimous local count and the parishioners. Through its forceful materiality, the strident corporeality of the central figural group, and the mnemonic (compositional) devices that encourage the viewer to remember Christ’s ideal death while contemplating that of the count, El Greco’s visionary image successfully positions the count’s life and death within specific typologies of sanctity. Orgaz’ beautiful death then, endorsed by the saints and signaled by his imitatio Christi, provides a clear model for the audience’s salvation, and presents a tangible claim for raising him to sainthood.
Caravaggio’s Conversion of St Paul is so different from other versions of the story that one wonders if there could be source material beyond St Luke’s Acts (9 and 22). In fact, Baronio’s Martyrologium romanum refers to the sermons of Augustine, one of which elaborates on Luke’s description of Paul as a vessel. Augustine said, “A vessel is meant to be filled. What with, but Grace?”. The image of Paul as cup was fertile beginning, since it could presuppose a larger sense, derived again from Augustine, that the old self evaporates as it converts, becoming a new creation. This was how Paul himself described his calling – initiated in his mother’s womb - allowing conversion to be recast into the image of the Nativity, where the converted Paul is akin to the infant Christ, with limbs outstretched like a star. Caravaggio’s Paul thus beckons to another painting in the same Augustinian church, namely Pinturicchio’s Adoration of the Shepherds. Drawing on Paula Frederickson’s study of the performative nature of conversion, coupled with the “limitless intimacy” of queer theology, the paper offers a new reading of Caravaggio’s masterwork.
Niccolò Campani (1478-1523) was a Sienese actor, playwright, and poet who divided his career between Siena, Mantua, and Rome. In his mid-20s, Campani contracted the French pox and suffered from it for eight years, a trial he recounted in a lament that he published first around 1509-11 in Siena; a decade later, he extended the poem and doubled its length. Printers in various cities produced multiple editions of the Lamento between the 1510s and the 1550s. Taking cues from studies of plague imagery in Renaissance Italy, this essay examines the representation of suffering proposed both in Campani’s text and in the title page’s woodcut of an afflicted man on his bed. It uses the woodcut to trace how the visual rhetoric of pox differed from plague in the early sixteenth century by focusing on the image of a devil dumping a basket of lesions upon the sufferer. The chapter concludes by reading the woodcut as site of mediation upon which some readers heightened the pox’s disfiguring power by inscribing further lesions upon the afflicted body with ink.
Jean Lepautre (1618 – 1682) was a prolific printmaker who worked in Paris during the reign of King Louis XIV of France. Appointed ‘Ordinary Engraver of the King’ in 1667, and admitted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1677, Lepautre enjoyed favour with the Bourbon monarchy, through which he was offered numerous prestigious commissions. In one of the earliest Bourbon-sanctioned projects he worked on – the 1662 volume L’entrée Triompahnte de Leurs Mejetez, published to commemorate Louis XIV’s triumphal entry into Paris upon his marriage to Maria Theresa, Infanta of Spain – Lepautre depicted a figure urinating on the side of a triumphal arch erected for the royal couple to pass through. Although urinating figures had been depicted in earlier French prints, this essay establishes how Lepautre’s retooling of genre conventions transformed a potentially transgressive moment into a gesture of blessing and implied fecundity. Lepautre’s reimagining of established pictorial conventions speaks to the evolution of printmaking in Louis XIV’s France, and the ability of the print to transform ideologies into historical realities beyond the scope of other pictorial forms. Within Louis XIV’s fledgling regime, Lepautre’s urinating figure sought to expand the mechanisms and limits of royal authority by merging the mythical, mystical and mundane, and the past, present and future, in a single image.
In 1780, Jacques-Louis David painted his first major commission, Saint Roch interceding with the Virgin for the Plague-stricken, an altarpiece for the chapel of Lazaret in Marseilles. The subject matter was imposed upon David by the Health Office as a commemoration of the miraculous reappearance of St Roch, protector of plague victims, during the 1720 outbreak of the disease. Yet the commission represented an opportunity for the young artist to show off his talents to audiences at the Salons in Paris, where the painting would be exhibited before returning to the port city. This essay considers David’s positioning of himself as a history painter through the conventions of the plague saint’s iconography and its previous representations by leading artists of the Renaissance and Baroque. It explores the tensions between religious emotion and secular restraint within the image to question the role of art making during the Enlightenment.
William Blake's watercolor Last Judgment at Petworth house bears an unmistakable resemblance to female human genitalia. Yet this observation was not committed to print in the literature on this work until 1993, when Stephen Goldsmith mischaracterized the image as “almost pornographic;” surely, “anatomic” would be a more appropriate adjective. Since then only Susan Sklar (2013) has pursued this observation emphasizing the possible Moravian origin of the image. This approach is too narrow. In this essay, I will identify the correspondence of Blake's complex image to female anatomy and consider it in light of his comments on human sexuality and salvation. Scattered throughout Blake's writing are statements such as “the Loins [are} thee he place of the Last Judgment” and “What is it men in women do require? The lineaments of Gratified Desire” and many others reveal Blake's attitudes to sex. I examine these and also consult contemporary texts on midwifery and human anatomy to contextualize Blake’s ideas. The Petworth Last Judgment is one of four surviving versions which Blake created on the subject, and others are known to have existed but are lost. Blake’s clear belief in universal salvation and his condemnation of believers in eternal damnation as “devil worshippers” raises the question of why Blake would return to the subject that seems so repellent to his beliefs. Blake's other Last Judgments do not have the same overt anatomical reference. I will argue that the soterial and sexual content of the Petworth version explain Blake’s long engagement with a subject so incompatible with his own ideas on human salvation.
The most surprising element of Jean Cocteau’s London mural of the Crucifixion is Christ’s corporeal exclusion; only the lower half of his legs are shown while the upper body disappears in the void of the oval opening in the ceiling of the small chapel. In his absence, focus shifts instead to the large cast of supplementary characters who each jostle for attention at the foot of the cross. On Christ’s right side is John the Apostle. Conjoined to Christ’s beloved friend is a self-portrait of Cocteau himself. This essay investigates the cultural origins and significance of this double portrait as well as the guards that surround it. While Christ’s death ostensibly remains the principal subject in this Crucifixion, I would suggest others, such as the nature of love, sexuality and poetry, assume greater significance. Death remains a theme, though in Cocteau’s late-career reworking of the scene it is not Christ’s that is his principal concern, rather his own.