Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque 9780271090771

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Piety and Plague

Habent sua fata libelli

SIXTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYS & STUDIES SERIES GENERAL EDITOR Michael Wolfe St. John’s University EDITORIAL BOARD OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYS & STUDIES ELAINE BEILIN Framingham State College

MARY B. MCKINLEY University of Virginia

CHRISTOPHER CELENZA Johns Hopkins University

HELEN NADER University of Arizona

MIRIAM U. CHRISMAN University of Massachusetts, Emerita BARBARA B. DIEFENDORF Boston University PAULA FINDLEN Stanford University SCOTT H. HENDRIX Princeton Theological Seminary

CHARLES G. NAUERT University of Missouri, Emeritus MAX REINHART University of Georgia SHERYL E. REISS Cornell University ROBERT V. SCHNUCKER Truman State University, Emeritus

JANE CAMPBELL HUTCHISON University of Wisconsin–Madison

NICHOLAS TERPSTRA University of Toronto

ROBERT M. KINGDON University of Wisconsin, Emeritus

MARGO TODD University of Pennsylvania

RONALD LOVE University of West Georgia

JAMES TRACY University of Minnesota

MERRY WIESNER–HANKS University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

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Copyright © 2007 Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri USA All rights reserved tsup.truman.edu Cover art: Michael Sweerts, Plague in an Ancient City, ca. 1652–54. Oil on canvas, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © 2006 Museum Associates/LACMA, Gift of the Ahmanson Foundation (1997.10.1). Cover design: Teresa Wheeler Type: ITC New Baskerville is a registered trademark of International Typeface Corporation, copyright Adobe Systems Inc. Printed by: Thomson-Shore, Dexter, Michigan USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Piety and plague : from Byzantium to the baroque / edited by Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester. p. cm. — (Sixteenth century essays and studies ; v. 78) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-1-931112-73-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Plague—Europe—History—16th century. 2. Plague—Religious aspects— Europe—History. 3. Piety—History. [DNLM: 1. Plague--history--Europe. 2. History, Medieval--Europe. 3. Plague--psychology--Europe. 4. Religion and Medicine--Europe. 5. Socioeconomic Factors--Europe. WC 355 P626 2007] I. Mormando, Franco. II. Worcester, Thomas. III. Sixteenth century essays & studies ; v. 78. RC178.A1P54 2007 362.196'92320094--dc22 2007029073

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from the publisher. The paper in this publication meets or exceeds the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

CONTENTS Illustrations

vii

Preface Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester

xi

1 The Literature of Plague and the Anxieties of Piety in Sixth-Century Byzantium Anthony Kaldellis 2 Mice, Arrows, and Tumors

1

23

MEDIEVAL PLAGUE ICONOGRAPHY NORTH OF THE ALPS

Pamela Berger 3 Visualizing Death

64

MEDIEVAL PLAGUES AND THE MACABRE

Elina Gertsman 4 The Making of a Plague Saint

90

SAINT SEBASTIAN’S IMAGERY AND CULT BEFORE THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

Sheila Barker 5 Protestants and Plague

132

THE CASE OF THE 1562/63 PEST IN NÜRNBERG

Ronald K. Rittgers 6 The Canker Friar

156

PIETY AND INTRIGUE IN AN ERA OF NEW DISEASES

William Eamon 7 Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod

177

A WORK OF ART IN MULTIPLE CONTEXTS

Elisabeth Hipp 8 Plague as Spiritual Medicine and Medicine as Spiritual Metaphor THREE TREATISES BY ETIENNE BINET, S.J. (1569–1639)

Thomas Worcester

224

vi

Contents

9 Pestilence, Apostasy, and Heresy in Seventeenth-Century Rome

237

DECIPHERING MICHAEL SWEERTS'S PLAGUE IN AN ANCIENT CITY

Franco Mormando Contributors

313

Index

317

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 2.1

Anonymous, The Plague of the Philistines, ca. 1250

25

2.2

Anonymous, The Ark in the Temple of Dagon and the Suffering of the Philistines, 1215–30

30

2.3

Anonymous, The Return of the Ark, 1215–30

33

2.4

Anonymous, The Plague of the Philistines, ca. 1250

34

2.5

Anonymous, The Plague of the Philistines, late 12th century

37

2.6

Anonymous, The Destruction of the Temple of Dagon and the Philistines Afflicted with Plague, 11th century

38

2.7

Anonymous, Philistines Suffering from the Plague, late 12th century

39

2.8

Anonymous, Philistines Beset with Plague, ca. 1315–25

41

2.9

Anonymous, The Plague of the First Vial, ca. 1300–1325

44

2.10 Anonymous, The Personified Blindfolded Death Holding Arrows of Affliction, mid-14th century

45

2.11 Anonymous, Jesus Throwing Arrows of Plague, late medieval

46

2.12 Anonymous, Death Strangling a Victim, from the Stiny Codex, 14th century

48

2.13 Pierre Remiet, Death, Devil and an Angel at the Bedside, ca. 1403

49

2.14 Anonymous, Last Rites, from a Franciscan Missal, ca. 1350

50

2.15 Anonymous, Diagram of an Eye, from John Pecham’s Perspectiva communis, ca. 1320

50

2.16 Anonymous, Burying Plague Victims, from the Annals of Gilles li Muisis, ca. 1353

52

2.17 Anonymous, Flagellants, early 15th century

53

2.18 Anonymous, The Burning of Jews, from the Annals of Gilles li Muisis, ca. 1353

55

VII

viii

Illustrations

2.19 Anonymous, Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, from a Book of Hours, late 14th century

57

2.20 Anonymous, Funeral in a Church, from a Book of Hours, late 14th century

58

2.21 Anonymous, David Praying to Avert the Plague on Jerusalem, 1509

59

2.22 Anonymous, Burial, from a Book of Hours, 15th century

60

3.1

Anonymous, Dying Man Tempted by Impatience, 1465, from Ars Moriendi

66

3.2

Gislebertus, The Last Judgment, 1130–35

68

3.3

Meo da Siena (or follower of), The Triumph of Death, 14th century

70

3.4

Anonymous, The Three Dead, detail from The Three Dead and the Three Living, late 15th century

73

Anonymous, The Three Living, detail from The Three Dead and the Three Living, late 15th century

73

3.6

Anonymous, the transi tomb of Cardinal La Grange, ca. 1402

75

3.7

Anonymous, The Dance of Death, ca. 1500

77

3.8

Anonymous, Child in the Cradle, detail from The Dance of Death, printed by Guyot Marchant, 1490

81

Barnaba da Modena, Madonna della Misericordia, 1375–76

83

3.10 Anonymous, Female Figure (Death?), detail from The Dance of Death, ca. 1490

84

4.1

Anonymous, The Martyrdom of Sebastian, ca. 1173–79

96

4.2

Giovanni del Biondo, Saint Sebastian Triptych, ca. 1375

101

4.3

Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian, ca. 1506

103

4.4

Benozzo Gozzoli, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1466

108

4.5

Titian, The Resurrection Polyptych (also called The Averoldi Polyptych), 1522

109

4.6

Anonymous, Saint Sebastian, ca. 1520

110

4.7

Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1475

112

4.8

Pietro Perugino, Saint Sebastian, ca. 1490

113

4.9

Pietro Perugino, Saint Sebastian, 1495

116

3.5

3.9

Illustrations

4.10 Pietro Perugino, Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian, ca. 1493

118

4.11 Il Bacchiacca (Francesco Umbertini), Saint Sebastian, ca. 1550

120

4.12 Albrecht Dürer, The Dresden Altarpiece, ca. 1496 (central panel) and ca. 1503 (wings)

121

4.13 Bernardino Rossellino and Francesco Botticini, Saint Sebastian Tabernacle, ca. 1477–80

125

4.14 Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Madonna with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian and Two Donors (also called The Casio Altarpiece), ca. 1500 126 7.1

Nicolas Poussin, The Plague at Ashdod, 1630–31

178

7.2

Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), Il Morbetto, ca. 1515–16

183

7.3

Attributed to Marco Dente (after Raphael), The Fire in the Borgo, mid-16th century

190

7.4

Rosso Fiorentino, Ignorance Expelled, ca. 1533–39

193

7.5

Camillo Procaccini, Saint Roch Curing the Plague-Stricken, ca. 1585 210

9.1

Michael Sweerts, Plague in an Ancient City, ca. 1652–54

238

9.2

James Fittler, engraver, [Michael Sweerts], The Plague, 1807

247

9.3

Fittler, detail of Figure 9.2

248

9.4

The so-called Temple of Minerva Medica, Rome, Italy

249

9.5

Michael Sweerts, Double Portrait, ca. 1660–61

258

9.6

Domenico Fontana, architect, North transept façade, 1588, Basilica of St. John Lateran

289

Luca Giordano, The Prophet Gad Offering King David the Choice of Famine, War or Plague, mid-1690s

292

Peter Paul Rubens, The Consequences of War (The Horrors of War), 1637–38

297

Nicolas Poussin, Emperor Titus Destroys the Temple in Jerusalem, 1638–39

300

9.7 9.8 9.9

ix

PREFACE Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester

Plague—whether bubonic or any other similar epidemic of acute disease resulting in massive mortality—was one of the enduring facts of everyday life on the European continent, East and West, for centuries, from earliest antiquity through the first decades of the eighteenth century. Accordingly, as scholars have now come to realize, it represents one of the most important influences on the development of that continent's society and culture. One cannot fully understand and explain the vicissitudes of European history in any of its aspects—political, economic, ecclesiastical, artistic, or social—without taking into adequate consideration the role played by epidemic disease such as bubonic plague and society's response to it. To date, however, the largest portion of scholarship on the issue has focused on the political, economic, demographic, and medical aspects of the subject. Piety and Plague seeks to redress this imbalance by giving greater coverage of what could broadly be termed the religious, cultural, and psychological aspects of plague and European society's response to it through the many centuries and over a wide geographical terrain, including Byzantium. The essays in this volume are interdisciplinary in nature, their authors representing the fields of classical studies, art history, history, church history, literature, and theology. The sources studied herein are not only written or printed texts, but painted images and other forms of visual documentation as well. Indeed, the latter represent an immense and hitherto insufficiently studied treasury of information about and insight into how European society responded to this dread mortality. In addition to having response to the plague as their common theme, the essays in this volume are similar in that each one, in its own way, either explores new, previously ignored, or little-studied historical territory or provides fresh new answers to old and at times vexing questions. All of this is based upon original research among the primary sources, printed or painted, although readers will also find in each essay ample bibliographical references to the most important secondary sources on the issues covered in this volume. xi

xii

Preface

This volume has its origins in the New England Renaissance Conference devoted to the same subject and organized by the same editors (Mormando and Worcester), held on 23 April 2005 at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. We acknowledge with gratitude the financial support from Holy Cross for the conference and for the preparation of the volume for publication. The conference, in turn, was held in conjunction with the concurrent exhibition of Italian painting at the Worcester Art Museum (April–September 2005) entitled Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800 (website: www.worcesterart.org/Hope). Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester also served (along with Gauvin Bailey and Pamela Jones) as curators of the exhibition and editors of the accompanying catalogue.

CHAPTER

1

The Literature of Plague and the Anxieties of Piety in Sixth-Century Byzantium Anthony Kaldellis

IN 381, GREGORIOS OF NYSSA (bishop of Nyssa and brother of Basileios, or Basil the Great, the theologian and bishop of Kaisareia) was in Constantinople to promote the cause of Orthodoxy at the general council of the church convened by the emperor Theodosius I. In a famous passage, he complained of the lower classes’ addiction to theological speculation. You know who I mean. The whole city is full of them, the alleys, the markets, the squares, and the wards; those who deal in apparel, who change money, who sell us our food. If you ask about a sale, he will philosophize to you about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of bread, he will answer that “the Father is greater and the Son lesser”; and if you say, “Is the bath ready?” he will assert that the Son comes from non-Being. I don’t know what to call this evil, an inflammation of the brain or a mania or some other illness that destabilizes the mind.1 This passage has caused considerable mischief. Offering some comic relief in an otherwise tedious theological context, as well as a glimpse of the passions of the common man, it has become one of those fixed quotations that have been lifted out of context and recycled by historians who see here 1

Gregorios of Nyssa, Oration on the Divinity of the Son and the Spirit, Including an Encomium of Abraham the Just, in PG 46 (1863): 553–76, quote at 557. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s.

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the essence of the Byzantine mind. It confirms the western stereotype of a civilization addicted to and debilitated by theological subtlety. “The eager pursuit of religious controversy afforded a new occupation to the busy idleness of the metropolis,” wrote Gibbon,2 whose conclusion has been extended by others to all classes and periods of Byzantine culture. The passage is invoked talisman-like against all who would qualify or reject this impossible picture, especially for centuries after the fourth; Gregorios “asserts everyone was obsessed by theological niceties.”3 In truth, Gregorios’s complaint strictly applies to only one year—a year of a council, which is significant—and one city, though encounters such as he describes would certainly have been possible throughout that century, as well as in other parts of the empire. Many sources attest to the turmoil and even violence of the theological controversies. But one must be careful. Gregorios is not saying that “everyone” was obsessed with theological niceties, only that the lower classes were. Moreover, what he is actually saying is that those niceties were Arian; he is complaining that the population of the capital followed a theology that had been declared heretical. In short, he is deriding the theological enemies of his own faction as ignorant moneychangers and tailors. It is rarely acknowledged in this connection that Gregorios is here expanding a passage in an oration by the leader of his faction, the acting bishop of Constantinople, Gregorios of Nazianzos, who likewise argued that theology was not a proper subject for gossip. What is essentially a polemical caricature has “since been overused to portray the Byzantines as collectively obsessed” with theology.4 This is not the place to examine the social scope of theological obsessions in Byzantium, a study that has oddly never been undertaken despite (or because of) the confident use of passages like the one quoted above. The aim of this essay is to reveal a different limitation of Byzantine theology that has also gone unnoticed, in part because scholars have allowed the sources to dictate what theology really is. It can be seen from Gregorios’s complaint that theology for him (and the shopkeepers) was exclusively a matter of defining the nature of God viewed abstractly, for example, the relation between the Father and the Son, involving questions of essence, substance, and so forth. What one realizes after perusing a few centuries’ worth of theological treatises is that the Byzantines produced little or nothing that explained God’s historical agency in their own post-apostolic times, 2 Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall, 2:28. See also Jones, Later Roman Empire, 964. Many more such statements can be cited. The idea has made its way into fiction—for example, Reed and Mayer, Two for Joy (35), which is set in the age of Justinian. For the social attitudes involved, see MacMullen, Voting for God, 37. 3Baldwin, review of Procopius of Caesaria, 478. Prominent Byzantinists have suspected that the average Byzantine neither knew nor cared about the theories and laws of the church fathers, e.g., Beck, Byzantinisches Erotikon. 4 McGuckin, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, 279.

Literature of Plague and Anxieties of Piety in Sixth-Century Byzantium

in living history. To be sure, the Incarnation, a historical event, had to play a central role in any theory, but that event was theorized more in relation to the nature and substance of God and less in relation to human history. By human history is here meant the concrete events of which the historians wrote and not the notion of the salvation of man in the abstract that was a part of God’s plan and, therefore, fed back directly into discussions of his nature, barely scratching the surface of the infinitely more humble world of human history. Christianity is often called a historical religion, by which two things are meant: first, that God became an individual Man at a particular moment in history dated by the reigns of historical kings and procurators; and second, that as a religion it postulates a linear story of Creation, Incarnation, and Second Coming against which mundane human history is supposed to be taking place. What is remarkable, then, is how rarely that overarching divine story intersected in Byzantine thought with actual human history. For the Byzantines, the Incarnation was a theological problem, not a historical one; they were far more interested in how the divine and the human interfaced in the person of Jesus Christ than in the question of why God chose that particular moment to become man. Granted, some answers were offered to the latter question, involving the consolidation of the Roman Empire and the reign of Augustus, but they are vague, unconvincing, and rarely attested after Eusebios of Kaisareia (ca. 300 AD)—they never became the subject of impassioned (or really any) debate.5 One has to look to find them; no treatises were written on the topic. At the other extreme, the Byzantines produced no systematic theology explaining in terms of human history the where, when, and why of the Second Coming. What exists is a very small number of apocalyptic narratives—the closest that the culture came to quasi-historical fantasy—but these can hardly be called theology, did not influence the intellectual mainstream, and in some cases had been written outside the empire.6 Looking beyond events that were integral parts of the Christian message, one finds that the Byzantines avoided clarifying God’s role in history and only alluded to it rhetorically. Imperial orations and decrees proclaimed that the emperor was God’s vicegerent on earth, but what this meant exactly was left unsaid, probably deliberately so as not to infringe on the rights of the church.7 The covenant between God and nation in the Old 5 See the passages cited in Setton, Christian Attitude towards the Emperor, 35–36, 48–49; and Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 185–86. For the Byzantines’ fundamentally nonhistorical theology of the Incarnation, see Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, chap. 12. 6 For an introduction to these texts, see Alexander, Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition. To some scholars, especially Mango, “Byzantinism and Romantic Hellenism,” apocalypticism represents the essence of Byzantium, but the claim is polemical and no argument is offered. Undue importance has been assigned to apocalyptic texts. 7 See Dagron, Emperor and Priest.

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Testament could also be invoked, with Orthodox Romans as the new Israel, but the model was not a good fit, because Christianity promised individual and not national salvation and because the state and the faith were never fully integrated in Byzantium. Constantine’s conversion was not taken as a historical national covenant like that of Abraham. The Byzantines knew that their state and national polity had a different historical origin from their faith and was constituted along different lines to serve different purposes. An Orthodox patriarch could in all honesty concede that a hated heretical emperor was still a brave, conscientious, and incorruptible ruler and an “excellent administrator of the Roman commonwealth.”8 And while it was common to ascribe imperial defeat and natural disaster to God’s anger at human sin, this explanation was only a pietistic cliché invoked in response to individual events. It never constituted a theology of God’s intervention in history and never clarified the nature of divine justice in relation to human history. Any sin would do for this purpose or even sin in general, with no need to point to specific historical deeds. Moreover, no attempt was made to prove the commensurability of crime and punishment. Why did the innocent suffer for the crimes of the wicked and why did the wicked prosper? In short, the Byzantines never engaged systematically with the problem of evil.9 Apollo of the Silver Bow could stride down from Olympus with anger in his heart and send plague to the Achaian camp in order to avenge the insult to his priest Chryses. But how can one reasonably blame a plague on an omnipotent, all-good, and eternally unchanging God?10 If the preceding is correct, one expects to find that great natural catastrophes and imperial reverses did not elicit coherent theological responses in Byzantium; rather, one must expect that writers who set out to explain such events failed either to find a common ground among themselves or to deploy individually the precision, sophistication, and internal consistency of which they were capable in strictly doctrinal theological matters. What should be expected is a range of reactions reflecting the real complexity of Byzantine intellectual life, as each writer turned selectively to different classical, biblical, personal, theological, scientific, and rhetorical modalities. And this is exactly what is found in the written sources for the plague of the sixth century, the so-called Justinianic plague. The Byzantines had no agreed-upon way of talking about the historical agency of their God or the 8 Patriarch Nikephoros I on Emperor Leon V in Theophanes Continuatus, Book 1: On the Reign of Leon V 19, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn: E. Weber, 1838), 30–31; Ioseph Genesios, On the Reigns of the Emperors 1.16, 1.22–23, ed. A. Lesmüller-Werner and I. Thurn, Josephi Genesii regum libri quattuor (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1978), 14, 20–21. 9Cf. Young, “Insight or Incoherence?” For a seventh-century attempt to confront this problem, see Anastasios of Sinai (?), Questions and Answers, in PG 89 (1865): 311–824, esp. Question 96 (cols. 736–49). 10 The shift away from pagan conceptions, and the inevitable rise of the problem of evil, can be detected in Plato Republic 379a and in many other subsequent passages throughout the work.

Literature of Plague and Anxieties of Piety in Sixth-Century Byzantium

moral meaning of calamitous events for which he, logically, must have been in some way responsible. Nature was especially unkind to the Byzantines in the sixth century. Fires and earthquakes destroyed major cities such as Antioch and Berytos. In 536–537, a dust cloud obscured the sun for months. Worst of all, 541 witnessed the outbreak of the deadliest plague in European history before the Black Death. So far, discussion of this plague has focused on historical problems, primarily those of demographic impact and epidemiological identification.11 This plague was the worst disaster in all of Byzantine history and occurred in an age that was exceptional in terms of intellectual activity and unusually rich in written sources. However, there has been no systematic study of the Byzantine response to this event.12 This essay will focus on its impact on popular piety and on the theological conjectures that it elicited. Evidence from earthquakes will also be adduced on occasion, as responses to those were not fundamentally different. The ultimate authority in the Byzantine Empire during the plague was Justinian himself (527–565 AD), who went beyond all his predecessors and successors in formulating an ideology of imperial rule that asserted his own supremacy in both Roman and Christian terms. Not only did he codify existing Roman law and legal theory (in the Corpus iuris civilis), he issued a continuous stream of legislation in which he sought to regulate many aspects of his subjects’ lives in accordance with his theological-ideological priorities. “We are accustomed to consider God in everything that we do,” he declared in 536.13 Justinian fully developed the logic of punitive theology and was the only contemporary willing to specify the sins that incurred divine anger before the outbreak of the plague. Before 541, he had declared that it was sodomy and blasphemy that caused plagues, earthquakes, and famines; whole cities and their inhabitants had been destroyed because of these sins.14 Accordingly, Justinian’s regime became infamous for cutting the penis—kaulotomia is not “castration”—of those who so offended against God and nature, though skeptics like the historian Prokopios believed that the charges were usually pretexts to confiscate the wealth of the accused or to dispose of personal enemies.15 11 See Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence, esp. 110–54, 277–94; and Horden, “Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian,” chap. 6, both citing previous scholarship. 12 Stathakopoulos (Famine and Pestilence, 146–54) devotes a few pages to the social response; Allen (“The ‘Justinianic’ Plague,” 20) devotes a few lines to the stance of the writers. 13 Justinian, Novel 18, preface, in Novellae, ed. Schöll and Kroll, 127–28; and Scott, The Civil Law, 16:95. In general, see Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea, 157–58. For Justinian’s legal works, see Honoré, Tribonian. For his ideology, see Pazdernik, “Justinianic Ideology and the Power of the Past.” 14 Justinian, Novel 77, in Novellae, ed. Schöll and Kroll, 381–83; and Scott, Civil Law, 16:288–89. Cf. Justinian, Novel 141 (559 AD), in Novellae, ed. Schöll and Kroll. 15 See Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 171–74. The main sources are Prokopios, Secret History, 11.34–36, 16.18–21; and Malalas, Chronographia, 18.18, in Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, ed. Thurn, 364–65; and in Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. Elizabeth Jeffreys et al., 253.

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Of course, one must be careful in drawing conclusions about what the emperor “believed” from this evidence. Even disregarding Prokopios’s cynicism—which, despite its bias, may still have accurately represented the emperor’s motives—it is not clear that the zealous pronouncements of a reformist emperor are a full or faithful reflection of his thoughts on the matter. Proclamations designed to put the fear of God into his subjects and discourage them from unnatural acts did not necessarily correspond to how he himself responded to the plague when it struck or indeed when he himself was infected by it, as Prokopios reveals that he was.16 Prokopios’s account of the plague makes it clear that physicians were very active in the capital during those months and were widely available, not only to the upper classes. Justinian certainly made use of their services. One of his court doctors, Aetios of Amida, composed a popular medical encyclopedia that included a (cribbed) section on pestilence and contagious diseases. 17 Justinian, then, certainly knew and probably actively solicited opinions about the plague that had nothing to do with sodomy and such, and there is every reason to believe that he put faith in those opinions. A passage in a different work by Prokopios implies that the emperor was constantly attended by physicians and, in a separate episode, it was only after their remedies had failed that he sought healing from the saints (a standard pattern of behavior in Byzantium).18 There is also evidence that at some point during his reign, Justinian reformed the medical profession by assigning doctors to Christian hospitals and providing state support for them.19 There is at present no satisfactory way to reconcile the imperial patient surrounded by state doctors with the zealous moral reformer who blamed plagues on sin or with the inquisitor who unmanned bishops for crimes against nature. These passages show different modalities of thought that perhaps rarely intersected in Justinian’s conscious mind. At any rate, he may have known the theological statements in the edicts to be specious but useful for the purposes of reform. Many modern historians have viewed that emperor’s military policies, ideological positions, and even theological views as flexible and pragmatic in the extreme.20 A “noble lie” about sodomy could only be salutary. The majority of the empire’s population would not have required Justinian’s prompting to view the plague as a manifestation of divine anger, yet 16

Prokopios, Wars 2.23.20; and Prokopios, Secret History 4.1. For Aetios as a court physician, see Scarborough, “Procopius, Theodora, and Aetius of Amida,” 48. For his works, see Hunger, Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner 294–97. For pestilence in his encyclopedia, Photios, Bibliotheke 221 (178a), ed. Henry, 3:143. 18Prokopios, Buildings 1.7.12. The later Life of St. Sampson 1.5 (PG 115:284) has Justinian served first by an army of doctors and then healed by the doctor-saint Sampson. These encounters are probably fictional; Miller, Birth of the Hospital, 63, 80–84. For doctors and saints, see Efthymiades, “A Day and Ten Months in the Life of a Lonely Bachelor,” esp. 15n33. 19 Miller, Birth of the Hospital, 48–49, 80–81, 91–92, 100–110. 20 See, for example, Gray, “Legacy of Chalcedon,” 228; and Greatrex, “Byzantium in the East,” 503. 17

Literature of Plague and Anxieties of Piety in Sixth-Century Byzantium

that view was only one among many other interpretations. As far as contemporary historians were concerned, this view was limited to the chronicle of Ioannes Malalas and those who used it. There is some uncertainty about the sources of that chronicle, whose Greek text survives in an abbreviated form covering all of history from the Creation to the end of Justinian’s reign. The first seventeen books reflect an Antiochene perspective, but at some point in book 18, which covers the reign of Justinian, the perspective shifts to Constantinople.21 That latter part of the chronicle, moreover, loyally promotes Justinian’s propaganda about important events such as the Nika riots of 532, possibly by following official notices. Unlike, say, Prokopios, Malalas regarded the “reign of terror as proper and right” and believed that “security” could result from “fear.”22 Malalas’s view of the plague can accordingly be predicted from these premises. “The Lord God saw that man’s transgressions had multiplied and he caused the overthrow of man on the earth.” His very brief extant entry on this event ends by piously declaring that “God’s compassion [eusplachnia] lasted in Byzantion [that is, Constantinople] for two months.”23 This “compassion” does not refer to the passing of the plague but very precisely to the duration of its outbreak. In other words, the plague itself manifested God’s compassion, not the fact that he allowed it to pass after two months. Malalas is not being cynical here, as when Suetonius says that the emperor Domitianus did not propose any cruel measure without first expounding on the virtue of clemency.24 This “compassion” is meant either as a euphemism for God’s “anger,” or quite literally in the sense that God sent the plague in order to reform mankind for its (long-term) benefit. By definition, all that God does, however terrible it may appear, is done out of compassion and love. It was not possible to maintain this paradox, or euphemism, consistently. The early ninth-century Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor probably copied his entry on the earthquake of 554 AD from the original version of Malalas. It states that “for a while men were overcome by contrition, went on litanies, and frequented churches, but after God’s mercy [philanthropia] had returned, they lapsed again to worse habits.”25 21 See Croke, “Malalas, the Man and His Work,” 17–25; and Jeffreys, “Malalas’ Sources,” 169, 211– 14. Warren Treadgold (Early Byzantine Historians, chap. 7) argues that for events before circa 500, Malalas basically plagiarized Eustathios of Epiphaneia while inventing other sources and information to give an appearance of original research. 22 Scott, “Malalas, The Secret History, and Justinian’s Propaganda,” 103–4; and Scott, “Malalas and Justinian’s Codification,” 12–31. 23Malalas, Chronographia 19.92, in Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, ed. Thurn, 407; and in Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. Jeffreys, 286–87. 24Suetonius, Domitianus, 11. 25 Theophanes the Confessor, Chronicle s.a. 6046, in Theophanes Chronographia, ed. de Boor, 1:229; and Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, trans. Mango and Scott, 335. For the origin of this entry in Malalas, Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. Jeffreys et al., 293–94.

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Here “mercy” (lit. “love of mankind”) has its usual sense: it refers to the lifting of the punishment and not to the punishment itself. This complex moral logic shapes the longest surviving account of the plague, that by Yuhannan, a native of Amida (like Justinian’s doctor Aetios) and, after 558, the (titular) Monophysite bishop of Ephesos (usually called John of Ephesos, though his name was not John and he never settled at Ephesos). During his long life, Yuhannan was alternately allowed to speak at the court for the Monophysite cause or persecuted for doing just that. He witnessed the outbreak of the plague at Constantinople in 542, but was assigned in that year by Justinian to convert the pagans of Asia Minor. Later in life, he wrote an ecclesiastical history in Syriac that started with Julius Caesar, but this has mostly been lost. It is known that he used Malalas for his own account of the sixth century, which has been preserved in part in a Syriac chronicle written toward the end of the eighth century.26 Yuhannan’s account of the plague is the longest extant and may have originally been a separate treatise before he incorporated it into his Ecclesiastical History. Though he used Malalas generally, his account of the plague itself is too long to have been lifted from the Antiochene chronicler. It is also very personal and reflects Yuhannan’s circumstances and outlook. (Relatively little progress has yet been made in determining exactly what he took from Malalas.) His account of the event is in almost all ways the opposite of the better-known one by Prokopios: biblical rather than classical, non- or even anti-scientific, emotionally charged rather than seemingly dispassionate, pietistic rather than ironic, and relatively incoherent. Its moral and theological tone also differs from the third main account of the event, that by the ecclesiastical historian Evagrius. Yuhannan begins his narration by invoking the lamentations of Jeremiah “over the afflictions of Jerusalem” (74). This sets the stage for a rhetorical lament charged throughout with biblical allusions, quotations, and parallels; the narrative, if one can call it that, is often interrupted by passages of scriptural and theological expostulation. The plague, Yuhannan claims, fulfilled the prophecies of Isaiah (81–82, 84). Like Pharaoh, the empire was scourged with earthquakes and wars, the plague being the last and most terrible chastisement (82–84). He often refers to it simply as “the wrath” or “the chastisement,” that is, God’s wrath at humanity’s sins, which have corrupted the earth (for example, 75, and throughout). He says that he decided to leave a record of the event, hoping that those who read it “during this remainder of the world” will become wiser “and will be saved from wrath here [that is, in this world] and from future torment” (76, also 98). This moral logic, however, is muddled and distorts the events themselves. 26 Yuhannan’s account of the plague will be cited from the translation by Witakowski, in Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre: Chronicle Part III, 74–98. For his relationship to Malalas, see Witakowski, “Malalas in Syriac,” 299–310. For additional fragments, see Michael the Syrian, Chronicle 9.28, ed. Chabot, 2:235–40.

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First, Yuhannan implies in his general statements that the chastisement was “a just sentence” (77) for the accumulated sins of mankind, but the specific anecdotes in his account—his “evidence,” as it were—never link this punishment to sins committed before the plague appeared, only to those committed during it. He never specifies the collective sins that (presumably) brought the plague on in the first place. And in order to maintain a tight causal link between sin and punishment, he has his characters die impossibly swiftly, in fact as soon as they commit a sin, contradicting all that is known about the symptomatology of the disease (for example, 78: “within one hour,” and throughout). A week’s delay would, apparently, weaken the moral lesson. Moreover, with the exception of one town that reverted to pagan worship (79–80), all of Yuhannan’s sinners are killed for what he regards as the cardinal (and capital) sin of avarice. But the crimes hardly justify the punishment: for example, taking goods from houses and towns whose inhabitants have died (77–79); asking someone (politely!) for a gift of money for his commemoration in case he should die and after all his family had also died (93–94); and corpse-bearers asking for higher wages when the labor supply had diminished and cash was readily available (94– 95);27 none of these seems to merit the death penalty. Was this, then, the worst that Yuhannan witnessed? He seems to have been obsessive about greed and indeed suggests at one point that the whole purpose of the plague was to curb or eliminate desire for material goods: “everyone who might still covet things of this world was quickly deprived of life” (95; cf. also 94). Certainly, his ethics differ from those of the modern world, but still the crimes alleged are tepid. Yuhannan chose to concentrate on sins committed during the plague rather than before it, but it seems that he could not find much to give a credible picture. After surveying all the evidence, it emerges that law and order did not break down during the plague and, in fact, many Byzantines turned to a life of piety and charity because of it. “The modern reader must be struck by the soberness of the accounts, and the degree of acceptance by the general populace. We hear of no processions of flagellants or persecutions of Jews.”28 Second, although Yuhannan acknowledges that the punishment was “pitiless” (74) and “terrible” (84), he insists that it revealed the “benignity and grace of God,” given that it acted as “a call to repentance” (85). Here, he stands close to Malalas, his source for other events of the sixth century. Yuhannan compares the advance of the plague to that of the armies of a great king, their movements slow and methodical to give the residents of the next city time to repent by giving away their material goods (85–86). But contrary to what he promises at the beginning of his account (76), such

27 28

In 544, Justinian was trying to limit wage inflation; Justinian, Novel 122. Evans, Age of Justinian, 163.

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repentance apparently did not save anyone “here,” in this world. Those who, like Noah, “built ships of almsgiving” only managed to “buy for themselves the kingdom” (86)—if “only” is an appropriate word in a Christian context. Still, they died like the rest. No one was spared, even those who recognized their sinfulness and tried to desist from it (cf. 79). Even Yuhannan cannot avoid the moral illogicality of all these events, and concludes by taking refuge in apophantic theology: the plague caused “astonishment about His righteous judgments which cannot be understood, nor comprehended, by human beings” (87). This admission of theological ignorance about God’s historical agency stands in significant contrast to Yuhannan’s confident understanding of God’s essential nature (the Monophysite position), for which beliefs he was willing to endure persecution and imprisonment. Yuhannan’s God is capable of virtually annihilating mankind for the purpose of morally reforming it. Could God not foresee that only a few would hear his message and change their ways? Here we stand on the threshold of the thorny problem of (human) free will and (divine) omniscience, which the Byzantines avoided. Still, there were times when the logic of punitive theology verged on incoherence. In his account of the miracles of St. Demetrius, Ioannes, the bishop of Thessalonike in the early seventh century, looks back to the outbreak of 586 (or 597) and notes that the plague destroyed not only bodies but also souls, as many people became angry with God for sending such an affliction and spoke out against him. This, Ioannes claims, jeopardized their fate in the afterlife.29 Put differently, the remedy itself occasioned further opportunities for the sins it was presumably meant to correct, but this, for Ioannes, only proved God’s wisdom. The bishop maintained that the punishment was still less than what his flock’s sins really warranted. But no theological treatise attempted to weigh the balance. Whereas Byzantine theology about the nature of God rose to an exceptional level of sophistication and subtlety and has remained fundamental to the discipline to this day, what Byzantine ecclesiastical writers had to say about God’s historical role and active justice in this world remained vague and sometimes barely coherent. And whereas sixth-century Byzantines adhered to very specific doctrinal formulas when it came to questions of Christology and divine essence, when it came to events such as the plague their theological instincts seem to have been very uncoordinated—unlike Gregory of Nyssa’s shopkeepers and bath attendants. Interestingly, the first extant literary source to record the sixth-century plague is the Latin epic poem that Flavius Cresconius Corippus wrote in 549 on the North African 29Ioannes of Thessalonike, The Miracles of St. Demetrios: Miracle 3 (31), in Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de Saint Démétrius, ed. and trans. Lemerle, 1:76. For Ioannes and St. Demetrios, see Skedros, Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki. For the date of the outbreak in question, see Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence, 324–28.

Literature of Plague and Anxieties of Piety in Sixth-Century Byzantium

campaigns of the Byzantine general Ioannes Troglita (though this text is absent from almost all discussions of the plague). Despite the vast differences in genre, language, subject matter, and geographical location, Corippus’s moral schema is quite similar to that of Yuhannan; it too singles out the sin of avarice as the source of God’s ire. In fact, the only sins Corippus cites have to do with property disputes arising from the large number of premature deaths: “all kinds of courts were opened, vindictive legal actions introduced…piety withdrew entirely.” Again, this is mild stuff, hardly a collapse of law and order. But “the Almighty Creator, as his anger bade Him, delayed no longer to apply the lash to that wretched populace.” Still, Corippus’s theological narrative differs in one crucial point from that of Yuhannan. Here it is not the plague that is ascribed to God’s anger; rather, God is said to have punished the African provincials for the sins they committed during the plague by sending Moors against them afterwards.30 It is not known how Corippus “explained” the plague, as the opening verses of his account are missing. Corippus’s logic is near to Yuhannan’s, despite the differences between the two men. In writers closer in genre and cultural origin to the Syriac Monophysite monk, there is increasing divergence. The fragment on the plague in the Syriac continuation of the Ecclesiastical History of Zacharias of Mytilene (Zacharias wrote the original in Greek in the late fifth century before becoming the bishop of Mytilene; his continuator was an anonymous monk writing in 569 in Amida, Yuhannan’s hometown) says vaguely that the plague “was a scourge from Satan, who was ordered by God to destroy men.”31 One can only guess at the “theology” behind this statement. When turning to the chief ecclesiastical historian of the sixth century, the lawyer of the church of Antioch, Evagrius, one finds an even more different picture. Evagrius wrote his history in the 590s and also used the original version of Malalas as a source. While he relied heavily on Prokopios for the sixth-century wars, which, for an ecclesiastical historian, he discussed extensively, still he does not seem to have followed Prokopios on the plague. He notes at the outset of his account that the plague resembled the one in Thucydides, but he does not go on to imitate Thucydides as Prokopios had. Evagrius, then, stands midway between the theological and emotional account of Yuhannan and the dispassionate classicism of Prokopios. For one thing, there are no references to God’s anger or the sins of mankind in

30Corippus, Iohannis 3.343–400, in Flavii Cresconii Corippi Iohannidos, seu De bellis libycis libri 8, ed. Diggle and Goodyear, 60–62; and trans. Shea, The Iohannis, or, De bellis Libycis of Flavius Cresconius Corippus, 107–8. In general, see Modéran, “Corippe et l’occupation byzantine de l’Afrique.” 31 Pseudo-Zacharias, Chronicle 10.9, in The Syriac Chronicle Known as That of Zachariah of Mitylene, trans. Hamilton and Brooks, 313. See, in general, Allen, “Zachariah Scholasticus and the Historia Ecclesiastica of Evagrius Scholasticus,” 472–73.

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his account, though that outlook is sometimes ascribed to him, presumably on the assumption that all Byzantines thought that way.32 Evagrius discusses the spread and periodic outbreaks of the disease and notes that he himself was infected while still a child and that he lost many family members in later outbreaks (his wife, many children, and other relatives and servants; in 591/592, he lost a daughter and her son). He discusses the symptoms and reports (contrary to Yuhannan) that most died on the second or third day; he then tries to discover the pattern of contagion. Noting that the plague has lasted for fifty-two years, he closes with this “bland”33 remark: “And what will happen now is unclear, as it will move in whatever direction pleases God, who knows both the causes (aitiai) of the event and where they lead.” Evagrius imposes no moral interpretation on the plague (there is no “sin” nor “wrath”), and even the theological conclusion quoted directly above is vague, almost certainly purposefully. God, for him, bears a very loose responsibility for the event, if any at all; at the very least, Evagrius implies, God will direct only the future movement of the plague, which is perhaps a polite way of asking for reprieve. God, then, may not have been responsible for the original outbreak, but he may now intervene to protect his long-suffering worshippers. This interpretation of Evagrius’s position is reinforced by his reference to the plague’s “causes” (the classical scientific term used since the time of Thucydides and Hippocrates), implying that these causes were something separate from God. God “knows” them, he is not the same as them; he is an omniscient physiologos, not necessarily a moral reformer wielding plagues as blunt instruments. Evagrius himself, however, does not speculate on the nature and identity of these natural causes. It is possible that, having experienced the horrible death of so many loved ones, Evagrius was less eager to throw about words like “sin” and “wrath,” which is always easier to do when someone else is the sinner—and the victim. In his chapter on Simeon Stylites, he notes that the saint had personally encouraged him to stop thinking about why his own children had died while those of a pagan neighbor had not (6.23). This episode is recorded in the contemporary Life of St. Symeon the Stylite (the Second), according to which Evagrius’s mind was tempted by diabolical thoughts and moved to blasphemy, because his daughter had died while the children of a pagan neighbor had not. The saint read Evagrius’s mind and sent him a reproachful letter. Evagrius rushed to Simeon to beg forgiveness. 34 Even so,

32Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 4.29 in Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius, ed. J. Bidez and L. Parmentier, 177–79; and Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus, trans. Whitby, 229–32. On “anger,” etc., see Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century, 42; and Evans, Age of Justinian, 163, 292n74. 33 Allen, Evagrius Scholastikos the Church Historian, 194. On the plague in general, see ibid., 190–94. 34 Life of St. Symeon the Stylite (the Second), 233 in La vie ancienne de S. Syméon Stylite le Jeune (521–592), ed. and trans. van den Ven, 1:210–11, 2:235–36.

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this did not mean that he accepted that his relatives deserved to die because of their sins. Hence perhaps the neutrality of his account and, possibly, its implied protest. Beyond these personal motives, Evagrius’s reluctance to accept punitive theology may have also been due to his respect for the Greek scientific and historical tradition, which he knew far better than Malalas and Yuhannan. In fact, by drawing attention to his own and his family’s experience of the plague—“for I decided,” he says, “to interweave my own affairs also into the narrative”—Evagrius enhances his credibility as a reliable eyewitness of events, a traditional objective of the ancient historians.35 Overall, however, his difference from Malalas seems to have been fundamentally theological, though the Byzantines were not inclined to put that difference into words. Evagrius, for instance, cites Malalas as his source for the fires and earthquake that destroyed Antioch in 525/526. The extant version of Malalas refers throughout and constantly to God’s wrath, his benevolent chastisement of man, and the mysteries of his love (17.16), whereas Evagrius, even though he claims to have followed Malalas here, omits all this in his account of those events, noting only in the following chapter that the subsequent election of Ephraim of Antioch as bishop proved to be beneficial: “God’s saving grace for men, which devises cures before the blow, and tempers the sword of anger with mercy, which exhibits its own sympathy at the very moment of despair, raised up Ephraim of Antioch” (4.5–6). 36 This is a more balanced view of God’s involvement; indeed, the balance seems to tilt toward the merciful. Evagrius must have been aware that he was altering Malalas’s theological interpretation, but unfortunately he did not cite his reasons for doing so. It is possible that Byzantine theology was insufficiently developed in this direction for him to do so with confidence. Granted, God was both merciful and wrathful. But in what proportion? And what did all this have to do with earthquakes and plagues? The most important source for the sixth-century plague is found in the chapters that Prokopios embedded in his narrative of the wars between Justinian and Persia (Wars 2.22–23). His outlook is in all important respects the exact opposite of that of Yuhannan. Prokopios follows classical models, not biblical ones. In particular, he so closely imitated Thucydides’ account of the plague in Athens in the first year of the Peloponnesian War that he was accused by many modern scholars both of lack of originality (imitation being regarded as affectation) and of distorting the facts of the event itself. But these charges no longer carry conviction, as it has been shown that Prokopios was careful to preserve the distinctive aspects of the sixth-century plague 35See, in general, Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography. Evagrius again highlights his family misfortunes in his account of the 588 earthquake at Antioch; Ecclesiastical History 6.8. 36 See, in general, Allen, Evagrius Scholastikos, 177–79 (“mild by comparison”). Cf. Evagrius’s account of the 588 earthquake at Antioch; Ecclesiastical History 6.8.

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and also because literary classicism is being rehabilitated as a more sophisticated and effective narrative technique than was previously recognized.37 Prokopios’s narrative is seemingly dispassionate, yet its soberness conveys a humanity that rivals Yuhannan’s gory and hysterical lamentations. He follows the geographical spread of the plague, describes the visions that accompanied the onset of the disease in a few of its victims, provides a careful medical account of the symptoms, and then devotes a chapter to the course of the plague in Constantinople, which he witnessed himself (2.22.9), commenting on the disruption of burial practices. The feel of clinical precision throughout is reinforced by the observations and investigations of the capital’s doctors, whom Prokopios obviously consulted (for example, 2.22.29), despite the fact that their remedies proved ineffectual. Now, it is sometimes assumed that despite this “classicizing façade” Prokopios basically shared his contemporaries’ view that the plague was sent by God. He suggests this himself in his opening remarks, where, like Thucydides, he denies that any of the physiologoi possessed an accurate understanding of the causes (aitiai) of the plague, though they were not short of opinions. Unlike Thucydides, however, he then goes on to say that in the end one can do nothing but ascribe the whole thing to God (2.22.1–2). However he says nothing of “wrath” or “sin.” And what does “God” mean in Prokopios, anyway? Throughout the Wars, including the narrative of the plague, Prokopios constructs a careful argument about the fundamentally amoral nature of the power that he believed was really dominant in the world: this was tyche, “fortune” or “chance.” For obvious reasons, he did not make this argument explicit, but there are so many passages in his work whose theological implications are, from an Orthodox point of view, so utterly bizarre that one is entitled to be suspicious.38 One of these occurs in connection with the plague. Consider how carefully the moral logic is parsed here. The wicked, he says, gave up their lawlessness and took up religion, but not because they had learned wisdom or had suddenly become lovers of virtue, for it is impossible to change qualities that are instilled in people by nature (physis) or habituation (didaskalia) over a long period of time, unless some divine influence has touched them. No, they changed their ways now because of fear and what they took to be necessity. But when they had survived the disease, they reverted to their previous way of life and became even worse than before. In fact, it would be entirely correct to say that “either because of some chance (tyche) or providence (pronoia)” the disease carefully picked out the worst and allowed them to live (2.23.14–16).

37

For the plague, see Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea, 26–27; for classicism in general, see ibid., chap. 1. Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea, 210–13, citing previous bibliography.

38

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This argument has many interesting implications, though in accordance with his pedagogical intentions (and concern for his safety), Prokopios leaves the reader to think them through for himself. First, it refutes the belief of Malalas, Yuhannan, and others that (temporary) terror can lead to moral reform. The kind of religion that wicked men practice in times of crisis has nothing to do with wisdom or the love of virtue. This insight completely reverses the “standard” belief about God’s punitive measures in this world, and Prokopios is no doubt responding to such views as were put forth at the time orally before they made their way into the Christian chronicles. Second, the implication of this passage is that the God to which Prokopios seems to ascribe the plague at the beginning of his account is not the same as the Christian God. Only if they had been touched by God, he says, would wicked men have been changed permanently, but they were not so changed, which means that the plague cannot have been sent by a benevolent God intent on reforming wicked men. That is why, toward the end of his argument, Prokopios allows the reader to wonder whether all this happened by chance or by providence, an alternative not present in his opening formulation, but a standard device by which the historian points his readers in the right direction after making a pietistic opening (cf. 2.22.18 for another “unexpected” alternative). Third, Prokopios’s statement that the plague chose the worse men and allowed them to live reinforces the suspicion that he cannot have believed that the Christian God (or any like god) was responsible for the plague. It also introduces a new element to the discussion of the Byzantine reaction to the plague in the sixth century, namely irony. For in the next paragraph, Prokopios casually mentions that the emperor Justinian had become ill too (2.23.20). The emperor is the only person in the whole narrative whom Prokopios specifically designates as having survived the plague.39 Is the reader meant to think of the most wicked men whom the plague picked out and allowed to survive? Prokopios was not a lone skeptic in an age of fear-induced pietism. His Wars was continued thirty years later by Agathias of Myrina (in western Asia Minor), a poet and lawyer in Constantinople who turned his hand to historiography. Sharing Prokopios’s classical outlook, Agathias wrote accounts of the earthquakes of the early 550s, the earthquake of Constantinople in 557, and the outbreak of the plague in 558,40 mixing Thucydidean scientific agnosticism with philosophy, pietism, and sociology. To a certain degree, Agathias transferred to the earthquakes what he found in Prokopios’s account of the plague. For instance, he describes in detail the marked rise

39

For Prokopios on Justinian, see Kaldellis, Procopius of Caesarea, chap. 4. Agathias Histories 2.15–16, 5.3–5, and 5.10, respectively; in Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum Libri Quinque, ed. R. Keydell; and Agathias: The Histories, trans. Frendo. 40

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in justice and piety that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe and that many assisted the needy. But all reverted to their former way of life when the terror passed. That behavior, he notes, “could not properly be called justice or firm and active piety of the sort which stamps itself on the mind through the operation of sound convictions steadfastly held…. It is in fact only under the stimulus of sudden fear and for as long as the emergency lasts that we make a few reluctant and perfunctory concessions to the ideal of charity” (5.5.6). This conclusion is essentially homage to Prokopios. But Agathias had more use for fear than had Prokopios. He devotes a whole chapter (5.4) to the death of the wicked senator Anatolios in the earthquake of 557, because many believed that it represented divine retribution for his sins. This kind of reasoning was not uncommon. Yuhannan, for instance, gloated over the hideous death of Euphrasios, the Chalkedonian bishop of Antioch, in the great earthquake that struck that city in 526. Like those who, according to Agathias, rejoiced at the death of the wicked senator Anatolios, Yuhannan ascribes Euphrasios’s death directly to God and claims that “the believers remembered the impudence of his evil deeds” (46–47). But here we see what a philosophical difference a classical education could still make. Agathias rejects the popular ascription of Anatolios’s death to God. Earthquakes, he reminds us, do not discriminate between good and evil people. Still, he continues, it is not altogether a bad thing if people should believe that they do, “since the fear of dying a horrible death may have a deterrent effect on some wrongdoers” (5.4.5). Agathias, then, advocates the use of “noble lies,” like those devised by Plato (and indeed Agathias shows himself familiar with Plato throughout the History). His advocacy of such pious lies, however, should caution the reader against accepting at face value any instances where Agathias attributes events to God in his own voice without raising the possibility of pious fraud. In the end, all that may remain secure in his digressions on the earthquakes of the 550s is the belief that they were due to “nature” (physis).41 Agathias was operating on a different level of philosophical sophistication than were Malalas, Yuhannan, and even Evagrius. Having surveyed the learned classes’ diverse reactions to the plague, it is interesting to look again at Gregorios of Nyssa’s shopkeepers. How was their religion affected by such events? What refuge could it provide? The evidence is inconsistent. Two very different sources, the Latin epic poet Corippus and the Syriac monk Yuhannan, depict a society driven by greed (though one in which the laws of property were apparently still observed). But the evidence they cite is weak and forced, adduced to justify their a priori negative view of their contemporaries or to promote a moral agenda. 41

For a thorough discussion, see Kaldellis, “Historical and Religious Views of Agathias,” 206–52.

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Prokopios and Agathias, by contrast, present a plausible picture: the majority of the population suddenly found faith and practiced justice and charity, even if only to lapse into their former habits when the crisis was over. This picture harmonizes with the general impression gained from putting all of the sources together. There was no breakdown in public order, no rise in violent crime, no popular discontent, and only venial opportunism; in other words, nothing like the lawlessness and disregard for others that Thucydides adduces for the plague of 430 BC (2.53). Overall, the Byzantines responded calmly and with compassion, though certainly they were numbed and depressed by the magnitude of the horror. Their doctors, many of whom were public servants, tended the sick without pause or fear, while others labored to clear the city of bodies. Justinian made money available for both purposes. When the earth shook, many Byzantines uttered pious cries of surprise and looked to the heavens to propitiate God.42 When they were infected with the plague and began to see frightful apparitions, they tried to exorcise them by calling out holy names—vainly, according to Prokopios.43 In both kinds of crisis, many fled to the churches, a zealous few prostrating themselves before the altar; some slaves even abandoned their masters to do so. Ioannes, bishop of Thessalonica, claimed that in the recent outbreak the citizens packed the churches, especially that of St. Demetrios himself, who healed many by appearing to them in visions. Almost all of those who stayed home, he adds with satisfaction, died.44 Many who had not set foot in a church before would have fled there during the plague. But in 541 their hopes were in vain, at least according to the skeptical Prokopios (for the plague) and Agathias (for the earthquakes of the 550s). Even Yuhannan notes that they died in droves in the churches, but his attitude is not ironic; his point is rather to emphasize how universal and pitiless God’s wrath was. 45 Many also turned to the saints, both living and dead, for advice and prayer, and often found healing and a halt to further progress of the plague, at least according to hagiographic sources.46 The “Great Old Man” Barsanouphios, a wise hermit who would answer the questions of other monks from his retreat near Gaza, was once petitioned “in regard to the world,” namely, regarding the imminent destruction of the world in the plague. He replied that “there are many who entreat God’s compassion to cease his wrath from the world; and none is more compassionate than God, who wants to have mercy but is opposed by the multitude of sins that occur 42 Agathias Histories 5.3.4–6. For Byzantine reactions to earthquakes in more detail, see Dagron, “Quand la terre tremble…”; and Vercleyen, “Tremblements de terre à Constantinople.” 43 Procopius Wars 2.22.11. 44Ioannes of Thessalonica, Miracles of St. Demetrios: Miracle 3 (37–41); ed. and trans. Lemerle, 78–80. 45 Procopius Wars 2.22.11; Agathias Histories 5.3.6–8 and 2.16.3; and Yuhannan Chronicle 75, 88. 46 See Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence, 150–151, to which list Evagrius Ecclesiastical History 4.35 (the relics of St. Thomas) should be added.

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in the world.” He directed his fellow monks to seek the prayers of three holy men in particular: “There are three men, perfect in God, who…keep the whole world from complete and sudden annihilation. Through their prayers, God combines his chastisement with his mercy.”47 For the sake of these three men, apparently, God had not yet entirely destroyed humanity. Yet, as with the chroniclers and historians examined above, the reaction of the empire’s population was not absolutely consistent, though the majority probably conformed to the orthodox cultural model outlined above. Yuhannan tells of a town near Palestine that reverted to pagan worship, which only a few townsmen had practiced in secret before then. 48 According to Agathias, the earthquakes opened the market for apocalyptic scenarios, charlatans, and other prophets (as Thucydides had noted for the plague in Athens).49 Agathias cites two explanations for the plague that were current in his day: the first had to do with the “world cycles” attested in ancient Egyptian oracles and by the astrologers of Persia; the second was that God’s anger was punishing mankind for its sins.50 No doubt the former was confined to a small number of dabblers in the occult, while the latter was believed by the majority of the Christian population. But this does not mean that the majority behavior was predictable. While some turned to holy men, according to Yuhannan the people of Constantinople somehow got it into their heads that the plague was carried around by the clergy and those itinerant black-cloaked monks, so when they saw one in the streets they screamed and ran away. Presumably Yuhannan himself was treated in this way, so he ascribed this belief—which was not at all to his liking and which persisted for two years after the initial outbreak—to rumors spread by demons.51 At Thessalonica, many became angry with God for sending such a terrible affliction; surely, they were not inclined to sympathize with God’s anger. Evagrius was tempted by “diabolical” thoughts even to the point of “blasphemy” when his daughter died while the children of a pagan neighbor did not. Much did not make sense about this plague, and it was all that preachers and monks could do to maintain a semblance of theological order. In short, the shopkeepers and money changers of 542 most likely did not display the theological uniformity that Gregorios of Nyssa encountered in 381. The burning issue was now a plague, not a council, and Byzantine theology had not formulated a coherent answer to such events. It was the state that led the response, not the church, while the population coped 47 Barsanouphios and Ioannes of Gaza, Letter 569; in Barsanuphe et Jean de Gaza: Correspondance, ed. Neyt and de Angelis-Noah, 2.2.730–735; and Letters from the Desert, Barsanuphius and John, trans. Chryssavgis, 153–54. 48Yuhannan Chronicle 79–80. 49 Agathias Histories 5.5.2. Cf. Thucydides History 2.54. 50 Agathias Histories 5.10.5–6. 51 Yuhannan Chronicle 97–98. Cf. Procopius Wars 2.22.21.

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mentally, emotionally, and theologically in whatever way seemed best to each, even blaming those plague-carrying monks for spreading the disease. Among the literate classes especially there was a wide range of reactions. This diversity was not merely a function of the diverse languages, genres, educational backgrounds, and philosophical goals of the authors, but of strictly personal factors as well. The skeptics Prokopios and Agathias, who were coming from the same classical background, apparently differed regarding the degree to which fear promoted moral improvement. Both Yuhannan and Evagrius wrote ecclesiastical histories at the same time and used the same source, Malalas, but their outlook was fundamentally different. Even those who believed that the plague constituted divine punishment or led to it rarely bothered to specify what had caused it. When they did, they did not always agree. Yuhannan and Corippus took aim at trivial acts of financial self-protection, while Justinian had preemptively blamed sodomy and blasphemy. The theology, or rather the moral logic, behind these explanations was not always coherent, and belies the expectation that the Byzantines had a solid understanding of their God’s actions (as opposed to his nature). And the main and most reliable source for the plague and the age as a whole, Prokopios, an author who personally witnessed much of what he described and was very well connected at the court and to powerful men in the provinces, the author on whose history all modern reconstructions are fundamentally based, offers in his account a subtle refutation of what many take to be the common outlook of all Byzantines. There, the classical traditions of precise medical observation, careful organization of material, a dispassionate outlook, subtle irony and rejection of superstition, and the pedagogical imperative to help the readers think for themselves rather than tell them what they ought to believe were still very much alive in sixth-century Byzantium.

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ABBREVIATION PG

Patrologiae cursus completus. Series graeca. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1857–86.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agathias. Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum libriquinque. Edited by Rudolf Keydell. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967. ———. Agathias: The Histories. Translated by Joseph D. Frendo. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976. Alexander, Paul. The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition. Edited by Dorothy deF. Abrahamse. Berkeley and Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985. Allen, Pauline. Evagrius Scholastikos the Church Historian. Études et documents 41. Louvain: Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 1981. ———. “The “Justinianic” Plague.” Byzantion 49 (1979): 5–20. ———. “Zachariah Scholasticus and the Historia Ecclesiastica of Evagrius Scholasticus.” Journal of Theological Studies 31 (1980): 471–88. Baldwin, Barry. Review of Procopius of Caesarea, by Anthony Kaldellis. New England Classical Journal 31.4 (2004): 477–79. Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Barsanouphios and Ioannes of Gaza. Correspondance. Vol 2, Aux cénobites. Part 2, Lettres 399– 616. ———. Letters from the Desert, by John Chryssaugis. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladmir Seminary Press, 2003. Beck, Hans Georg. Byzantinisches Erotikon: Orthodoxie, Literatur, Gesellschaft. Munich: Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: C. H. Beck, 1984. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Cameron, Averil. Procopius and the Sixth Century. London: Routledge, 1996. Corippus, Flavius Cresconius. Flavii Cresconii Corippii Iohannidos: seu De bellis libycis libri 8. Edited by James Diggle and Francis R. D. Goodyear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. ———. The Iohannis, or, De belli libycis of Flavius Cresconius Corippus. Translated by George W. Shea. Studies in Classics 7. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. Croke, Brian. “Malalas, the Man and His Work.” In Jeffreys, Croke, and Scott, Studies in John Malalas, 1–25. Dagron, Gilbert. Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. “Quand la terre tremble…” Travaux et Mémoires 8 (1981): 87–103. Efthymiades, Stephanos. “A Day and Ten Months in the Life of a Lonely Bachelor: The Other Byzantium in Miracula S. Artemii 18 and 22.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 1–26. Evagrius. The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus. Translated by Michael Whitby. Translated Texts for Historians 33. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000. ———. The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia. Edited by Joseph Bidez and Léon Parmentier. London: Methuen, 1898. Reprint, Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1964. Evans, J. A. S. The Age of Justinian: The Circumstances of Imperial Power. London: Routledge, 1996.

Literature of Plague and Anxieties of Piety in Sixth-Century Byzantium Genesios, Ioseph. Iosephi Genesii regum libri quattuor. Edited by A. Lesmüller and Hans Thurn. Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae 14. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edited by David Womersley. London: Penguin Classics, 1994. Gray, Patrick T. R. “The Legacy of Chalcedon: Christological Problems and Their Significance.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, edited by Michael Maas, 215–38. Greatrex, Geoffery. “Byzantium in the East in the Sixth Century.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, edited by Michael Maas, 477–509. Honoré, Tony. Tribonian. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Horden, Peregrine. “Mediterranean Plague in the Age of Justinian.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, edited by Michael Maas, 134–60. Hunger, Herbert. Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner. 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1978. Ioannes of Thessalonike. “The Miracles of St. Demetrios: Miracle 3.” In Les plus anciens recueils des miracles de Saint Démétrius et la pénétration des Slaves dans les Balkans. Edited and translated by Paul Lemerle. Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1979–81. Jeffreys, Elizabeth. “Malalas’ Sources.” In Jeffreys, Croke, and Scott, Studies in John Malalas, 167–216. Jeffreys, Elizabeth, Brian Croke, and Roger Scott, eds. Studies in John Malalas. Sydney: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1990. Jones, A. H. M. The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey. 2 vols. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Justinian. Novellae. Edited by Rudolph Schöll and Wilhelm Kroll. Corpus iuris civilis 3. 7th ed. Berlin: Wiedman, 1959. Kaldellis, Anthony. “The Historical and Religious Views of Agathias: A Reinterpretation.” Byzantion 69 (1999): 206–52. ———. Procopius of Caesarea: Tyranny, History, and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. La vie ancienne de S. Syméon Stylite le Jeune (521–592). Edited and Translated by Paul van den Ven. 2 vols. Subsidia Hagiographica 32. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962. Maas, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. MacMullen, Ramsay. Voting for God in the Early Church Councils. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Malalas, John. The Chronicle of John Malalas. Translated by Elizabeth Jeffreys et al. Melourne: Australian Association of Byzantine Studies, 1986. ———. Ioannis Malalae Chronographia. Edited by Hans Thurn. Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae. Series Berolinensis 35. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000. Mango, Cyril. “Byzantinism and Romantic Hellenism.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 29–43. Marincola, John. Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McGuckin, John A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.

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Anthony Kaldellis Michael the Syrian. Chronique de Michel le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche (1166–1199). Edited and translated by Jean Baptiste Chabot. Paris, 1901. Reprint, Brussels: Culture of Civilisation, 1963. Miller, Timothy S. The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Modéran, Yves. “Corippe et l’occupation byzantine de l’Afrique: Pour une nouvelle lecture de la Johannide.” Antiquités africaines 22 (1986): 195–212. Pazdernik, Charles. “Justinianic Ideology and the Power of the Past.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian, edited by Michael Maas, 185–212. Photius. Photius Bibliothèque. Edited and translated by René Henry. Vol 3. Paris: Édition les Belles lettres, 1960. Reed, Mary, and Eric Mayer. Two for Joy: A John the Eunuch Mystery. Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2000. Scarborough, John. “Procopius, Theodora, and Aetius of Amida: Some Connections.” In Thirty-First Annual Byzantine Studies Conference: Abstracts, 48. Athens: University of Georgia, 2005. Scott, Roger. “Malalas and Justinian’s Codification.” In Byzantine Papers: Proceedings of the First Australian Byzantine Studies Conference, edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, and Ann Moffatt, 12–31. Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1981. ———. “Malalas, The Secret History, and Justinian’s Propaganda.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 39 (1985): 99–109. Scott, S. P., trans. The Civil Law. 17 vols. Cincinnati: Central Trust Company, 1932. Setton, Kenneth M. Christian Attitude towards the Emperor in the Fourth Century, Especially as Shown in Addresses to the Emperor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. Skedros, James C. Saint Demetrios of Thessaloniki: Civic Patron and Divine Protector, 4th–7th Centuries C.E. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999. Stathakopoulos, Dionysios Ch. Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Theophanes the Confessor. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813. Translated and edited by Cyril A. Mango and Roger Scott. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. ———. Theophanis Chronographia. Edited by Carl de Boor. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1883. Theophanes Continuatus: Iohannes Cameniata, Symeon Magister, Georgius Monachus. Edited by Immanuel Bekker. Corpus scriptorum historiae byzantinae 33. Bonn: E. Weber, 1838. Treadgold, Warren. The Early Byzantine Historians. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Vercleyen, F. “Tremblements de terre à Constantinople: L’impact sur la population.” Byzantion 58 (1988): 155–71. Witakowski, Witold. “Malalas in Syriac.” In Studies in John Malalas, edited by Elizabeth Jeffreys, Brian Croke, and Roger Scott, 299–310. ———, ed. and trans. Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre: Chronicle Part III. Translated Texts for Historians 22. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996. Young, F. M. “Insight or Incoherence? The Greek Fathers on God and Evil?” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 24 (1973): 113–26. Zacharias. The Syriac Chronicle Known as That of Zachariah of Mytilene. Translated by F. J. Hamilton and E. W. Brooks. London: Methuen, 1899.

CHAPTER

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Mice, Arrows, and Tumors MEDIEVAL PLAGUE ICONOGRAPHY NORTH OF THE ALPS

Pamela Berger

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, the fear of plague has once again become an issue of global dimension. The iconographic symbol of the current plague is the bird, traditionally symbolic in Western art of God bringing humankind to safety, as in the story of Noah, or the Holy Spirit. The Middle Ages evolved a variety of explanations for the causes of the plague and created symbols to denote those causes. An iconography for the results of the plague also developed, including imagery of the sick and the dying. 1 This essay will explore some of the pictorial and textual assumptions about the causes of the plague and the symbolic language developed to represent it. It will also call attention to a few unpublished late medieval manuscripts that depict themes relating to the ramifications of the Black Death of 1348–49. In 1894, Alexander Yersin identified the pathogen that caused the plague, and shortly thereafter, scientists showed that fleas escaping from dead rats were the source of the disease. It is often assumed that since the etiology of plague was not known until the late nineteenth century, people did not connect it with rats.2 Well before the outbreak of the Black Death, however, there was some understanding that rats were connected to the disease. The evidence is found in medieval manuscripts recounting and illustrating an episode in the Bible that has been termed the Plague of the

1

Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence; and Friedman, “‘He Hath a Thousand Slayn.’” Mormando, “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy”; and Neustatter, “Mice in Plague Pictures,” 105. The Poussin painting The Plague at Ashod, which includes rats, has long been known as the exception to the idea that artists as well as medical men were unaware of the connection between rats and the plague. For an in-depth analysis of Poussin’s plague painting, see the essay in this volume by Elisabeth Hipp. 2

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Philistines, also called the Plague of Ashdod (1 Samuel 5–6). The Philistines had captured the ark of the covenant and placed it in the temple of their god Dagon. The next day, they discovered that the statue of Dagon had fallen on its face before the ark. The Lord caused a plague to fall upon five Philistine cities in retribution for their having taken the ark. Rats figure prominently in a number of medieval manuscripts that depict this Plague of the Philistines. Textual as well as visual sources can demonstrate how the connection betweens rats and plague originated and how the connection was transmitted. One of the illustrations that show rats causing this plague is in a French picture Bible (known as the Morgan Bible) completed at the court of Louis IX sometime between 1244 and 1254 (fig. 2.1).3 In the upper left quadrant are five pedimented structures meant to represent the five Philistine cities ravaged by the plague. Bodies are strewn at the base of the walls and portals, and rats swarm over them. The corpses include the unbearded young as well as the old and a peasant wearing a cap as well as city dwellers. The rats bite them all over, especially on the necks and armpits, places where the buboes of bubonic plague are found, though other parts of the body are attacked as well. Blood drips from the bites. Beside the representations of the five cities stand six men: five stand for the leaders of the Philistines and one is the priest or diviner counseling them on how to rid themselves of the plague. One of the textual sources available to the master directing the illustration of this Bible was the Vulgate, translated from Hebrew to Latin by Jerome sometime between 382 and 405 CE.4 Jerome’s Vulgate makes no mention of rats in this part of the story (1 Sam. 5), 5 but says only that God struck the Philistines “in the secret parts of the buttocks” (percussit in secretiori parte natium), a phrase that has generally been taken to mean that God struck them with emerods, or hemorrhoids. 6 The oldest surviving version of this episode, however, is in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible dating from the third century BCE. The Septuagint does connect rats with the plague that struck the Philistines. In 1 Samuel 5:6, the text reads, “The hand of the Lord was heavy upon Ashdod, and he brought evil upon them, and it burst out upon them into the ships and rats sprang up in the midst of their country, and there was a great tumult of death in the city.”7 Further along, the text recounts 3 Neustatter, “Mice in Plague Pictures,” 110 and fig. 2; Weiss, Die Kreuzritterbibel, 3:238; and Plummer and Cockerell, Old Testament Miniatures, 108. 4 There were earlier, Old Latin versions of the Bible, which Jerome’s text gradually replaced. Dines, Septuagint, 10. There were also later Latin versions, among them the Clementine Vulgate, authorized by Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605). 5 Later in the text rats are mentioned as offerings. See 1 Samuel 6:5, 11–12, 15, 17–18. 6 The Authorized (King James) Version uses the Middle English word “emerods” (1 Sam. 5:6). 7 I would like to thank Dia Philippides for her help with some parts of the translation of the Greek Septuagint. The English translation that includes the words “burst out upon them into the ships” is XXXXXXX

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 2.1. Anonymous, The Plague of the Philistines, ca. 1250. Manuscript illumination, Ms. 638, fol. 21v. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Photo reproduced by permission from The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY.

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that the Philistines sent the ark away to another city, Gath, where also “the hand of the Lord came upon the city, and there was very great confusion. And he struck the men of the city both small and great, and struck them in their buttocks. And the Gittites made for themselves images of tumors.” 8 Ultimately, the ark was present in five Philistine cities and in each one “there was very great confusion in all the city, when the ark of the God of Israel entered there, and those who lived and died not were struck with tumors; and the cry of the city went up to heaven” (1 Sam. 5:12). It has long been recognized by medical authorities that the disease described in this portion of the Septuagint is most likely the bubonic plague.9 The epidemic spread along with the transporting of the ark, so in epidemiological terms, one might hypothesize that either those who brought the ark or the animals involved in the transport served to communicate the plague; it attacked the “hidden parts,” that is, the groin, as do the plague buboes; the lesions caused by the epidemic could be described as having a definite shape; the disease was very deadly and caused social upheaval; the Hebrew word used to describe it, apholim, is included in a list of skin diseases in Deuteronomy 28:27; and mice are associated with the outbreak.10 The link in the Septuagint between mice and the plague of the Philistines is taken up by Josephus (37 CE–ca. 100 CE) in his Antiquities of the Jews (6.1). Josephus’s text adds a description of how the Philistines suffered from diarrhea and vomiting, symptoms consonant with the early stages of bubonic plague:11 “At length God sent a very destructive disease upon the city and country of Ashdod [Philistines], for they died of the dysentery or flux, a sore distemper…. They brought up their entrails, and vomited up what they had eaten, and what was entirely corrupted by the disease. And as to the fruits of their country, a great multitude of mice arose out of the earth and hurt them, and spared neither the plants nor the fruits.” 12 8

problematic. Elsewhere the word “ships” is translated “buttocks.” G. R. Driver (“The Plague of the Philistines,” 52) says that the Greek word that has been translated into the English as “ships” actually “means the male privies [buttocks], just as the Latin navis is occasionally used to denote the pudenda muliebria.” There was a confusion in the Latin because navis -is, f., means “ship”; nati sunt from nascor means “to spring up”; and natis -is, f., or nates -ium means “rump or buttocks.” The problem may stem from the original Hebrew. Scholars have long realized the 1 Samuel 5 texts represent an interweaving of several traditions, probably in the original Hebrew as well as in the Septuagint and Vulgate. They suggest that the text Jerome was looking at was garbled as well. See Conrad, “Biblical Tradition for the Plague of the Philistines,” 283; and Geyer, “Mice and Rites in I Samuel V–VI,” 293. 8 This sentence, “the Gittites made for themselves images of tumors,” has also been translated as “they made for themselves comfortable seats”; Driver, “Plague of the Philistines,” 51. See below for the texts of Comestor and the Psalter of Saint Louis. 9 Eichler, “Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6,” 162–64. 10 In Hebrew, the same word is used for mice and rats; Eichler, “Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6,” 162. 11 Eichler, “Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6,” 161. 12 Though Josephus wrote in Greek and Aramaic, his texts were translated into Latin in the Middle Ages.

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The Septuagint and Josephus accounts that connect mice with the plague of the Philistines do not appear in the earliest extant Hebrew version of the Bible that has come down to us, the Masoretic Text, dating from about the tenth century. But the idea that rats were linked with the deaths that raged in the city apparently made sense to the writers of the Talmud, which was set down between 200 and 500 CE. Lewis Ginzberg has summarized the various Talmudic sources, which reveal that, as a punishment for the Philistines, mice were crawling “forth out of the earth, and jerking the entrails out of the bodies of the Philistines while they eased nature. If the Philistines sought to protect themselves by using brass vessels, the vessels burst at the touch of the mice, and, as before, the Philistines were at their mercy.”13 These Talmudic sources no doubt influenced Rashi, the great eleventh and twelfth century biblical commentator who lived in Troyes, France. Though the Masoretic Hebrew text available to Rashi does not mention rats as connected to the disease, Rashi incorporated into his commentary the earlier Talmudic explanations. Evidently, linking rats to the plague made more sense to him than the garbled “plague of hemorrhoids” transmitted by the Masoretic. Rashi elaborates on the Hebrew word for “hemorrhoids” used in the Masoretic Text.14 He writes in his commentary that God smote the Philistines with a “plague of the rectum. Mice would enter their recta, disembowel them, and crawl out.” Thus, the link between mice and the plague was well established in the Latin and Hebrew textual traditions of the Middle Ages. These texts may help illuminate certain other details in the Morgan manuscript. For instance, in the next episode of the story, illustrated in the upper right (1 Sam. 6), the Philistine priest has told the rulers not to return the ark empty, but rather to provide an offering of five golden tumors and five golden rats.15 The ark and the golden offerings are to be set up on a wagon drawn by nursing cows without their calves. If the cows drawing the ark go toward the Hebrews rather than toward their calves, the Philistines will know that the hand of God had brought on the affliction. The ark of the covenant is shown as a Gothic reliquary with crosses as finials. The cart

13 Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 4:62–63; 6:223. Ginzberg also cites (ibid., 6:223) a tenth-century Jewish source, Seder Eliyahu Rabbah, a commentary on a midrash that also “speaks of the visitation of the mice, as well as of the plague causing death among men, women, and children.” 14 In synagogue readings when this section is read aloud, the word t’chorim is substituted for the word in the Masoretic text, apholim, because, as Talmudic commentators explain, apholim relates to unspeakable things: Rashi’s Commentary, online at Chabad.org, Library, Judaica Press, Complete Tanach, The Bible (with Rashi) Nevi’im, Shmuel I, chap. 5: http://www.chabad.org/library/article.asp?AID=15834&show rashi=true (April 2006). See also Eichler, “Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6,” 160. 15 The illustrator was probably not familiar with the practice, apparently recorded in this section of the book of Samuel, of creating models of the causes of illness. Healing sanctuaries from the Greek and Roman world are replete with models in terra cotta, stone, or wood of limbs and organs exhibiting tumors that caused disease and death. Those frequenting the sanctuaries hoped to cure the very afflictions on display; Berger, “Sculpted Body Parts,” 1.

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is being drawn away from the calves, which are depicted under an arch beneath the Philistines. Beside the ark are the offerings, but instead of golden rats there are gray living rats, and they are crawling in and out of metal vessels. It is curious that metal vessels are mentioned only in the Talmudic tradition, where the brass vessels into which the Philistines are relieving themselves miraculously burst at the touch of the mice, presumably a miracle to further the suffering. The notion that the mice, the offering of the Philistines, would be alive is contrary to all texts and is pictured nowhere else. It has been suggested that the mice are shown as living because of a misreading of aureos (gold), which may have been mistakenly read as vivos (living).16 At any rate, here the containers are interpreted as carrying away the live rats whose bites are depicted as causing the plague. In the bottom two images, the Israelites put the ark and the gold vessels containing the living rats on a great stone and, to the right, they make a burnt offering of the cart and the nursing cows. Surrounding the Morgan illustration is a summary Latin text added in Bologna around 1300. The commentator thought the golden vessels were part of the offering, but he clearly connected the mice with the plague when he described the picture as showing the “pestis magna,” the great plague that smote the city because of the “murium inaestimabilis multitudo,” the innumerable multitude of mice. When they were “unable to sustain such a pestilence any longer, the Philistines removed the ark of God from that place, having added golden vessels to soothe the anger of the God of Israel.”17 The Farsi and Judeo-Arabic texts, which also surround the picture, were added in the seventeenth century. They are briefer and do not mention rodents. The Septuagint-Josephus-Talmudic tradition was followed by one of the most important medieval churchmen, Peter Comestor, who, during the second part of the twelfth century, composed an elaborate commentary on the Bible in Latin, the Historia Scholastica. In addition to the Septuagint, Comestor specifically cites Josephus in his account of the Plague of the Philistines.18 Comestor writes that mice sprang up in the fields and that they gnawed away at the entrails of the Philistines. This detail is important for an understanding of another manuscript that illustrates the Plague of the Philistines, a thirteenth-century Bible moralisée (the Moralized Bible), where rats are shown biting people and causing the plague (figs. 2.2 and 2.3). The Bible moralisée was written in French in Paris between 1215 and 1230. In addition to Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, it is based on a loose paraphrase 16

Plummer and Cockerell, Old Testament Miniatures, 108. Weiss, Die Kreuzritterbibel,1:312. 18 Peter Comestor, Liber I Regum, 8, in PL 198:1300–1301: “Quod Josephus dicit factum ex crudeli passione dysenteriae, ita ut putrefacta egerent intestina, et mures ebullientes de agris corrodebant extales eorum.” 17

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of the Vulgate as well as the Josephus text. It greatly expands the plague iconography, for it illustrates the story and then moralizes it from the point of view of contemporary events. For instance, the wicked Philistines in this narrative are interpreted as being the Saracens (the medieval term for Muslims), against whom the French were fighting the Crusades. In addition, the moralized texts and images present a version of the story from a Christological perspective. These proclivities become clear right at the top of the page in the first four images (fig. 2.2). The text on the left reads, “Here the Saracens (Li Sarrazin) come and take the ark that they had conquered and put it in their mosque (mahomerie/mahommer) beside one of their gods named Dagon.”19 In the roundel on the right “their god Dagon [has] fallen to the ground, the head and hands and feet broken off.” The Saracens who have put the ark next to Dagon are likened to devils, who put the holy church next to Beelzebub. When Dagon falls to the ground, it is said to be like the holy church taking away the power of the devil. The story of the plague itself commences in the third roundel down on the left. The French text on the side indicates that since the Saracens have taken the ark against God’s will, God is angered and “raz de terre ,” rats, enter into them and “los mangerent les entrailles,” eat their entrails. This is a loose French translation of the Comestor Latin text “corrodebant extales eorum.” The image shows large rats that seem to be springing up from the ground and leaping into the groins of the Saracens. Unlike the Morgan illustration, which has the rats biting at the necks and armpits, here, influenced by the Comestor, the rats specifically target the pubic area. This interpretation of the tradition allowed for the revealing contemporary analogy depicted in the accompanying roundels. The Saracens who suffered from the rats leaping up to bite their sexual parts are likened to the “wicked prelates and the wicked bishops who hold rents…through simony, and God is angered with them and they are struck by sodomy which eats them and their loins and their entrails.”20 The roundel illustrating this moralized interpretation shows the bishops and clerics drawing close young boys, hugging them, and caressing their cheeks. Two of the boys appear to be tonsured, which means that they are young clerics. One bishop tilts up a boy’s face in an endearing gesture. The bishop in the center pushes away the personification of church, Ecclesia, who bows her head in dismay. The reason this particular kind of moralization could be used here is that Comestor writes that the mice sprung up and that they struck the “secret parts of their buttocks”; however, he goes on to add, like Josephus, that they were suffering from “crudeli passione dysenteriae” (the cruel suffering of dysentery). Since the Comestor language paraphrased here translates the

19 20

Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, ed. and trans. Guest, 108–9. Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, ed. and trans. Guest, 108.

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Fig. 2.2. Anonymous, The Ark in the Temple of Dagon and the Suffering of the Philistines, 1215–30. Manuscript illumination, Bible moralisée, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, fol. 36r. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Photo reproduced by permission from ÖNB/ Bildarchiv+ImageID.

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Josephus account of the Philistines’ suffering with the words “ex crudeli passione,” it allowed for an allegorizing of suffering, passion, in Latin, not just in the sense of physical suffering, but also in the medieval French sense of passion or “violent love.” In the moralized tale, God strikes the prelates with the suffering (passion), which makes them engage in sodomy with young boys. The “passion,” sodomy, “eats them and their loins and their entrails,” just as the rats ate the entrails of the Philistines. The next part of the biblical story is in the third roundel from the top on the right. The Philistines/Saracens repent and make offerings of rats of gold and of five pieces of gold “and the rats fall from them and they are cured of this plague.” The rats of gold are being placed in a box, and above it on another platter are what the accompanying text calls five “pieces d’or” (pieces of gold). The Comestor Latin version that influenced this paraphrase recounts that in the container next to the ark were “quinque annulos aureos et quinque mures auros.”21 No doubt the Comestor text specifying “five golden rings” influenced this depiction of circular gold forms with black holes in the middle, though how they were understood to relate to the initial suffering remains unclear, unless one evokes the notion of hemorrhoids. At the feet of the Saracens, the rats are falling away. The final text and image at the bottom right complete the allegory. The Saracens’ repentance and offering signify (senefie) the ecclesiastics who repent and make offerings of the five senses (de V. sens); Jesus removes them from sodomy and they push the boys away. In a clever allegorization of the biblical account, the author of the moralized story used the five offerings from the five Philistine cities to stand for the five senses. As the Philistines had to give up gold for the creation of the offerings, the bishops had to give up the sensual pleasures of the five senses stemming from the sodomy. In the visual rendition of the bishops’ repentance, the boys, like the rats, are shown falling down. It is apparent that, as in other sections of the Bible Moralisée, the text and images here have been interpreted to reflect concerns of the day. The theologians who dictated the iconographic program for this Bible directed the artist or artists to draw images that were consonant with the theologians’ point of view and their interpretation of God’s plan. God’s will was to punish the Saracens with rats that would eat their entrails. In an analogous manner, God punishes the prelates with a desire that “eats them.” In a curious twist, the Philistines/Saracens are sometimes depicted as wearing a tight-fitting or slightly pointed cap, an attire common for Jews in this manuscript. So the Philistines, who are called Saracens, are sometimes depicted as Jews. 21 The Septuagint specified that “five golden tumors” and “five golden rats” should go into the ark. The Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 6.1.2) has it that five golden images and five golden rats should be sent. In the Vulgate, they are designated as “similitudinem anorum” (models of anuses).

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The use of this combined Philistine/Saracen/Jew iconography continues on the verso, where again the Lord’s enemies are being struck with plague (fig. 2.3). In the visual tradition that the Morgan manuscript followed, the ark was given back to the people of Beth Shemesh without indicating that many of the Israelites themselves were struck with disease. The Septuagint, Vulgate, Hebrew, and Comestor texts tell the same story and attribute the plague to the Israelites’ folly of having looked into the ark (1 Sam. 6:1, Septuagint): “And the sons of Jeconiah were not pleased with the men of Beth Shemesh because they looked into the ark of the Lord; and the Lord struck fifty thousand and seventy men among them. And the people mourned, because the Lord had inflicted on the people a very great plague.” Perhaps the illustrators of the Bible moralisée could not make sense of the Lord’s striking those who presumably were his own people, so they invented their own imagery and text. In the right-hand roundel at the top, the Israelites of Beth Shemesh (1 Sam. 6:13) have been turned into the “wicked Saracens” who want to “take and guard [the ark], and God is angered with them and strikes them all.”22 The image shows God striking the Saracens by throwing down pointed arrows on their faces and hands. Arrows later become a common symbol for the agent that inflicts people with plague. The Israelites of Beth Shemesh, who welcome the ark in the text and visual tradition, have now become the Saracens/Philistines. In a double inversion, these “Saracens” are depicted as Jews commonly are, with beards, pointed hats, large grotesque noses and mouths, and grimacing expressions. The roundel below on the lower left depicts Ecclesia carried by the chariot. The cows are replaced by the bishops who are tethered to the chariot. The calves that, in the image above, were left crying after their mothers as the cows fulfilled God’s will are now replaced by tonsured youths, who had been analagous to the rats that caused the “pain” in the groin. The accompanying text tells that the churchmen “push away the boys” just as the cows ignored their calves. After being sexually used, the boys are cast aside: these “children and their parents go crying after” the prelates, but they have no recourse; the prelates “do not care nor give them anything.” The grim boys gesture in dismay as the bishops turn their backs on them. These bishops, ignoring the cries of the boys and their parents, are designated as good prelates, for they have taken on the burden of pulling the holy church. The moralizing roundel on the lower right equates the Saracens/Jews from the image above it, who wanted to take and guard the holy ark, with the wicked people, who “argue about guarding the holy Church, and God is angered with them and pushes them all into hell,” the jaws of which are spread open at the bottom of the roundel. Thus, the texts and images here 22

Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, ed. and trans. Guest, 109.

Fig. 2.3. Anonymous, The Return of the Ark, 1215–30. Manuscript illumination, Bible moralisée, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, fol. 36v. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Photo reproduced by permission from ÖNB/ Bildarchiv+ImageID.

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were selectively revised for a mid-thirteenth-century French perspective wherein Jews and Muslims are seen as enemies of Christians. Muslims threatened the Christian sites in the Holy Land, and contemporary Jews were the descendants of the murderers of Jesus. They both had to be depicted as victims of God’s wrath as he sent down the plague. As these evil peoples march into hell, they serve as warnings to the contemporary wicked who might argue about guarding the holy church. The Psalter of Saint Louis is another manuscript from the mid-thirteenth century that points to a connection between the plague and rats. At the front of this Psalter is a group of seventy-eight full-page illustrations of scenes from the Old Testament, and one of them depicts the Plague of the Philistines (fig. 2.4). On the left, the five Philistine leaders are asking their priest, who wears a pointed hat, how to rid themselves of the rats that swarm below. The medieval French text on the back of the image is written by a contemporary scribe23 and relates that “this page shows how the sons of Israel take counsel and sit on sheepskins and a plentitude of mice are among them. And how the people die in the fields.”24 Obviously, the scribe has been told to call the Philistines in the story the Israelites, not a surprising “misunderstanding” given the climate of the times. The image also depicts the Philistine priest as wearing the pointed hat typical of the Jew. As the text indicates, the Israelites/Philistines are seated on piaus de moutons (skins of sheep), presumably to ease the pain in their buttocks; the bench beneath them is covered in a white cloth that has on it the curly hairs of sheep. This detail comes from the Comestor text, which records that the Philistines “fecerunt sibi sedes pelliceas,” words not present in the medieval version of the Vulgate.25 Though the presence of the sheepskin argues for the idea that hemorrhoids are the problem, a “plentitude of mice” is clearly visible, and in the text they are mentioned next to the phrase, “the people die.” So, in the Psalter of Saint Louis the cause of the plague that besets the Philistines/Israelites and forces them to return the ark of the covenant appears to be the mice. God’s people are the Christians, who are shown on the right looking up to see the ark return. They are all wearing simple peasant caps; not a one has the pointed cap worn by the Philistine/Israelite priest and by many Jews elsewhere in this Psalter. The images in the Morgan Bible, the Bible moralisée, and the Psalter of Saint Louis depicting the Plague of the Philistines are in accord with the 23

Thomas, “Introduction et Commentaires,” 19. “En ceste page est conment li fill Israhel sont a consoill et sieent seur piaus de moutons et plentei de souris entr’eus. Et conment les gens muerent es chans et conment dues vaches traients la sainte arche et muaillent por leur veaus ensi revint la sainte arche au tabernacle.” Thomas, “Introduction et Commentaires” (author’s translation). 25 The sixteenth-century Clementine version of the Vulgate, however, does mention “fecerunt sibi sedes pelliceas” (1 Sam. 5:9). The Vulgata Clementina is available online at vulsearch.sourceforge.net/ html/1Rg.html. 24

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Fig. 2.4. Anonymous, The Plague of the Philistines, ca. 1250. Manuscript illumination, Psalter of Saint Louis, Ms. Lat. 10525, fol. 71r. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo reproduced by permission from the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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iconography favored during the reign of Louis IX. He saw the Old Testament figures not as ancestors of the contemporary Jews, but as his own ancestors and those of his French subjects. The Muslims and Jews were the enemy, and these illustrations were chosen to depict how God’s wrath punished them. Louis organized and participated in two crusades, and perhaps the choice to depict the events recounted in 1 Samuel should be seen in that context.26 The Philistines/Saracens/Jews had stolen a holy relic of the believers, and God’s power helped the Israelites/French to retrieve it, through the agency of the rat-induced plague. Certainly, Louis likewise hoped for divine intervention as he mobilized for and fought against the Muslims, whom he saw as having control of the holy relics in Jerusalem. Another strand of the tradition connecting mice with plague can be picked up in Spain, and it ultimately had an influence north of the Alps. In Pamplona, in the late twelfth-century royal chancery of King Sancho VII, called el Fuerte, in Pamplona one Petrus Facundus was responsible for directing the production of two picture Bibles, both executed in a similar style.27 The image of the Plague of the Philistines is one of over eight hundred biblical episodes depicted in each of these Bibles. One of the Pamplona Bibles now in Augsburg contains a plague narrative illustration showing three seated men holding their hands to their heads in a gesture of woe (fig. 2.5). The two figures on the left shield their genitals with their free hands, and the figure on the right points to the cause of their grief, the rat. The Latin above is partially from Vulgate 1 Samuel 5:6: “Adgravata est autem manus domini super Azotos et demolitus est eos” (The hand of the Lord was heavy upon the Azotos [Philistines]). The next part of the inscription goes on to say that “there was a springing up in the cities and fields of rats that were born in the middle of their region and there was a confusion of death.”28 This part of the text is not in the Vulgate but is in the Septuagint (1 Sam. 5:6 ). Thus, the text in the Augsburg Pamplona Bible incorporates both the Latin Vulgate and a Latin translation of the Greek Septuagint, and the image follows the text. The creatures are named by the word mures on the lower left side of the picture; the Philistines are also named: “Isti sunt azoti.” Though the two figures on the left do hold their hands over their genitals, the brief text in this picture does not include a mention of God striking the Philistines “in their secret parts.” How would this version of the Plague of the Philistines or a text dependent on it have been available to the royal chancery in Pamplona? In

26King Louis led the Seventh Crusade from mid-1248 to mid-1254. He left for the Eighth Crusade on 1 July in 1270, and died from an illness on 25 August of that same year, shortly after landing on the coast of Africa. 27 Bucher, Pamplona Bibles, 1:3–4, 9–10. 28 “Et ebullierunt ville et agri in medio regionis illius et nati sunt mures et facta est confusion mortis.” Pamplona Bible, Augsburg, University Library, fol. 95v.

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Fig. 2.5. Anonymous, The Plague of the Philistines, late 12th century. Manuscript illustration, Pamplona Bible, Col. I.2.4.15, fol. 95v. Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg. Photo reproduced by permission from Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg.

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twelfth-century Spain, scholars of Hebrew, Arabic, and Christian learning had access to each other’s texts, and one of those texts may have been an early Mediterranean illustrated manuscript.29 Kurt Weitzmann hypothesized that such a manuscript may have had over three hundred illustrations and probably included the books of Samuel. He cites two examples of the story of the Philistines and the ark of the covenant to illustrate his hypothesis. One is in the Dura-Europus Synagogue and the other is found in an eleventh-century Byzantine manuscript, Vatican Greek 333. Weitzmann believed that both of these illustrations of the Philistine story are based on the same rich archetype, a Jewish illustrated Bible that influenced the Christian illustrative tradition.30 That the Dura fresco does not depict rats should not be surprising, since rodents could hardly be expected to find a place on the walls of a synagogue. The Vatican manuscript, however, presents a more complex problem (fig. 2.6). The image is very small (3.3 x 7.5 centimeters) and a good deal of the paint has come off. What can be discerned on the left are the Philistines in front of an arcuated structure, and at least two of them are making gestures of woe, as in the Augsburg copy of the Pamplona Bible. The temple of Dagon is to the extreme right, and the ark of the covenant, adorned with cherubim, is in the center. Since this manuscript is so worn, it is difficult to see if rats are present.31 However, the question arises as to whether or not the small creatures at the base of the column and at the feet of the Philistines could be rats. Or are what look like rodents merely places where the paint has come off? Unfortunately, the state of the manuscript does not permit a definitive answer. What is now known, however, is that the illustrated Pamplona Bible present in Augsburg did depend on the Septuagint/Josephus tradition, which included the mention of rats. The other Bible completed in the Pamplona chancery in the late 1100s made its way to France after the death of Sancho VII in 1234 (fig. 2.7). The Bible, now in Amiens, displays six men, presumably the five Philistine rulers and the priest. Each has a hand up to his face in a gesture of woe. The text above is almost the same as in Augsburg’s Pamplona Bible and designates rats as the cause of the Philistine anguish. However, unlike the Augsburg manuscript, in the Amiens manuscript there is an addition. Written vertically on the edge of the right border is “percussit in secretiori parte,” the last part of the Vulgate phrase in 1 Samuel 5: 6. One or two of the men have their hands covering their genitals, but less pronouncedly than in the Augsburg image. Though the Septuagint rat phrase is written above, no rats appear in the image; as in Augsburg, the rodents are depicted as part of the offerings on the top of the ark in the image below. 29

Weitzmann, “Zur Frage,” 404–5; and Bucher, Pamplona Bibles, 1:82, 101. Weitzmann, “Die Illustration des Septuagint,” 116–17; and Weitzmann, “Zur Frage,” 402–5. 31 Stahl,“Iconographic Sources of the Old Testament Miniatures,” 218–19. 30

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 2.6. Anonymous, The Destruction of the Temple of Dagon and the Philistines Afflicted with Plague, 11th century. Manuscript illumination, Codex Gr. 333, fol. 9 v. Vatican Library, Rome. Copyright Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Reproduced by permission.

Thus, in these two Bibles from the royal chancery in Pamplona the pictorial model included parts of both traditions: a “plague” that related to the “secret parts,” and a plague caused by rats. The Amiens Pamplona Bible was probably handed down to Sancho’s heir, Thibaut IV, count of Champagne and king of Navarre.32 It then passed to the Valois rulers of France, where, around 1315, the images were used as a model for a luxury Picture Bible and Illustrated Lives of Saints now in the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library (fig. 2.8). The iconography of the five Philistine rulers and the one priest in this image is like the Amiens illustration, but the style is totally different. The lines delineating these early fourteenth-century figures are fluid, as in contemporary Parisian miniatures, and the artists made use of a diapered background and strong colors. To the right of the image is a text in French, which is strongly influenced by a French translation/adaptation of Comestor’s Historia Scholastica made by Guyart des Moulins between 1291 and 1295.33 Like the Comestor and Guyart narratives of the Plague of the Philistines, the Spencer Picture Bible’s text tells of the “torment of a cruel suffering and a disease that is called dysentery” (tourmenta d’une cruel passion & maladie qud dit dissintere) that attacked the entrails of the Philistines. Although, like the Amiens manuscript, the image does not depict mice, the text says that “little mice were born in the fields throughout the country and they caused great mischief and great confusion and peril of death.”34 The text of the Spencer 32Sandler,

“Picture Bible and Illustrated Lives of Saints,” 97–98. Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale. New York Public Library, MS Spencer 4 ms., fol. 76r. 34 Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale. New York Public Library, MS Spencer 22 ms., fol. 63r. I thank Dr. Laurie Shepard for her help with this text. 33

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Fig. 2.7. Anonymous, Philistines Suffering from the Plague, late 12th century. Manuscript illumination, Ms. Lat. 108, fol. 81r. Bibliothèque d’Amiens Metropole, Amiens. Photo reproduced by permission from the Bibliothèque d’Amiens Metropole.

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Fig. 2.8. Anonymous, Philistines Beset with Plague, ca. 1315–25. Manuscript illumination, Spencer Collection, Spencer ms. 22, fol. 63r. The New York Public Library. Photo reproduced by permission from Spencer Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Picture Bible and the Guyart des Moulins text both give an account that resembles the Josephus and Comestor, including the mice eating the entrails and causing great death in the city.35 Over one hundred copies of this medieval French account by Guyart des Moulins are known to have been made.36 More than 80 percent of the extant copies of the Guyart text were produced in Paris between 1310 and 1420, and it was widely read, especially by those in the aristocracy. Thus, right up to and throughout the time of the Black Death, the popularity of these French vernacular Bibles strongly suggests that not only the clergy but also the lay readers north of the Alps had some understanding, or at least a suspicion, of the fact that rats are connected to plague. The New Testament text that is a source of the plague imagery is the book of Revelation. Three major illustrated cycles of this text exist from the ninth century up until the later Middle Ages.37 One is an old Carolingian cycle and another is a commentary by Beatus of Liébana (written between 776 and 784). The illustrated Beatus manuscripts were drawn from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries.38 The third is the so-called Anglo-Norman group, which was formed around 1240 in England and northern France. This cycle was widely copied right up into the fourteenth century. There are nearly one hundred extant manuscripts from the Anglo-Norman group, some prepared for monastic communities and some for courtly patrons.39 The section of Revelation dealing with a plague that is relevant for our study is in chapters 15 and 16. John says (15:1) “Et vidi aliud signum in caelo magnum et mirabile angelos septem habentes plagas septem novissimas quoniam in illis consummata est ira Dei” (“And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven angels having the seven last plagues; for in them is filled up the wrath of God”). The Latin and medieval French texts both relate that in John’s vision seven angels pour out seven plagues from their vials: plagues that turned the seas, rivers, and springs to blood; a plague that scorched mankind; a plague of darkness that brought pain; a plague of drought; a plague that brought unclean frogs; and one that brought an earthquake and hail. The one plague that might be related to a disease revealing itself on the skin and that could have been interpreted as linked to the pestilence of the Black Death is the first plague (Rev. 16:1–2), the one that is manifest through sore and grievous wounds. John recounts: 35 Guyart des Moulins writes: “Et grant plente des souris des champs mengoient leur entrail…et etait aussi grans mortalietes en la cite.” He also cites, as a possible cause of the epidemic, “the corruption of the air”; Bible historiale, New York Public Library, Spencer 4 ms., fol. 76r. The idea of corrupt air becomes an important explanation for the plague in later texts and illustrations. 36Komada, “Bible Historiale,” 100–101. 37 Maekawa, Narrative and Experience, 108–11. 38 On the Beatus manuscripts see Williams, Illustrated Beatus. 39 Klein, “Introduction,” 188–89.

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“And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth…. And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.”40 This plague is related to the plague in Exodus 9:8 when God tells Moses to toss a handful of soot from a furnace into the air and it becomes a fine dust, creating festering boils on men and animals throughout the land.41 The illustrations to this text and commentary in the Beatus cycle usually show the seven angels holding bowls, with dots inside them. Then, as the first bowl is emptied, flowing lines fall from the bowl to earth. 42 The copies in the Beatus tradition, however, were almost exclusively limited to Spain, and they were compiled before the mid-twelfth century. More pertinent to this study of late medieval plague iconography is the Anglo-Norman cycle. This cycle was completed on both sides of the English Channel in the thirteenth century and was copied almost without change for hundreds of years.43 The illustrations in that cycle, as shown in an example from the Cloisters Apocalypse, depict the angel, having flown down from the temple in the sky, emptying his vial upon the earth, the contents of which would cause the sores and grievous wounds (fig. 2.9).44 The contents of the vial are depicted as a grayish matter, and that matter is the agent causing the plague of the sores on the skin.45 Thus, no doubt many who viewed these images in the numerous illustrated Apocalypses connected the cruel and malignant wounds caused by the plague with a noxious air embodying God’s wrath. In fact, the representation of the agent responsible for the skin plague as a grayish matter flowing from the sky does accord with the questions of several mid- to late-fourteenth-century chroniclers who tried to understand the causes of the waves of plague they had been experiencing during the past decade. One such chronicler was Jean Jacmé, a papal physician and chancellor of Montpellier. Writing in 1364, Jacmé refers to cor40 Revelation 16:1–2 (Vulgate): “Audivi vocem magnam de templo dicentem septem angelis ite et effundite septem fialas irae Dei in terram…. Et abiit primus et effudit fialam suam in terram et factum est vulnus saevum ac pessimum in homines qui habent caracterem bestiae et eos qui adoraverunt imaginem eius.” 41 Some malignant substance emanating from a bowl is the way the “soot” for the Exodus story is also frequently rendered. See, for example, the image from the Moralizing Bible, fol. 19v, third image down on right. 42 For the “Morgan Beatus,” see, for example, Williams, Illustrated Beatus, vol. 2, plates 74 and 77. For the “Vitrina 14 –1 Beatus,” see ibid., plate 140. 43For a study of this group, see Lewis, Reading Images. 44 The Cloisters Apocalypse was produced in France in the 1320s in or near Coutance. It derives from what has been termed the “Metz” Group; Klein, “Introduction,” 190. 45 The notion that corrupt air might have been a cause of the Plague of the Philistines was discussed by the Philistine rulers in Guyart des Moulins, Bible historiale, New York Public Library, Spencer 4 ms., fol. 76r.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 2.9. Anonymous, The Plague of the First Vial, ca. 1300–1325. Manuscript illumination, The Cloisters Collection, fol. 30v. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo reproduced by permission from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (68.174). All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

rupt vapors from above inflicting plague: “For the [thick-clouded vapors in the air] above corrupts the air, and so the spirits of men are corrupted.”46 Louis Heyligen, one of a group of musicians at the papal court of Avignon, also describes the plague as a “stinking breath of the wind.” 47 Thus, these chroniclers viewed corrupt air or wind as related to plague. 48 Perhaps their thought that corrupt wind brought the plague was partially influenced by the apocalyptic textual and illustrative tradition, for the text from Revelation was, from the late eleventh century, commonly read as 46Text

in Horrox, Black Death, 173–74. Text in Horrox, Black Death, 41–42. 48 This was an ancient notion, articulated by Hippocrates and elaborated upon by Galen and Avicenna. See Mormando, “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy,” 8. 47

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part of the Easter liturgy, and Apocalypse imagery populated wall paintings and stained glass for all to see.49 The numerous disasters that befall humankind as recounted in the book of Revelation are described with a language rich in weapons imagery, and that imagery of bow and arrows, swords, and lances is likewise used in other works of art as general symbols of plague-causing agents. For instance, the notion of arrows representing a plague can be seen in a curious wall painting dating from 1355, in Lavaudieu, Haute Loire, in the Auvergne region of France (fig. 2.10).50 The image is on the south wall of a small Romanesque church that at one time was a nunnery. Above the hooded blind female is the word mors. Larger than the other figures, she grips six arrows in each hand and appears to have wounded all those at her sides with similar arrows. The figures of men and women, old and young, churchmen and bourgeois, surround her. They all have closed eyes and grim faces, and appear to be succumbing to death. An inscription dates the painting to just after the region had been devastated by the Black Death. What is interesting about the mural is that though it is found in a nunnery, God’s wrath is not evoked. It is a cruel female personification of blind fate, who dominates the scene. In a late medieval altar panel now in the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover (fig. 2.11), the symbol of the affliction is again arrows. Jesus appears above in a scalloped space that breaks into the starry background. He holds three arrows in his left hand and with his right, he appears to aim an arrow downward. Jesus has already cast other arrows; they are piercing the bodies of reclining figures that represent the plague victims. The arrowheads have most frequently struck in their groins, armpits, or necks, places where the buboes of the plague erupt. On the left, the Virgin holds out her tunic, in which she catches many of the arrows meant for the victims, a few of whom are babies. Plague iconography includes not only the imagery that relates to causes of the plague, such as rats, foul air, and arrows, but also the symptoms and the dying. The symptoms of the plague recounted by the chroniclers are so similar that scholars believe that many of the chroniclers knew they were dealing with more or less the same disease. However, Guy of Chauliac, surgeon and physician of Pope Clement VI of Avignon, writes of two kinds of “mortalities,” one that involved spitting blood, and another that involved tumors in the armpits and groin.51 Such tumors are depicted in art, as seen in the boil on the armpit of the dying man in the Stiny Codex 49

Williams, Illustrated Beatus, 1:104; and Lewis, Reading Images, 214. “Vers une nouvelle datation des peintures,” 68–85. See Elina Gertsman’s essay in this volume for further discussion of this fresco. 51 Campbell, Black Death and Men of Learning, 2. See also Jean de Venette, in Horrox, Black Death, 55–57; and the Avignon Musician, also in Horrox, Black Death, 42–43. 50Courtille,

45

Fig. 2.10. Anonymous, The Personified Blindfolded Death Holding Arrows of Affliction, mid-14th century. Wall painting, Lavaudieu, Haute Loire, France. Photo reproduced by permission from website www.artroman.net, 18 October 2005.

46 Pamela Berger

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Fig. 2.11. Anonymous, Jesus Throwing Arrows of Plague, late medieval. Altar panel, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hannover, Germany. Photo reproduced by permission from the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover.

(fig. 2.12). This form is now known as the bubonic plague. Heyligen, the Avignon musician, also knew of the boils, but he had observed that in another form, the pestilence was even more deadly. Those who got an infection of the lungs, now known as the pneumonic plague, coughed up blood and could not breathe. The throat and windpipe fill up with phlegm and blood, resulting in death by suffocation. The figure in the Stiny Codex manifests symptoms of both the bubonic and pneumonic plagues, for the patient mainly seems to be suffering from suffocation. This horror has been graphically personified by a strangulating creature whose body retains its flesh, though its face appears as a grisly skeletal head with a gaping mouth. The devilish monster has his hands on the dying man’s throat, thereby preventing him from breathing. The spear in the hands of a skeleton was also used to indicate the agonizing pain of death, as in an image illustrating the Pilgrimage of the Soul

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 2.12. Anonymous, Death Strangling a Victim, from the Stiny Codex, 14th century. Manuscript illumination, University Library, Prague. Photo reproduced by permission from Werner Forman/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 2.13. Pierre Remiet, Death, Devil, and an Angel at the Bedside, ca. 1403. Manuscript illumination, Ms. BPL 74, fol. 92r. University Library, Leiden. Photo reproduced by permission from University Library, Leiden.

(fig. 2.13). Here, death has the form of a grinning skeletal head on an emaciated body. One of death’s spears is aimed at the heart of the man who has taken his last breath. From the thirteenth century, the breath, anima, was associated with the soul, which, at the moment of final expiration, is depicted in the form of a homunculus, or little man. The horned black devil has been smudged, perhaps by a reader who was attempting to blot out the horror.52 The man’s soul has made eye contact with the winged angel who stands at the head of the bed. Presumably, this angel will accompany the soul to heaven. Chroniclers of the mid-fourteenth-century plague recount that, though some churchmen refused to attend to plague victims, others stayed and administered to the sick, as in a manuscript illustration from a Franciscan 52

Camille, Master of Death, 219–20.

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Fig. 2.14. Anonymous, Last Rites, from a Franciscan Missal, ca. 1350. Manuscript illustration, Ms. Douce 313, fol. cccxcv r. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photo reproduced by permission from The Bodleian Library.

Fig. 2.15. Anonymous, Diagram of an Eye, from John Pecham’s Perspectiva communis, ca. 1320. Manuscript illustration, Ms. Ashmole 1522, fol. 153v. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photo reproduced by permission from The Bodleian Library.

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missal in the Bodleian Library (fig. 2.14). Many of the clergy fled along with members of the families of the victims. People were afraid even to look at someone who was sick for fear of being infected; this may have been the result of medieval notions of why and how people see. During the thirteenth century, Aristotelians from Oxford and Paris theorized that objects sent forth rays that were “captured” by the eye. This Aristotelian theory, called “intromission,” was legitimized by the optical writings of Alhazen, who influenced western writers on optics such as John Pecham (fig. 2.15).53 Part of this notion was that the object (in this case the sick person) emitted a “species” or “likeness” into the air that would be carried right to the eye of the beholder.54 The rays from the object of sight fall on the spherical surface of the pupil and then penetrate through the three humors of the eye and along the optic nerve. It was reputed that these rays had the potential to transmit the disease. As the doctor from Montpellier, Jean Jacmé, understood it, the brain of the sick person makes a poisonous material that is extruded through the eye, where the toxic spirits build up and “seek a dwelling place into which it can enter…. And if any well person looks upon that visible spirit, he receives the attack of the pestilential disease.”55 Thus, as the panic spread, people grew afraid of the gaze of plague victims, for the very sight of the sick could be deemed dangerous. Several of the immediate responses to the plague can be seen in the imagery of the fourteenth century north of the Alps. Gilles li Muisis’ midfourteenth-century chronicle, which was illustrated shortly after it was written, depicts people bringing coffins to the cemetery, and other bodies being placed in the ground wound only in a shroud (fig. 2.16). These deceased were lucky to have coffins or even a shroud; during the plague, many were simply buried in mass graves or, in Avignon, thrown into the Rhône. The faces in this image are glum, and the palette is mostly black or bloodred; however, in an unusual touch, little white flowers have sprung up from the clumps of dark grass. Though the most common reaction to plague was flight, there was also an attempt to ward off the disease through religious ritual. Some of those rituals, such as self-flagellation, veered off into the aberrant. At first, the flagellants were composed of local or regional brotherhoods that assembled for pious processions, but their gatherings evolved into a kind of public mortification undertaken as a form of penance. A manuscript illumination from the early fifteenth century preserves what is known from texts and other illustrations (fig. 2.17). The flagellants wear long robes with hoods that have holes for the eyes and a long extension flowing onto their chests. They carry knotted whips with which they strike themselves. Froissart, who 53

Lindberg, “Intromission-Extramission Controversy,” 153–54. Lindberg, “Alhazen’s Theory of Vision,” 327–28; and Camille, Gothic Art, Glorious Visions, 22. 55 Quoted in Campbell, Black Death and Men of Learning, 61–62. 54

51

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 2.16. Anonymous, Burying Plague Victims, from the Annals of Gilles li Muisis, ca. 1353. Manuscript illustration, Ms. 13076–77, c. 24t. fol. 24v. Bibliothèque Royale Albert I, Brussels, Belgium. Photo Credit: Snark/Art Resource, NY.

52 Pamela Berger

Fig. 2.17. Anonymous, Flagellants, early 15th century. Manuscript illumination, Ms. Douce, 144, fol. 110r. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photo reproduced by permission from The Bodleian Library.

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lived at the time of the Black Death, amplifies the understanding of these flagellants. He relates that they “scourged themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes…. Some made themselves bleed very badly between the shoulders and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying that it was miraculous blood….”56 Clement VI, the pope at Avignon, abhorred the practice of flagellation and called public penance unlawful. He went so far as to excommunicate those who engaged in it.57 But flagellation was widespread and though the church was nominally against it, there are images of churchmen participating. The hysteria did not subside until late 1349. Though flagellants may have been religious in origin in that they were seeking the expurgation of their sins, they soon evolved into groups that flailed out against “the other.” In the fourteenth century, it was often the foreigner or the outcast who was designated as the chief cause of whatever contemporary malady was threatening. In Spain, Portuguese pilgrims were thought to be responsible for an outbreak of the plague, and in southern France it was the English who were at fault. Blame was also cast on lepers, Muslims,58 and especially Jews. When the flagellants called for their extermination, they attracted ever greater numbers of adherents. Gilles Li Muisis is one of those chroniclers to give us an account of the fate of some Jews during the Black Death: “In 1349 Jews were seized and put in chains and into prison…. The reason for this was a strong suspicion that they planned to destroy the Christians by means of poison, and that they had secretly put poison into wells, springs and rivers so that Christians would drink it…. The word was that throughout Germany and in other countries they were burnt, or beheaded, or killed by some other means.”59 In an illustration of the burning of Jews from Li Muisis’ chronicle it looks as if the event is taking place just outside the city walls (fig. 2.18). One man, arms crossed, peers over the side of a pit. Another man, well dressed and with a purse at his waist, brings wood. Behind him, a fellow with a bulging belly looks on with a rather distressed expression. On the left, a cross section of people from the city are in attendance. A churchman, a couple of burghers, and a knight are in the front row near the elegantly dressed man who feeds the fire. Behind him is a crowd including helmeted soldiers carrying weapons. Both the text and the image reveal that the populace was ready to believe that the men and women burning in the pit could indeed have been responsible for poisoning the well and giving them the plague. Besides the petitions of the flagellants and the slaughtering of those who were thought to be responsible for the plague, people took other 56

Froissart, Chronicles, ed. Brereton, 111. Froissart, Chronicles, 112. 58 Marks, Medieval Plague, 108. 59 Gilles Li Muisis, “Chronicle,” in Horrox, Black Death, 50. 57

Fig. 2.18. Anonymous, The Burning of Jews, from the Annals of Gilles li Muisis, ca. 1353. Manuscript illustration, Ms. 13076–77, c. 24t. fol. 12v. Bibliothèque Royale Albert I, Brussels. Photo reproduced by permission from Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

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actions to save or cure themselves. They were told to avoid gambling and lechery, to light fires for purification, and to practice bloodletting,60 but most people put their faith in traditional Christian prayer (see fig. 2.14). 61 The Franciscan missal from the Bodleian Library shows a monk administering last rites to a sick man lying in bed, a jeweled cross behind his pillow. To the right, the monk is praying before a covered chalice on an altar. The experience of the waves of plague in the second half of the fourteenth century contributed to a shift in iconography north of the Alps. Some of the imagery emphasized what was comforting, such as the Virgin of Misericorde protecting faithful petitioners beneath her cloak. There was also the new emphasis on “plague saints” such as Sebastian, who could act as intercessor before God. In an illuminated Book of Hours from the late fourteenth century, the body of Saint Sebastian is depicted riddled with so many arrows that he looks like a porcupine, as the Golden Legend of Jacopus de Voragine describes him (fig. 2.19).62 There was also an increase in funerary and macabre iconography north of the Alps, especially in illuminated books of hours. A funerary scene accompanying the Office of the Dead depicts, in a bifocal cutaway view, both the Gothic monumental entrance and the inside of a church where people are keeping vigil the night before a burial (fig. 2.20). Inside, a coffin is draped with an elaborately embroidered cloth. Behind it, two ecclesiastical figures on the left are reading from or meditating on the words in the open volumes. Two professional mourners with faces hidden are part of the scene. A young blond man clasps his hands and bows his head at the far right. A crippled old man on crutches is hovering, rather than standing, at the entrance. Perhaps he is meant to represent the elderly patron of the book envisioning or imagining the ritual that will surround his own demise. Or is he the patron placing himself in a scene meant to represent the untimely death of an adult son or daughter? Either way, the scene depicts an aesthetization of death. The aroma of the candles would have overcome the smell of bodily decay, and gold embroidered cloths cover the coffin holding the decomposing body. The gruesomeness of funerary iconography increased in the very late Middle Ages, with a growing emphasis on the more grisly symbols of death, such as the cadaver, which became part of David’s prayer in the books of hours. An example from the Boston Public Library (fig. 2.21) illustrates the moment when David tries to stop the angel of death from destroying Jerusalem by means of the plague (1 Chron. 21:8–17). David had taken a census,

60Ziegler,

Black Death, 50, 60. Modern science has shown that on the one hand, certain people will be exposed to a mortal disease and not get sick, and others somehow heal partially through a belief that they can in fact be cured. For recent scientific opinion on the power of the placebo effect see Harrington, Placebo Effect. 62 Jacopus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 1:100. For the development of the cult of St. Sebastian as a plague saint, see Sheila Barker’s essay in this volume. 61

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Fig. 2.19. Anonymous, Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, from a Book of Hours, late 14th century. Manuscript illumination, Ms. Med. 81, fol. 135r. Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library. Photo reproduced by permission from The Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department. Courtesy of the Trustees.

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Fig. 2.20. Anonymous, Funeral in a Church, from a Book of Hours, late 14th century. Manuscript illumination, Ms. Med. 81, fol. 89r. Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library. Photo reproduced by permission from The Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department. Courtesy of the Trustees.

a prideful act that was evil in the sight of God, for men do not belong to David, but to the Lord. So, through the prophet Gad, David’s seer, the Lord made known the three possible punishments that David and his people would suffer for his trespass. As the French verses below the image indicate, David could choose “guerre, famine, ou pestilence” (war, famine, or plague). The text goes on to say that he chose peste, and so the Lord sent a plague on Israel, and seventy thousand men died (1 Chron. 21:14). Here, the aged King David is on his knees without his crown. A cadaver and a dead or dying man are at his feet. He looks up at the avenging angel holding an arrow and the bloodred “sword of the Lord”; he is about to cast the plague on the Holy City. David prayed, however, and the city was spared from the plague. His grim choices and the number of dead are spelled out in the rhymed French text below. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the funerals process out to the graveyards and the more graphic aspects of death are depicted. In a fifteenth century Book of Hours, grave diggers are burying a body sewn into

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Fig. 2.21. Anonymous, David Praying to Avert the Plague on Jerusalem, 1509. Colored woodcut in a Book of Hours, XG 509 C 28H, fol. kii. Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library. Photo reproduced by permission from The Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department. Courtesy of the Trustees.

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Fig. 2.22. Anonymous, Burial, from a Book of Hours, 15th century. Manuscript illumination, Ms. Med. 89 fol. 148r. Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library. Photo reproduced by permission from The Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department. Courtesy of the Trustees.

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its shroud in the spot where they have exhumed the bones of a former deceased (fig. 2.22). The bones will be thrown into the charnel house, which, in this miniature, is perhaps depicted just outside the graveyard walls. The thought of having their corpses eaten by worms was so abhorrent to some members of the aristocracy that they had their bodies boiled after death.63 Then the lean bones could be separated from the flesh and interred in an appropriate setting. The imagery relating to death and the macabre does seem to increase in the second part of the fourteenth century. But though several major outbreaks of the plague occurred between 1348 and 1400, the chroniclers mention them only briefly in comparison to the descriptions of the Black Death of 1348. It seems that the midcentury plague had made a much more profound impact on them, or at least they recorded it more fully. 64 Perhaps chroniclers had been so traumatized by the plague that they wanted to repress it; perhaps the symptoms of later outbreaks were less severe. Or perhaps the chroniclers had grown so used to the plague that they stopped giving it much attention. For as the twenty-first century so clearly demonstrates, people do become inured to even the grimmest accounts of famines, massacres, and diseases.

63 64

Camille, Master of Death, 177–78. Horrox, Black Death, 13.

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ABBREVIATION PL

Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1844–64.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berger, Pamela. “Sculpted Body Parts from Ancient Healing Sanctuaries.” In The Plume and the Palette, edited by Pamela Berger, Jeffery Howe, and Susan A. Michalczyk, 1–15. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Boeckl, Christine M. Images of Plague and Pestilence. Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 43. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000. Bucher, François. The Pamplona Bibles: A Facsimile Compiled from Two Picture Bibles with Martyrologies by King Sancho el Fuerto of Navarra (1194–1234). 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Camille, Michael. Gothic Art, Glorious Visions. New York: Prentice Hall and Harry Abrams, 1996. ———. Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Campbell, Anna Montgomery. The Black Death and Men of Learning. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931. Conrad, Lawrence I. “The Biblical Tradition for the Plague of the Philistines.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984): 281–87. Courtille, Anne. “Vers une nouvelle datation des peintures de l’église Saint-André de Lavaudieu?” Almanach de Brioude 61 (1981): 68–85. Dines, Jennifer M. The Septuagint. London: T&T Clark, 2004. Driver, G. R. “The Plague of the Philistines (1 Samuel v, 6–vi, 16).” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland ¹
₂ (1950): 50–52. Eichler, Myron. “The Plague in I Samuel 5 and 6.” Dor le-dor 10 (1982): 157–65. Friedman, John B. “‘He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence’: Iconography of the Plague in the Late Middle Ages.” In Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Francis X. Newman, 75-122. Binghamton: State University of New York, 1986. Froissart, Jean. Chronicles. Translated and edited by Geoffrey Brereton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968. Geyer, John B. “Mice and Rites in I Samuel V–VI.” Vetus Testamentum 31 (1981): 293–304. Gilles Li Muisis. “Chronicle.” In Horrox, The Black Death, 45–54. Ginzberg, Lewis. The Legends of the Jews. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1909–30. Guest, Gerald B., Commentator and translator. Bible moralisée: Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. London: Harvey Miller, 1995. Harrington, Anne. Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Horrox, Rosemary, translator and editor. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Jacopus de Voragine. The Golden Legend. Translated by William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Jean de Venette. Excerpt from the “Chronicle of Jean de Venette,” in Horrox, The Black Death, 54–57. Klein, Peter K. “Introduction: The Apocalypse in Medieval Art.” In The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, edited by Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn, 159–99. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Mice, Arrows, and Tumors Komada, Akido. “Bible Historiale (‘Complete Version’).” In The Splendor of the Word, 100– 108. Lewis, Suzanne. Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lindberg, David, C. “Alhazen’s Theory of Vision and Its Reception in the West.” Isis 58 (1967): 321–41. ———. “The Intromission-Extramission Controversy in Islamic Visual Theory: Alkindi versus Avicenna.” In David C. Lindberg, Studies in the History of Medieval Optics, 137–59. London: Variorum Reprints, 1983. Maekawa, Kumiko. Narrative and Experience: Innovations in Thirteenth-Century Picture Books. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Marks, Geoffrey. The Medieval Plague. Garden City: Doubleday, 1971. Mormando, Franco. “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy: What the Primary Sources, Printed and Painted, Reveal.” In Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, edited by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas W. Worcester, 1–44. Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 2005. Distributed by University of Chicago Press. Neustatter, Otto. “Mice in Plague Pictures.” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 4 (1941): 105–13. Plummer, John, and Sydney C. Cockerell. Old Testament Miniatures: A Medieval Picture Book with 283 Paintings from the Creation to the Story of David. 1927. Reprint, New York: George Braziller, 1969. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. “Picture Bible and Illustrated Lives of Saints.” In The Splendor of the Word, 97–100. The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at the New York Public Library. Edited by Jonathan J. G. Alexander, James H. Marrow, and Lucy Freeman Sandler. New York: New York Public Library, 2006. Stahl, Harvey Joseph. The Iconographic Sources of the Old Testament Miniatures, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 638. PhD diss. New York University, 1974. Thomas, Marcel. “Introduction et Commentaire.” In Le Psautier de Saint Louis, Reproductions des 78 Enluminures à Pleine Page du Manuscrit Latin 10525 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, 9–27. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1970. Weiss, Daniel H.Die Kreuzritterbibel=The Morgan Crusader Bible=La Bible des Croisades. Lucern: Faksimile Verlag, 1999. Weitzmann, Kurt. “Die Illustration des Septuagint.” Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 3– 4 (1952–53): 96–120. ———. “Zur Frage des Einflusses jüdischer Bilderquellen auf die Illustration des Alten Testamentes.” In Mullus: Festschrift Theodor Klauser, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, edited by Alfred Stuiber and Alfred Hermann, 410–15. Münster: Aschendorff, 1964. Williams, John. The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Harvey Miller, 1994. Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. New York: John Day Co., 1969.

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3

Visualizing Death MEDIEVAL PLAGUES AND THE MACABRE

Elina Gertsman

FORASMUCH AS THE PASSAGE OF DEATH, of the wretchedness of the exile of this world, for ignorance (uncunning) of dying—not only to lewd men (laymen) but also to religious and devout persons— seemeth wonderfully hard and perilous, and also right fearful and horrible; therefore in this present matter and treatise, that is of the Craft of Dying, is drawn and contained a short manner of exhortation, for teaching and comforting of them that be in point of death.1 Thus begins the Book of the Craft of Dying, a late medieval English manual that helped men negotiate their last moments in this terrestrial world.2 This instructional handbook on dying, an English translation of the anonymous Ars moriendi, encapsulated the late medieval conception of the “good death,” that is, death with the benefit of the church’s sacraments, in one’s own home, and surrounded by family and friends. The original Latin treatise came in two versions—a short one and a long one—and although scholars disagree about its original author, it seems clear that one of the main sources of the Ars moriendi is the third part of Jean Gerson’s Opus tripartitum de praeceptis decalogi, de confessione et de arte moriendi.3 Enormously popular in the fifteenth century, the treatise effectively staged the drama of death, involving the dying man, Moriens, in an elaborate spectacle of his own mortality. 1“Here

Beginneth the Book of the Craft of Dying,” in Comper, Book of the Craft of Dying, 3. The bibliography on the Ars moriendi treatises is vast. Especially useful are Bayard’s critical edition of L’art du bien mourir au XVe siècle and O’Connor, Art of Dying Well. 3 Bayard, L’art du bien mourir, 18. 2

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Gathered around his bed to decide his ultimate destiny are the Trinity, the Virgin, the devil, the angels, and the demons. Death here is not personified, but is instead figured as a moral event, a public display of mankind’s negotiations with mortality (fig. 3.1). These negotiations have a decidedly mechanical, reflexive flavor. Moriens is subjected to five temptations—to reject faith, to despair over sins, to become impatient, to indulge in vainglory, and to succumb to avarice—and to five inspirations—to confirm faith, to hope for mercy through the act of contrition, to sustain patience through suffering, to recollect one’s sins, and finally to achieve detachment from the material world. Upon successfully overcoming each temptation and meekly acceding to all inspirations, Moriens is consequently, somewhat perfunctorily, and certainly inevitably saved. This predetermined structure of the required steps towards salvation demonstrates an attempt to normalize dying and regulate its rituals, which had been disrupted by the sudden onset of plague epidemics, but now again had come to the fore. This very same impulse, it seems, underlies the multiplication of representations of burial rituals in the late medieval books of hours. In her study of fifteenth-century manuscript illuminations, Gloria Fiero has drawn attention to the funerary ritual imagery, postulating these images as “a manifestation of the intense psychological need within European society to restore the religious and social traditions of funeral and burial that were disrupted by the Black Death.”4 In the fourteenth century, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote in his Decameron that the dead were no longer accorded “the lamentations and bitter tears of their relatives…nor did the priests go to the trouble of pronouncing solemn and lengthy funeral rights, but…hastily lowered the body into the nearest empty grave they could find.”5 Eventually, he writes, “there were no tears or candles or mourners to honor the dead; in fact, no more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be shown towards dead goats.”6 Boccaccio may have had a flare for the dramatic, but around 1359/60 another man, a Carmelite friar named Jean de Venette, reported in his chronicle the following news regarding the plague and the flagging funerary rites: “As a result of that pestilence a great many men and women died that year and the next in Paris and throughout the kingdom of France, as they also did in other parts of the world. The young were more likely to die than the elderly, and did so in such numbers that burials could hardly keep pace…the cowardly priests took themselves off, leaving the performance of spiritual offices to the regular clergy.”7 4 Fiero, “Death Ritual in Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illumination,” 271. For further discussion of the representation of death in the Books of Hours, see Alexandre-Bidon, “La mort dans les livres d’heures,” in A Réveiller les morts, 83–94. 5Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. William, 10. 6 Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. William, 11. 7 Quoted in Geraud, Chronique Latin de Guillaume de Nangis avec les continuations de cette chronique, XXXXX

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Fig. 3.1. Anonymous, Dying Man Tempted by Impatience, 1465. Woodcut from Ars Moriendi, Germany. Photo reproduced by permission from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Visualizing Death

The representations of burials seem to betray a desire to standardize the funerary rites and codify them in the Offices of the Dead. In the fifteenth century, the epidemics subsided and the books of hours swelled with detailed illuminated Offices of the Dead that recorded, painstakingly, funerary rituals. In the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, for instance, the Matins opens with a deathbed scene, wherein the priest who came to hear the last confession prepares to give viaticum and administer extreme unction. On the pages of the Prime, the corpse is prepared for burial: the shuttered window has now been opened, as the private ritual of dying is here replaced by a communal spectacle of death; this signals the beginning of the public part of the ritual, in which the deceased would be carried through the streets to the church. There, placed before the altar, the corpse would be blessed and the Mass sung, as is seen in the image that accompanies the Terce; after being carried to the graveyard, the body, again blessed, would be delivered to the ground, the ritual invoked in the image that accompanies Sext. The “Hours of the Dead” conclude with an image of the Requiem Mass.8 In the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, as well as in the Ars moriendi, one sees, perhaps, a visualized reaction to the chaos brought about by the plague, the desire to regularize the process of death itself and to assure a satisfactory outcome.

DEATH AND THE IMAGE IN THE MIDDLE AGES The plague is also often implicated with a very different kind of imagery that gained popularity in the late Middle Ages—the imagery of the macabre. The macabre focused on the decay of the body, and portrayed death by means of decomposing corpses, skeletons stripped of flesh, and, especially, juxtapositions of these putrefying bodies with the whole and as yet uncorrupted flesh of those still living. Death has been visualized in medieval art in a variety of ways, most often in the context of Passion and martyrdom narratives, and frequently as a physical visceral event, from the crucifixion of the emaciated and bleeding Christ to the cruel grilling of Saint Lawrence. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the death of mortal men and women came to be represented in a proliferation of Last Judgment scenes that unfolded above the portals of many pilgrimage churches; there, too, as in the story of Lazarus (whose miraculous revivification fated him to die twice), death was figured by means of resurrection (fig. 3.2). Finally, in the years before and especially in the wake of the Black Death epidemic, a decidedly gruesome

8

2:210–16; reprinted in Horrox, Black Death, 54–57. The entire chronicle is translated and annotated by Richard newhall and Jean Birdsail, in Chronicle of Jean de Venette. 8 Hours of Catherine of Cleves, fol. 97 (Matins), fol. 99v (Prime), fol. 101 (Terce), fol. 102v (Sext), fol. 104 (Mass). For more on the text of the Office of the Dead, see Ottosen, Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead.

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Fig. 3.2. Gislebertus, The Last Judgment, 1130–35. Stone relief, Church of St. Lazare, Autun, France. Photo by author.

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subject became popular in European art—the Triumph of Death. 9 Unlike the Last Judgment imagery, the Triumph figures Death personified as an apocalyptic figure described by John in Revelation 7:8: a morbid earthbound apparition on a pale horse that tramples crowds as it sweeps the land.10 In a wall painting in the Sacro Speco at Subiaco, the skeletal Death takes on decidedly female characteristics: the woman was associated with death throughout the Middle Ages, not least because Eve, responsible for biting the fateful apple, helped bring death into this world (fig. 3.3). 11 A skeletal Death wrapped in a black shroud rides triumphantly in an oxcart in Lorenzo Costa’s the Triumph of Death from the church of S. Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna;12 it gallops on horseback over the unfortunate beggars and the sick and attacks an unsuspecting group of nobles in a 1445 fresco at the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo.13 Such a specter is described in Pierre Michault’s La Danse aux Aveugles: “this thing, disfigured, mounted on a horse, it is Death. It passes by and does not spare anybody, and it hits with its arrow that is so sharp.”14 The Triumph iconography lurks on the margins of the macabre, but its allegorical nature and lack of focus on the corruptibility of the human body leave it devoid of the visceral quality of true macabre art, which is so fascinated with the flesh and its fragmentation, reveling in the spectacle of the sordid, foul, tainted nature of human bodies that decompose and fall apart within their repugnant graves. The Triumph lacks the uncanniness of the macabre, the eerie and disturbing quality of which is predicated on the spectacular display of decomposed bodies, their overt physicality, their repetition and doubling, and, ultimately, their disquieting sense of spiritual isolation. In Lorenzo Costa’s Triumph of Death, men and women cowering on the ground are watched by God and his heavenly court, but in macabre imagery,

9

Liliane Brion-Guerry’s Le thème du “Triomphe de la mort” is the most helpful resource on the subject. A slight variation on the theme was produced in an illustration of Petrarch’s Trionfi, in which Death triumphs over Love, Time triumphs over Death, and Divinity triumphs over Time. Various Triumphs of Death that constitute a part of the extensive cycles were inspired by Petrarch’s poems. For a comprehensive study of the influence of Petrarch’s Trionfi on fifteenth-century artistic production, see Ortner, Petrarcas “Trionfi.” 11 See Imagerie du Sacro speco; Egidi et al., I monasteri di Subiaco, 486; Dantier, Les monastères bénédictins d’Italie, 2:222; and Brion-Guerry, Le thème du “Triomphe de la mort,” 118–19. 12 For both the Triumph of Fame and the Triumph of Death frescoes in Bologna see Marr, “Die Erlösungsallegorie von Lorenzo Costa.” 13 Literature on this Triumph of Death includes Carta, “L’affresco del Trionfo della morte”; Abbate and Cordaro, Trionfo della Morte di Palermo; Mazze, “Il Trionfo della Morte a Palermo”; Bresc-Bautier, Artistes, patriciens et confréries; and Giuffrida, “Aspetti della politica.” 14 “Cette chose toute defiguree assise sur un boeuf, c’est la Mort. Elle pase et n’epargne personne et frappe de son dard qui tant est poignant.” Quoted in Utzinger, Itinéraires des Danses macabres, 97. The synthesis of all these themes—triumphant Death, ubi sunt tradition, Mors de la Pomme, Death on Horseback, etc.—will appear only at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in Robert Gobin’s Les Loups ravissans: Cestuy liure / Ou autrement doctrinal moral / Intitule est: Qui deliure Douze chapitres en general / Ou chascun se brutte et rural / Nest par trop, il pourra congnoistre / Comment euiter vice et mal / On doit et tresvertueux estre [Paris, ca. 1505]. 10

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Fig. 3.3. Meo da Siena (or follower of), The Triumph of Death, 14th century. Fresco, Sacro Speco, Subiaco, Italy. Photo from Liliane Brion-Guerry, Le thème du “Triomphe de la mort” dans la peinture italienne, Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1950, Figure 14 (mistakenly identifying it as the fresco of the same subject in Pisa).

God is largely absent, and men find themselves alone, face-to-face with death. Or, rather, not exactly alone: the personal, intimate encounter between living flesh and its decaying double is made viscerally available to the gaze of the viewer—an encounter so disquieting, so unsettling, and so unmistakably macabre. Three visual and literary themes are associated especially with the macabre: the accidental encounter of living and dead as told in the story The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living, in which a group of noblemen encounter three corpses during the hunt; the transi tombs, in which an idealized effigy of the patron is doubled by an image of his decomposed corpse underneath; and the Dance of Death, which shows men and women of different estates brought to a morbid dance with death. All carry a didactic and penitential rhetoric, and all possess the defining characteristics of the macabre—the themes of doubling and repetition, the stress on the physicality of the decomposing body, and the preoccupation with spectacle and display.15 15

For the themes of mirroring and doubling, see Binski, Medieval Death, 123–63.

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MACABRE ART This imagery, in its nature, is extremely different from what has been examined thus far. In the macabre images, instead of a regularized procedure of dying, the ugly and the fantastic side of Death resurfaces, extraordinary and grotesque, as revitalized corpses confront the living in a series of morbid encounters. Each such encounter offers one and the same message: Death is an equalizing force that sweeps away all human ambition, and strikes women and men, the rich and the poor, and the young and the old. One who witnesses such an encounter benefits directly by learning and internalizing a jolting didactic lesson: the macabre exists by way of the readerviewer who receives the message. In the late medieval poem “A Disputation betwixt the Body and Worms” makes a double appeal to the audience: first, to the author of the poem who is himself addressed by the tomb epitaph he reads and relates to his readers (“Take hede un to my figure here abowne / And se how sumtyme I was fresche and gay / Now turned to wormes mete and corrupcion”), and then to the reader of the poem proper, when the poet elaborates on the meaning of his verses: “That ther at sum wisdom thou may lere / To se what thou art and here aftyr sal be / When thou leste wenes, venit mors te superare / When thi grafe grenes, bonum est mortis meditari.”16 This same message is reiterated in The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living.17 The poem, originally written in the thirteenth century and later retold in various versions, both poetic and visual, tells of three young noblemen, who, during a hunt, encounter three decomposing corpses.18 A dialogue ensues and, in its course, the corpses tell the noblemen about the transitory nature of life, make the young men confront the repugnancy of flesh, and, by doing so, point to the need for timely atonement. The visual presence of the illustrated Legend in manuscripts and murals attests to its popularity, and although the Legend became a Franco-German phenomenon, it also appears early on in Italy, England, and Spain.19 The world of the dead and the world of the living collide in this morbid encounter, which may be considered the first manifestation of macabre art in the Middle Ages. 16 Horrox (Black Death, 347) renders this as “Look at my image / and see how I was once fresh and gay / who am now turned to worms; meat and corruption / … / So you may learn some wisdom from studying it / and realize what you are and what you shall become / When you least expect it death comes to conquer you / While your grave is still undug it is good to think on death.” For the full text see Conlee, Middle English Debate Poetry, 51–62 17 The best resource on the Legend is Vifs nous sommes, morts nous serons. 18 Stefan Glixelli was the first to differentiate among five versions of the poem in his Les cinq poèmes des trois morts et des trois vifs. For additional literature on the texts, see De Mointaglon, L’Alphabet de la mort d’Hans Holbein entouré; Storck, Die Legende von den drei Lebenden und von den drei Toten; and Künstle, Die Legende von den drei Lebenden und von den drei Toten und der Totentanz. Images are treated in Servières, “Les formes artistiques du ‘Dict des Trois Morts et des Trois Vifs’”; Offner, Corpus of Florentine Painting, 3.5.261–63; and Rötzler, Die Begegnung der drei Lebenden und drei Toten. 19 For the full list, see Vifs nous sommes.

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An excellent example of the Legend appears on the walls of the church of Sts. Blaise and Orien at Meslay-le-Grenet (figs. 3.4 and 3.5). There, six figures encounter one another in a cemetery, its ground sprinkled with small crosses. A window cut in the wall between the figures of the dead and the living emphasizes the divide between the two realms. Wrapped in long white shrouds, their skeletal feet bare on the ground, the dead are contrasted with the three noblemen on horseback, clad in elaborate garments; falcons above signify their status as hunters. For scholar Jean Baudrillard, “the figure of the double [is] intimately bound up with [the figure] of death,”20 and the uncanny quality of the image is here signaled precisely by the doubling of the bodies, by the implied mirroring of the noble hunters, so full of life, and the passive figures that appear, without warning, directly in front of them. The hunters react forcefully and so do their horses. Two of the animals turn away from the morbid specters, while the riders look over their shoulders, seemingly disbelieving the apparition of the corpses. The falcons above them turn towards the corpses as well. The third rider faces the dead, his hands emphatically raised; he seems to be in the middle of delivering his speech of repentance, while his horse rears in horror. The gazes and gestures of the hunters draw attention to the three dead, who stand defiantly, their skeletal heads tossed back; the skeleton on the far right is clearly aware of his decomposed body, and arches his back, as if displaying his decaying flesh. The contrast between the luxurious dress of the hunters and the shrouded ghostlike dead emphasizes the somehow inappropriate physicality of the dead bodies in question. The position of the viewer vis-à-vis this scene is significant. The beholder stands below the image, privy to the spectacle unfolding above, but evidently unnoticed. The audience is witnessing a clash between two realms, a clash necessary for the construction of a macabre image: here, one world intrudes upon another. This trespassing of the liminal border between life and death is mutual: the living are made to confront, incredibly, the future corruption of their bodies, while the dead return to the world of the living, reversing, unexpectedly and impossibly, their initial journey into the realm of death. This journey is uncanny, in the sense that literary theorist Nicholas Royle defines it as “a matter of something gruesome or terrible, above all death and corpses” that “has something to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”21 Because the viewers are separated from this intimate scene so emphatically, they witness the scene in secret, unseen; the beholders are voyeurs, peeking from behind the enig20

Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 141.

Visualizing Death

Fig. 3.4. Anonymous, The Three Dead, detail from The Three Dead and the Three Living, late 15th century. Fresco, Church of Sts. Blaise and Orien, Meslay-le-Grenet, France. Photo by author.

Fig. 3.5. Anonymous, The Three Living, detail from The Three Dead and the Three Living, late 15th century. Fresco, Church of Sts. Blaise and Orien, Meslay-le-Grenet, France. Photo by author.

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matic portal that separates life and death. This sense of separation reminds the viewers that they, unlike the unfortunate hunters, are not being doubled in a decomposing mockery of the body; the macabre may strive to traumatize its beholders, but it always leaves a caveat for escape. Turning away from the morbid encounter, the viewers are encouraged to think about and internalize the moral lesson of what they have just seen. In the Legend, then, the living are faced with their own mortality. This moral lesson is quite straightforward and articulated in the declaration of one of the dead: “We once were what you are now; you will become what we are now.” One must always be mindful of death, which comes inevitably and sometimes suddenly. The dead in the Legend are apparitions, phantoms, ghosts, revenants: they rise from their graves to warn and advise, to caution and counsel repentance. A different kind of apparition carrying essentially the same penitential rhetoric accompanies transi tombs, which became popular in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries among the northern European ecclesiastical literati.22 These tombs, like the images of the Legend, offer a spectacle of the macabre: here, images of men carved on a tombstone are doubled by the representation of their decomposed bodies underneath.23 Traditionally, medieval effigies drew attention away from contemplation of the dead body within the tomb, but in the late Middle Ages, transi tombs reversed these expectations by exposing the reality of the decay and making it permanent in stone—that is, putting the body on display.24 The importance of this display is underscored in the opening of the inscription on the Avignon tomb of Cardinal La Grange, which dates from around 1402: “Spectaculum facti sumus mundo” (We have been made a spectacle for the world) (fig. 3.6).25 The idealized effigy sculpted on top of the sepulcher and the decomposed corpse carved below echo one another in a sort of uncanny encounter, as if the corpse is being reflected in a distorted mirror.26 Here, however, the two realms are kept emphatically distinct: the intact body on top of the tomb comes in no visual or physical contact with the decaying corpse below; the transi, too, although turned towards the effigy, cannot “see” it through the stone screen. The viewer here is privy to more than the cardinal himself, and is allowed to behold what the cardinal,

21 Royle, Uncanny, 2. For further discussion of the notion of the uncanny, see Arnzen, Return of the Uncanny; Bronfen, “The Death Drive (Freud)”; and Chisholm, “The Uncanny.” See also Dolar, “‘I Shall Be With You on Your Wedding-Night’”; Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”; Johnson, “Ambient Technologies, Uncanny Signs”; Kofman, “Un philosophe ‘unheimlich’”; and Rank, Double. 22 On transi tombs see Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol; King, “The Cadaver Tomb in England”; Lawson, “Cadaver Effigies”; and Binski, Medieval Death,139–52. 23 Jurgis Baltrusaitis (Le Moyen Age fantastique, 240) was the first to suggest the similarities between the two: both warn the viewer about the sin of pride, and both equally confront us with the contrast between a decomposing and a whole body. 24 On Gothic effigies see, for instance, Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship. 25 Binski, Medieval Death, 145. 26 All that remains are the tomb fragments; the double effigy was once capped by a representation XXXXX

Visualizing Death

Fig. 3.6. Anonymous, the transi tomb of Cardinal La Grange, ca. 1402. Stone, Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon, France. Photo by author.

dead and buried, can no longer see. In the Legend, the moral lesson about the fleeting quality of life was ostensibly meant for the hunters, but here, in the transi, it is unequivocally directed at the viewer. The address to the viewer is stressed still further in the seven heads sculpted above the inscription, which are usually identified as belonging to a pope, two cardinals, a bishop, a king, a young prince, and a burgher. The inscription itself resonates incontrovertibly with the moral lesson of The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living: “You will revert, as we have done, to a fetid cadaver, food and tidbits for worms and ashes.”27 The encounter in the Legend may have been conceived as a moral exemplum, but it focused its attention on three rich men; the transi tomb of Cardinal La Grange includes all others in its didactic lesson by pointing out the inevitability of death for “the old and the young…of whichever status, sex or estate.” And if the Latin of the inscription itself was reserved for the learned elite, the chorus of sculpted heads was meant to guide the viewing of those who could not read: it emphasizes the equality of death by inviting them to extend the transformation of La Grange’s body to all bodies: royal, clerical, and one’s own. The Latin inscription, moreover, hardly bars an illiterate 27

of the heavenly court and included a scene in which angels interceded on La Grange’s behalf. 27 Binski, Medieval Death, 143–45. Specifically on Lagrange’s tomb, see Morganstern, “The La Grange Tomb and Choir.”

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viewer from understanding the full impact of the striking difference between the two sculpted versions of the cardinal’s body, as the slightly skeletonized heads emphasize the equality of death for all. The emphasis on this corruption of doubled flesh is seen most dramatically in the imagery and texts of the Dance of Death. Of all macabre images, it is the Dance that is most commonly associated with the plagues or, rather, with local outbreaks that continued to rage throughout Europe over the next couple of centuries.28 Even more popular than the Legend, the Dance of Death became fashionable throughout Europe and was found in Germany, France, England, Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, and the Baltic.29 The Dance of Death from Meslay-leGrenet, France, dating from approximately 1500, is a fairly typical example (fig. 3.7).30 Grasped by Death embodied, a long procession of men of different classes, laymen and clerics, rich and poor, young and old alike, eloquently communicate the message of the inevitability of death, which is here symbolized by the dancing skeletons. Inscribed below the scene is a series of verses, written in the vernacular, that exhort the living to dance along. Space does not allow for a full discussion of the complexity of the Dance of Death; however, it is worth mentioning the same aspects of doubling, repetition, and display that were traced for the other macabre themes. Here, too, one encounters a representation of death as an oppressive materiality of the flesh, as skeleton after skeleton parades in front of us, each prancing, displaying its body, showing it off from every imaginable angle. Each, of course, is doubled by a living person led away in the morbid dance with death. Death is transformed into a spectacle of crumbling flesh, as body after body flaunts its own decay and disintegration for the benefit of the viewer. The uncanny effect brought about by the doubling of the bodies is deepened in the repetitive structure of the Dance of Death by the recurrence of the paired, doubled dancers that follow one another. Here, the series of personal encounters with death found in the Legend is multiplied dramatically, transformed into a spectacle for all society to see and experience. The secrecy and the privacy of the encounter between a human being and death is compromised, and the dancers here are clearly aware of the viewers: they stare back at them, imploringly, beseechingly, as if attempting to secure their intercession, to beg them to disrupt this gruesome romp.

28

Dubruck, Theme of Death in French; and Brosselet, “Les danses macabres en temps de peste.” bibliography on the Dance of Death imagery is too vast to be given fair treatment here. Quite a few important scholarly works have considered the Dance of Death paintings within the broader context of the late medieval world, with varying degrees of success; see Mâle, Religious Art in France, 328– 48; Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages; Boase, Death in the Middle Ages, esp. 104–9; Camille, Master of Death, esp. 158, 196; and Binski, Medieval Death, 153–59. 30 See Gertsman, “Visual Space and the Practice of Viewing.” 29The

Fig. 3.7. Anonymous, The Dance of Death, ca. 1500. Fresco, Church of Sts. Blaise and Orien, Meslay-le-Grenet, France. Photo by author.

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Moving alongside the painting, the medieval beholder would inevitably have come to his or her own double—a life-sized figure of a bailiff, a physician, a ploughman. In The Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living, as well as in transi tombs, the victims of Death were doubled by (their own) dead bodies; here, it is the viewer who encounters his or her own painted double, who makes eye contact with the beholder. As the skeletal Death grabs its victim, the victim looks at the viewer; the viewer, in turn, reads the verses in which he or she is directly addressed: the verses—the words spoken by Death—comment specifically on his or her profession. The beholder is here cast as a terrified onlooker, not hidden from view, but exposed for the dancers to see. The painting is physically experienced in such a way that the distinction between the picture and the audience is considerably confused, as the viewer is drawn into the morbid dance, invited to become a part of the procession of Death. Death, here, claims all.

THE PLAGUE AND THE MACABRE It is no wonder that a number of scholars implicate the plague in the appearance of macabre images—in their somatic and visceral nature and especially in their overall lesson about the equalizing nature of death. The fascination with the macabre decay of the human body is often taken to have gone hand in hand with the advent of deadly epidemics, which, by increasing societal violence and by making death such a common occurrence, cheapened the value of human life.31 Indeed, macabre imagery appeared in many areas affected by outbreaks of plague: in France (Paris alone suffered the loss of 40,000 people in 1466), in the cities of the Hansa,32 and in Italy, all of which were repeatedly affected by bouts of plague throughout the fifteenth century.33 Based on the inflammatory speeches of Girolamo Savonarola, the plague continued to reign everywhere; as late as 1496, he promised his audiences that “there will not be enough men left to bury the dead; nor means to dig enough graves…. Men will pass through the streets crying aloud, ‘Are there any dead? Are there any dead?’”34 However, to hold medieval plagues responsible for the spread of macabre imagery is highly problematic. To begin with, both geographical and temporal frameworks of the development of the macabre do not coincide with the disastrous progress of the Black Death through Europe. The Encounter of the Three Dead and the Three Living, for example, appeared

31See esp. Ziegler, Black Death, 85–111; and Tuchman, Distant Mirror, 82–127, 172–89. The bibliography on the Black Death is enormous; I have profited most from the compendium of medieval plague sources translated and edited by Rosemary Horrox (see note 6 above). 32 Schildhauer, Hansa, 175. 33 Hay, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, 33. 34 Savonarola quoted in Aston, Fifteenth Century, 15.

Visualizing Death

in manuscript illumination at the end of the thirteenth century—long before the first bout of plague in 1347.35 Conversely, the Dance of Death gained popularity by the end of the fifteenth century, when the epidemics had subsided considerably and lost their initial horrifying moral impact. Moreover, one finds very few transi tombs or Dances of Death in Italy, the initial locus of the plague, and in the fifteenth century even the iconography of the Encounter of the Three Dead and the Three Living became far less frequent south of the Alps. The Dance of Death is still found in Italy in the sixteenth century, long after the epidemics, though still fear-inspiring, had become a more routine part of people’s experience and ceased to terrify in the same way they had done during the fourteenth century; unlike the Dance of Death in Paris, painted in the heart of the city at the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, sixteenth-century Italian images are found in small towns, painted high up on the cemetery chapel facades, such as those in Pinzolo and Carisolo, both painted by Simone Baschenis,36 located within a few kilometers of one another. The configuration of these images is quite distinct, as they betray the desire to transform the macabre from an intimate and visceral encounter with somatic decay into a broad-spectrum reflection on the nature of death. Both, for instance, include a representation of Christ (hanging on the cross in Pinzolo, and standing and blessing in Carisolo37), and both introduce the image of Death on horseback shooting arrows at its victims, thereby conflating the Dance with the more familiar Triumph of Death. Equating the progress of the Black Death with the rise of macabre imagery becomes especially problematic in view of new findings recently published by Samuel Cohn Jr.38 Basing his research on over 40,000 documents—among them chronicles, wills, and burial records—Cohn demonstrates that the disease underwent radical transformations in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that with these changes in the character of the plague came adjustments in mentality. Because of the domestication of what he calls a “new toxic germ,” the mortality rate declined rapidly after the first onset of the disease in 1348, which “allowed doctors to congratulate themselves on what they and their patients perceived as successful medical intervention, the discovery of new remedies and measures for prevention.”39

35 See, for example, Bib. Nat. de France, Paris, Arsenal, ms. 3142, fol. 311v, created ca. 1285–92; the poem there is accompanied by the image of the three dead and the three living. 36An inscription on the façade window of Santo Stefano reads: “Simon de Baschenis pingebat die 12 Mensis Juli 1519.” A seminal study of the Italian Dances is Vigo, Le Danze Macabre in Italia. 37The inclusion of Christ particularly, inasmuch as it is reminiscent of Berlin’s Marienkirche mural, may indicate a German influence; Brion-Guerry, Le thème du “Triomphe de la mort,” 61. 38 Cohn, Black Death Transformed. 39 Cohn, Black Death Transformed, 238–40.

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The changes in the nature of the disease led to another important fact: the plague stopped being the ultimate equalizer. Later fifteenth-century epidemics struck mainly children and spared adults, who developed some immunity to the disease. In examining burial records and analyzing chronicles gathered from around Europe, Cohn draws attention to the increase in the proportion of children’s deaths to the overall numbers of the dead. 40 For instance, Sienese Camporeggio records indicate that while in 1348 children formed under 9 percent of all the plague burials, in 1363, when the epidemic returned, children constituted over one-third of those who died from the disease and were buried at the cemetery. Similarly, if European chroniclers lamented the equalizing force of the plague in 1348, by the end of the fourteenth and certainly by the fifteenth century chronicles from places as different as Pisa, Mainz, and Paris pointed to the fact that children were the most frequent victims of the plague;41 the British Anonimalle Chronicle even goes as far as to call the plague “la mortalite des enfauntz.”42 How, then, should the fundamental message of the macabre imagery that hails the leveling force of death be dealt with? The sculptor of the monumental tomb of La Grange included, as a company for the cardinal, seven sculpted heads that belonged to men from different strata of society: death equalizes all. The monumental murals of the Dance of Death that include the rich, the poor, the young, the old, laymen, and ecclesiastics transform the danse macabre into Bakhtinian carnival proper:43 the pope, the king, the peasant, the beggar, for just this moment are all alike in the grip of equalizing death. If a disproportionate number of children were susceptible to the later plagues, then it is the representation of the Child in the Cradle, commonly tucked in at the end of the procession, that should have come to the fore, multiplied into the images of infants, toddlers, young children, and adolescents (fig. 3.8). Finally, the philosophy that accompanied this change in the nature of the disease contradicts, at its core, the call of the macabre imagery to think constantly of death. The somatic spectacle of decomposition highlighted by the doubling between the uncorrupted body and its putrefied doppelganger, the requisite and identifying characteristics of the macabre, stand in stark contrast with the ordered and controlled images from the Offices of the Dead and with the predictable and tidy series of struggles between the good

40

Cohn, Black Death Transformed, 212–16. For Pisa, see Banti, Cronaca di Pisa di Ranieri Sardo, 186; for Mainz, see “Chronicon moguntinum, 1347–1406 und Fortsetzung bis 1478,” 222; and for Paris, see Tuetey, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris 1405– 1449, 111, 228, 295. 42 Galbraith, Anonimalle Chronicle, 50. 43Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua (translated by Helene Iswolsky as Rabelais and His World). This idea is present throughout Bakhtin’s book, but especially in chapter 3, which deals with festive folk imagery in Rabelais’ work, and chapter 5, which specifically addresses grotesque bodies and their implied ambivalence. 41

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Fig. 3.8. Anonymous, Child in the Cradle, detail from The Dance of Death, printed by Guyot Marchant. Woodcut, Paris, 1490. Photo reproduced by permission from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

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and the evil that accompany the Ars moriendi treatises. This is, in part, Baudrillard’s “primitive” double—“the dead man [who] is the double of the living,” just as “the double is the familiar living figure of the dead.”44 But this is also what he terms a “haunting double” who, with internalizing of the soul, “comes to the fore as the subject’s discontinuity in death and madness.”45 Instead of preparing one for a good death or showing the proper burial rites that ought to follow such a death, the macabre showcases and promotes obsessive thinking about mortality. The skeletal Death of the Parisian danse macabre, for instance, quite specifically asks: “Tell us, for what reason, have you not been thinking about death?” Medieval doctors—among them Tommasso del Garbo and Johann Widmans—would have had a very good and ready answer to this: they advised against thinking about death precisely because they believed it made one susceptible to the plague. If Girolamo Savonarola incited his Florentine congregation to dwell on death as divine punishment, his namesake and contemporary, Paduan doctor Michele Savonarola, warned that plague is fueled by melancholy, sadness, and, especially, by heavy thoughts of death.46 There is one medieval mural that bears a direct connection to the Black Death, however. This is a fresco from the church of Saint André in Lavaudieu, France, painted in 1355—that is, in the wake of the first devastating epidemic. This Death is personified as a woman—not an unusual choice—and carries arrows that strike those around her, often in the neck and the armpits—in other words, places where the buboes commonly appeared. Entitled Mors, this fresco stands at the intersection of such themes as the Triumph of Death (there, too, a female figure, albeit skeletal, strikes its victims with arrows) and the Dance of Death (in which laymen and clerics of various ages line up in the deadly cavalcade).47 This is a curious inversion of an iconographic theme usually called the Madonna of Mercy that portrays the Virgin as a monumental figure draped in an expansive mantle. However, if the Madonna of Mercy, often invoked in connection with the plague, gathers the crowds under her wide cloak to protect the devout and shelter them from harmful arrows (fig. 3.9),48 the personified Plague at Lavaudieu shelters no one, allowing men and women to collapse on the ground on either side of her towering body, her cloak remaining conspicuously empty. One 44

Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 141. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 142. 46 Savonarola, I trattati in volgare della peste. 47 See Courtille, “Vers une nouvelle datation des peintures.” See the essay by Pamela Berger in this volume for an illustration and further discussion of this mural. 48 For instance, in the early fifteenth century in the bishopric of Fermo, documents allowing the building of the churches dedicated to the Virgin link her directly to the protection from the epidemics. The Mother of Mercy was meant to intercede on humanity’s behalf to stop the disease. See Sensi, “Santuari politici ‘contra pestem.’” For further discussion of the Madonna of Mercy and her protective powers against plague, see Sussmann, “Maria mit dem Schutzmantel”; and Marshall, “Manipulating the Sacred,” 512–27. Marshall also discusses images that feature the chosen ones shielded by Mary’s cloak, XXXXX 45

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Fig. 3.9. Barnaba da Modena, Madonna della Misericordia, 1375–76. Tempera on panel, S. Maria dei Servi, Genoa. Photo reproduced by permission from S. Maria dei Servi.

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Fig. 3.10. Anonymous, Female Figure (Death?), detail from The Dance of Death, ca. 1490. Fresco, Kermaria-en-Isquit, Plouha, France. Photo by author.

must note, too, the striking resemblance of this personification of the Black Death with the mysterious figure of a woman that appears in the midst of the dancers in the Dance of Death at Kermaria, between the physician and the usurer (fig. 3.10).49 Its placement in the middle of the procession otherwise devoid of women is startling; what is more startling is that she takes the place of one of the skeletal dancers. Could it be that she is Death personified, and those skeletons that prance amidst the mournful cavalcade of victims are her morbid decaying vassals? Macabre imagery, then, exists in an uneasy relationship with the later plague epidemics. Certainly, it was not engendered by them and often it contradicted medical advice by exposing and by insisting upon the reality of omnipresent death. Here, the macabre resonates with late medieval sermons, with their apocalyptic, eschatological appeal strongly flavored with didacticism.50 Unquestionably, the plague epidemics contributed to the popularity of the macabre and especially to its dramatic message of the inevitable and equalizing nature of death. It is important to understand, however, that much of the earlier drama and violence of the Black Death 49

while others are collapsing on the ground, as in Plague Madonna della Misericordia by Pietro Alemanno (1485) and Barnaba da Modena (1370s). 49 On Kermaria, see Soleil, La danse macabre de Kermaria-an-Isquit; Chardin, Chapelle de Kermaria-Nisquit en Plouha; and Cocaign and Mesnard, Itron-Varia-an-Iskuit, Plouha. 50 I am thinking, e.g., of the Franciscan friar Richard who preached apocalyptic sermons at the Cemetery of Holy Innocents in front of the Dance of Death murals. The moral, didactic flavor of his sermons is easy to surmise from the fact that his audience, contrite and repentant, threw expensive clothing and gaming paraphernalia into a fire that burned nearby. See Tuetey, Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris, 233–34.

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waned in the late medieval and early modern period. Pogroms, although no less numerous, lost their direct connections to the plague; only one known massacre in the late fourteenth century directly implicated the Jews in the outbreak of the disease. Flagellants, too, became less numerous, and their movement became more localized, often organized by a local church or town authority. Nor did the drama of the macabre, with its visceral focus on the flesh, stem directly from the plague epidemics, but rather became their frequent companion; on the late medieval canvas of Europe it painted its own imagery amidst the devastation of the old world and the building of the world. Instead, it is the Ars moriendi, the handbook of mortality, that processes and digests the earlier horrors of the plagues and, when the respite finally comes, patiently and tirelessly instructs its readers on the best and tidiest way to finally die.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbate Vincenzo, and Michele Cordaro, eds. Trionfo della Morte di Palermo: L’opera, le vicende conservative, il restauro. Palermo: Sellerio, 1989. Alexandre-Bidon, Danièle. A Réveiller les morts: La mort au quotidien dans l’Occident médiéval. Edited by Danièle Alexandre-Bison and Cécile Treffort. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1993. Arnzen, Michael, ed. The Return of the Uncanny. Vashon Island, WA: Paradoxa, 1997. Aston, Margaret. The Fifteenth Century: The Prospect of Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 1968. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable I Narodnaya Kul’tura Srednevekovya I Renessansa. Düsseldorf: Izdatel’stvo Antikvariat, 1965. Translated by Helene Iswolsky as Rabelais and His World. (Cambridge: MIT Press). Banti, Ottavio, ed. Cronaca di Pisa di Ranieri Sardo. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1963. Baltrusaitis, Jurgis. Le Moyen Age fantastique: Antiquités et exotismes dans l’art gothique. Paris: A. Colin, 1955. Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage Publications, 1993. Bayard, Florence. L’art du bien mourir au Xme siècle: Etude sur les arts du bien mourir au bas moyen âge à la lumière d’un “Ars Moriendi” allemand du Xme siècle. Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris–Sorbonne, 2000. Begule, Lucien. La Chapelle de Kermaria. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909. Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Boase, Thomas S. R. Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgment, and Remembrance. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Translated by G. H. William. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Bresc-Bautier, Geneviève. Artistes, patriciens et confréries: Production et consommation de l’oeuvre d’art à Palerme et en Sicile occidentale 1348–1460. Rome: École Française de Rome, Palaise Farnèse, 1979. Brion-Guerry, Liliane. Le thème du “Triomphe de la mort” dans la peinture italienne. Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1950. Bronfen, Elizabeth. “The Death Drive.” In Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Elizabeth Wright, 52–57. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. Brosselet, Jacqueline. “Les danses macabres en temps de peste.” Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 1971, 29–72. Camille, Michael. Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Carta, Giuseppe. “L’affresco del Trionfo della Morte, 1441, nell’Ospedale Grande e Nuovo di Palermo.” In Il trionfo della morte e le danze macabre: Dagli atti del VI Convegno internazionale tenutosi in Clusone dal 19 al 21 agosto 1994, 113–34. Clusone: Città di Clusone, 1997. Chardin, Paul. Chapelle de Kermaria-Nisquit en Plouha (Côtes-du-Nord). Paris: Leroux, 1894. Chisholm, Diane. “The Uncanny.” In Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, edited by Elizabeth Wright, 436-40. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992. “Chronicon moguntinum, 1347–1406 und Fortsetzung bis 1478.” In Die Chroniken der mittelrheinischen Städte: Mainz. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1882.

Visualizing Death Cocaign, Jean, and Maurice Mesnard. Itron-Varia-an-Iskuit, Plouha. Villeurbanne: Imprimerie Lescuyer Société Nouvelle, 1995. Cohen, Kathleen. Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Cohn, Samuel K. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Comper, Frances M. M., ed. The Book of the Craft of Dying and Other Early English Tracts concerning Death. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1917. Conlee, John W. Middle English Debate Poetry. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991. Courtille, Anne. “Vers une nouvelle datation des peintures de 1’église Saint-André de Lavaudieu.” Almanach de Brioude, 1981, 69–85. Dantier, Alphonse. Les monastères bénédictins d’Italie: Souvenirs d’un voyage littéraire au-delà des Alpes. Paris: Didier, 1866. De Mointaglon, Anatole. L’Alphabet de la mort d’Hans Holbein entouré de bordures du XVIe siècle et suivi d’anciens poëmes français sur le sujet des trois mors et des trois vis. Paris: E. Tross, 1856. Dolar, Mladen. “‘I Shall Be With You on Your Wedding Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny” (1906). Translated by Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1995): 7–16. Dubruck, Edelgard. The Theme of Death in French Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Hague: Mouton, 1964. Egidi, Pietro, Vincenzo Frederico, Gustavo Giovanni, and Frederico Hermann. I monasteri di Subiaco. Rome: Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, 1904. Fiero, Gloria. “Death Ritual in Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illumination.” Journal of Medieval History 10 (1984): 271. Freytag, Hartmut, ed. Der Totentanz der Marienkirche zu Lübeck und der Nikolaikirch in Reval (Tallinn): Edition, Kommentar, Interpretation, Rezeption. Cologne: Böhlau, 1993. Galbraith, Vivian H., ed. The Anonimalle Chronicle 1333 to 1381. Historical Series 45. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927. Geraud, H., ed. Chronique Latin de Guillaume de Nangis de 1100 à 1300 avec les continuations de cette chronique de 1300 à 1368. 2 vols. Paris, 1843. Gertsman, Elina. “The Dance of Death in Reval (Tallinn): The Preacher and His Audience.” Gesta 42, no. 2 (2003): 143–59. ———. “Visual Space and the Practice of Viewing: The Dance of Death at Meslay-le-Grenet.” Religion and the Arts 9 (2005): 1–37. Giuffrida, Romualdo. “Aspetti della politica per la tutela dei beni culturali in Sicilia nella prima metà dell’Ottocento: Il problema del restauro degli affreschi di Palazzo Sclafani.” Storia dell’arte 26 (1976): 5–11. Glixelli, Stefan. Les cinq poèmes des trois morts et des trois vifs. Paris: H. Champion, 1914. Gobin, Robert. Les Loups ravissans. [Paris, 1505]. Hay, Denys. Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. 2nd ed. London: Longman, 1989. Horrox, Rosemary, trans. and ed. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. The Hours of Catherine Cleves. Introduction by John Plummer. New York: G. Braziller, 2002. Huizinga, Johan. The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996. Imagerie du Sacro Speco [de Subiaco]. Rome, 1855. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Translated by Roy Sellers. Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1995): 7–16. Johnson, Christopher. “Ambient Technologies, Uncanny Signs.” Oxford Literary Review 21 (1999): 117–34.

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Elina Gertsman King, Pamela M. “The Cadaver Tomb in England: Novel Manifestations of an Old Idea.” Church Monuments 5 (1990): 26–38. Kofman, Sarah. “Un philosophe ‘unheimlich.’” Lectures de Derrida (1984): 11–114. Künstle, Karl. Die Legende von den drei Lebenden und von den drei Toten und der Totentanz. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1908. Lawson, S. “Cadaver Effigies: The Portrait as Prediction.” Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 25 (1974): 519–23. Mâle, Emile. Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources. Edited by Harry Bober, translated by Marthiel Mathews. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Marr, Thorsten. “Die Erlösungsallegorie von Lorenzo Costa in S. Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 54, no. 4 (1991): 530–40. Marshall, Louise. “Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy.” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 485–532. Mazze, Angela. “Il Trionfo della Morte a Palermo: Lo Zingaro e la peste.” Storia dell’arte 45 (1982): 153–59. Morganstern, A. M. Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries, and England. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. ———. “The La Grange Tomb and Choir: A Monument of the Great Schism of the West.” Speculum 48 (1973): 52–69. O’Connor, Mary Catherine. The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi. New York: AMS Press, 1966. Offner, Richard. Corpus of Florentine Painting. New York: Institute of Fine Arts, 1930. Ortner, Alexandra. Petrarcas “Trionfi” in Malerei, Dichtung und Festkultur: Untersuchung zur Entstehung und Verbreitung eines florentinischen Bildmotivs auf cassoni und deschi da parto des 15 Jahrhunderts. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 1998. Ottosen, Knud. The Responsories and Versicles of the Latin Office of the Dead. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1993. Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated and edited by Harry Tucker Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971. Rötzler, Willy. Die Begegnung der drei Lebenden und drei Toten. Winterthur: P.G. Keller, 1961. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2003. Savonarola, Michele. I trattati in volgare della peste et dell’acqua ardente. Edited by Luigi Belloni. Milan, 1953. Schildhauer, Johannes. The Hansa: History and Culture. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1985. Sensi, Mario. “Santuari politici ‘contra pestem.’ L’esempio di Fermo.” In Miscellanea di studi marchigiani in onore di Febo Allevi, edited by Gianfranco Paci, 606–52. Agugliano: Baglioni, 1987. Servières, Georges. “Les fromes artistiques du ‘Dict des Trois Morts et des Trois Vifs.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 13 (1926): 19–36. Soleil, Félix. La danse macabre de kermaria-an-Isquit. Saint-Brieuc: L. Prud’homme, 1882. Stork, Willy Friedrich. Die Legende von den drei Lebenden und von den drei Toten. Tübingen: H. Laupp, 1910. Sussmann, Vera. “Maria mit dem Schutzmantel.” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 5 (1929): 285–351. Tuchman, Barbara A. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Knopf, 1978. Tuetey, Alexandre, ed. Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris 1405–1449. Paris: Champion, 1881.

Visualizing Death Utzinger, Hélène and Bernard. Itinéraires des Danses macabres. Chartres: Editions J. M. Garnier, 1996. Venette, Jean de. The Chronicle of Jean de Venette. Translated by Jean Birdsall, edited by Richard A. Newhall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953. Vifs nous sommes, morts nous sommes: La rencontre des trois morts et des trois vifs dans la peinture murale en France. Compiled by Groupe de recherches sur les peintures murales. Vendôme: Editions du Cherche-Lune, 2001. Vigo, Pietro. La Danze Macabre in Italia. Livorno: F. Vigo, 1978. Ziegler, Phillip. The Black Death. New York: Collins, 1969. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Page references are to the Penguin edition.

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CHAPTER 4

The Making of a Plague Saint SAINT SEBASTIAN’S IMAGERY AND CULT BEFORE THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

Sheila Barker

THE POPULARITY OF SEBASTIAN’S IMAGERY since the Middle Ages can be largely attributed to the once widespread belief that he offered protection from epidemic diseases; however this belief arose much later—perhaps seven centuries later—than what has previously been assumed. Sebastian’s cult embraced a number of themes and concerns in addition to the particular problem of plague. When his cult and imagery did pertain to plague, however, this connection was profoundly implicated by evolving religious and secular perspectives on the human body and its diseases.

THE MARTYR’S BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC Sebastian had been both venerated and depicted for many centuries prior to his assuming the role of a protector against plague. His cult originated sometime before 354 at his tomb in the catacombs on the Via Appia in Rome. It quickly flourished thanks to the stream of pilgrims to a basilica that was built above these catacombs in the late fourth century, originally called the Ecclesia Apostolorum.1 Sebastian’s biographical passio was probably composed during the pontificate of Sixtus III (432–440) by a monk from the monastery beside the Ecclesia Apostolorum.2 This passio does not associate the martyr with any specific disease, nor does it mention plague. Instead, it indicates Sebastian’s youth in Lombardy, places him in Diocletian’s Rome 1

Gordini, “Sebastiano, santo, martire di Roma,” 11:776, 784. The Ecclesia Apostolorum was later renamed after Sebastian. 2 “De S. Sebastiano Mart. Romanae Eccl. Defensore,” in Acta Sanctorum, January; and Pesci, “Il culto di San Sebastiano,” 180–82; and Ferrau, La Basilica e la Catacomba di S. Sebastiano, 33.

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within a witnessing community of saints, and chronicles the events leading to his martyrdom. Among these events are the first attempt on his life by the emperor’s archers, his recovery in the care of Irene, and his second arrest by the imperial guard, who bludgeoned him to death. The passio also recounts the saint’s posthumous history: after the imperial guard dumped his corpse into a sewer to prevent its recovery by the Christians, Sebastian appeared to Lucina in a dream to tell her where his corpse lay; Lucia then found it and had it buried in the catacombs beside the remains of the apostles Peter and Paul. Among the earliest surviving images of Sebastian is a fresco in the crypt of Saint Cecilia at the church of San Callisto in Rome. He appears here much the same as the two saints, Polycamus and Quirinus, depicted beside him: they are beardless men, dressed in white tunics fastened with clasps, and posed like philosophers.3 By the time that Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) designated Sebastian as Rome’s third patron saint (following Peter and Paul), Sebastian’s cult had already acquired an enduring territorial association with the city that was the site of his relics as well as the See of Peter. Several decades earlier, this territorial association had inflected the meaning of Sebastian’s cult in the Byzantine exarchy of Ravenna. Here, at San Martino (later renamed San Apollinare Nuovo), a church that had been converted from the Arian to the Catholic rite in 561, Sebastian was depicted in the mosaics on the right wall of the nave, dating from about 570.4 He stands amidst a long cortege of saints, all dressed identically as they pay homage to an imperially robed Christ.5 Like the other saints in this retinue, Sebastian can be identified with a distinct political territory to which Emperor Justinian claimed dominion as Constantine’s successor and as the defender of religious orthodoxy. 6 This territorial association is largely responsible for the diffusion of Sebastian’s cult among the Byzantine, Lombard, and Frankish kingdoms over the following centuries. It certainly propelled the introduction of his cult to the Lombard capital of Pavia during the plague of 680, an event first recorded by Paul the Deacon (ca. 720–ca. 799).7 In the midst of this

3 Pesci, “Il culto di San Sebastiano,” 191–94; and Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 367. 4 Deichmann, Geschichte und Monumente, vol. 1, Ravenna, 176–200. 5 The exception in this mosaic is Saint Martin of Tours, to whom the church is dedicated; he leads the procession and is distinguished by his dark cloak (his hagiological attribute). 6 On the relationship between Rome and the Byzantine Empire, see Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages, 141–72. 7 Paulus Diaconus [Paul the Deacon], Historia Langobardorum, vol. 9, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum. A reliable modern translation into Italian is in Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 406. Paul the Deacon’s account repeats a description in the Liber Pontificalis of a Roman plague that occurred in 680. To this, Paul adds an account of the same plague’s effects in Pavia. A good angel and a bad angel went through the streets of Pavia at night announcing the number of victims that would fall dead in each house the next morning. During this time, a man announced that the plague would end XXXXXX

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epidemic, Sebastian’s arm relic was brought to the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, located a short walk from Pavia’s cathedral.8 Notably, modern historians have designated Pavia’s recourse to Sebastian during the seventh-century plague as the earliest evidence of Sebastian’s plague cult—that is, a cult predicated on the belief that Sebastian had special powers against plague.9 In the absence of further evidence, however, it seems an anachronism that, in this epoch, the cult of a Christian saint would have attained functional specificity. It is far more likely that Sebastian’s efficacious intervention against the plague of 680 was anticipated on the basis of his martyr’s status, his privileged burial near the apostles Peter and Paul, and the miraculous power of his relics—and was not due to any particular sanitary application of his cult.10 If Sebastian’s cult did not have a specialized antipestilential function at this time, it remains to be explained why his relics, and not some more readily available ones, were selected to help save Pavia from plague. The answer is politics.11 In 680, the same year that plague struck both Rome and the Longobard capital of Pavia, Pope Agatho sealed an important alliance with the Longobards and established a Catholic hierarchy in the Longobard territories.12 The transfer of some of Sebastian’s relics from Rome to Pavia’s church of San Pietro in Vincoli—a church consecrated to the most important of Roman saints and visited by pilgrims taking the Via Francigena route to Rome—symbolically reinforced the bond between two worldly hierarchies. Sebastian was ideally suited for this mediating role, since he had territorial associations with both Lombardy, where he spent his youth, and Rome, where he died.13 Pope Agatho’s alliance with the Lombards was commemorated in Rome that same year with the dedication of an altar to Saint Sebastian at Rome’s homonymous church of San Pietro in Vincoli, resulting in a cultic doppelganger of the Pavian model.14 Perhaps, just like the Sebastian altar in Pavia, the Sebastian altar in Rome constituted part of this city’s efforts to 8

upon the building of an altar to Sebastian in the Pavian church of San Pietro in Vincoli; the plague ended when Sebastian’s relics were brought from Rome to Pavia. See Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 346. 8 On the Pavian church of San Pietro in Vincoli and its relic, see Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 408–21. 9 See, for example, Gordini, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 786–89. Until now, this assertion has not been questioned. 10 Brown, Cult of the Saints. 11 Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 393, 414–19. They note Jacobus de Voragine’s role in obscuring this meaning, “with the loss of the original emphasis on the bond between the two centers of power, one religious and one civil” (author’s translation). 12 Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 393. See also Davies, Emergence of Western Society, 81. 13 According to the passio, Sebastian was born in Narbonne, Gaul, and raised in Milan, but Saint Ambrose claimed he was born in Milan. See Gordini, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 776–77. 14 Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 393.

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obtain divine protection from the plague of 680. Sebastian would have been appropriate for a role in Rome’s petitions because, in addition to his generic theological merits, he had been especially charged with the tutelage of Rome by Pope Gregory the Great, as noted above. The eventual cessation of plague in both Rome and Pavia surely confirmed the miraculous powers of the saint and his relics; on a moral level, however, the plague’s end must have signaled heaven’s approbation of the Roman-Longobard alliance. Still extant at San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome is a late seventh-century mosaic that presumably decorated the area of the original Sebastian altar. 15 This mosaic shows Sebastian as an elderly man with a white beard, dressed in a ceremonial white tunic and holding his jeweled martyr’s crown; typologically, then, it conforms closely with the mosaic image of Sebastian in Ravenna. It should be noted that no aspect of this image recalls Apollo, the deity invoked against plagues in pre-Christian Rome; nor does the image include any of the arrows that functioned as metaphors for plague in classical literature.16 This observation should dispel the deeply problematic theory that Sebastian was first invoked to protect against plague because his appearance and his arrow attribute had invited the superstitious to conflate him with the pagan plague deity Apollo, for whom these “new Christians” required an orthodox substitute.17 In the early ninth century, the Franks officially adopted Sebastian’s cult. Like the Longobards and Byzantines before them, they did so for political motives.18 With Charlemagne’s grandson Lothair controlling papal and city politics through his Roman envoy Wal, some of Sebastian’s relics, along with those of Pope Gregory the Great, were released by Pope Eugenius II to Hilduin, the abbot of Saint-Denis, who in turn sent them to the abbey of SaintMédard in Soissons in the year 826.19 Soissons was no casual destination: it was the former Roman outpost at which the Franks won their definitive battle in 486 against the last Roman ruler in Gaul, and it had been the setting for Pépin’s coronation by the archbishop of Mainz.20 At this sanctuary 15 This image is probably based on the Dalmatian soldier saints in the mosaics (ca. 640–42) in the oratory of San Venanzio at San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome; Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 390. 16 On Apollo as a plague deity in Rome, see Gagé, Apollon romain. 17 The “romantic-evolutionary” general theory is dismantled by Peter Brown (Cult of the Saints, 1– 22). With regard to Sebastian, it is disputed by Hippolyte Delehaye (Étude sur le légendier romain, 70), Gian Domenico Gordini (“Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 787), and Louise Marshall (“Reading the Body of a Plague Saint,” 240). Marshall traces the theory to Henry Sigerist (“Sebastian-Apollo”), but its origins are yet much earlier, for Franco Mormando (“Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy,” 31) has discovered a seventeenth-century proponent of the Apollo-Sebastian theory. 18 On the political symbolism that determined the transfer of relics in the Carolingian and Ottonian periods, see Oberste, “Heilige und ihre Reliquien,” 73–75. 19 Shortly after this, some of the Sebastian relics at Saint-Médard were given to Saint-Victoire in Paris; Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 381. 20 Davies, Emergence of Western Society, 73, 144, 145

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steeped with Frankish memory, a place was hallowed for the relics of Sebastian and Gregory the Great, two saints profoundly associated with Rome. Thus, with this single gesture, Lothair betokened his fealty to the Roman Catholic Church and rekindled the Carolingian claim to Rome’s imperial legacy. The symbolic fusion of Roman and Frankish destinies at Soissons did not reflect the political realities in Rome, where Pope Gregory IV (827–44) buckled against Lothair’s growing interference in church matters. As if to signal a breach in their alliance, Gregory IV blocked Lothair’s access to Sebastian’s remaining relics by transferring them from the extramural catacombs to the Oratory of Saint Gregory the Great at the Vatican Palace, where they were under the pope’s tight control and where Sebastian’s title of Defensor ecclesiae romanae gained new luster; a new silver reliquary made at this time for Sebastian’s skull would seem to indicate that the saint figured prominently in papal ceremonies.21 Again, then, Sebastian’s relics were instrumental in the staging of a political relationship—in this case, a hostile one.

THE SAINT, HIS ARROWS, AND THE RISE OF HIS LEGEND The expansion of Sebastian’s cult following the strategic dissemination of his relics stimulated an interest in his Roman itinerary, especially among the growing number of pilgrims who were visiting Rome. Among the sites most associated with Sebastian’s martyrdom was the area of the Palatine hill where Sebastian was shot with arrows and where Irene tended to him. In the late tenth century, the church of Santa Maria in Pallara (now known as San Sebastianello) was built at this site, and on one of its nave walls the events of Sebastian’s passio were depicted for the first time ever in a fresco cycle.22 Judging from its narrative structure and its accessibility to lay audiences, Santa Maria in Pallara’s tenth-century mural cycle served to instruct pilgrims on the historical significance of the site.23 It depicted five events from Sebastian’s passio: the archers’ attempt to kill Sebastian, his convalescence at Irene’s house, the disposal of his corpse in a sewer, the transportation of his corpse to the catacombs, and his burial there. Notably, this influential cycle omitted the episode in which Sebastian was clubbed to death. Thus, uninstructed visitors could have mistakenly concluded from this sequence that Sebastian died at the hands of the archers. Perhaps the confusion spawned by this omission is the reason that nearly all representations of Sebastian from the following centuries— 21 Gordini, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 785. Leo IV (847–55) transferred the skull reliquary to the church of Santi Quattro Coronati. Onorius III returned the relics from the Vatican to the Appian basilica in 1218. 22 Gigli, S. Sebastiano al Palatino, 67; and Krautheimer, Rome, 167. 23 On similar earlier narrative cycles, see Jessop, “Pictorial Cycles of Non-Biblical Saints.”

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whether narrative cycles or isolated images—show the saint pierced by arrows, as if this were the moment of his death.24 One such example is the eleventh-century fresco at the Scala Santa in Rome, probably the oldest surviving isolated image to show Sebastian pierced by arrows. Just like its prototype at Santa Maria in Pallara, the Scala Santa fresco represents Sebastian with a brown beard and flanked symmetrically by archers.25 Sebastian was again portrayed with archers in an isolated scene in the frescoed crypt of the cathedral of Anagni (near Rome). Dating from 1173 to 1179, these frescoes (fig. 4.1) were occasioned by Pope Alexander III’s donation of some of Sebastian’s relics to this church, as well as those of Saints Stephen and Thomas à Becket (canonized in 1173).26 Alexander III (1159–81) spent much of his long, turbulent papacy in outlying towns such as Anagni because Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I had installed an antipope in Rome with the support of the Roman nobility. The pope’s erection of an altar in honor of these three intrepid martyrs may have been a rallying call for the church to stand up against its enemies. The inscription above the fresco of Sebastian with archers underlines this theme, indicating that Sebastian sustains his arrow wounds while serving the Lord.27 Following the emergence of isolated scenes of Sebastian with the archers, the arrow began to serve as Sebastian’s attribute. An early example occurs in the mid-thirteenth-century fresco formerly at the church of San Barnaba in Prato (now at Prato’s Ospedale della Misericordia e Dolce), which shows Sebastian with a blond beard, dressed in a richly embroidered tunic, and carrying an arrow.28 Both image types—Sebastian with the archers and Sebastian holding the arrow as an attribute—became standard in his imagery at a time when Sebastian’s cultic associations and applications often reflected his spiritual role as militant defender of the church and his worldly career as a professional soldier. The binomial association between Sebastian and plague was still well over a century away, as was the artistic representation of Sebastian as a beardless youth. Decisive to the emergence of a direct cultic link between Sebastian and the plague was Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, composed around 1260 as an entertaining yet salutary resource for preachers.29 The Sebastian legend in this work consists of Jacobus’s paraphrase of the old passio and notices of two posthumous miracles: the punishment of a woman who 24 In the thirteenth century, an image of a bearded Saint Sebastian with arrows in his clothed body was made for the Roman church of San Giorgio in Velabro, and a similar one was made for the crypt of the basilica of San Sebastiano; Zupnick, “Saint Sebastian in Art,” 10, 14; and Cannata, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 790–95. 25Ressouni-Demigneux, Saint-Sébastien, 17. 26 Giammaria, Un universo di simboli, 41. 27In part, the inscription reads, “Sustinet affixas domino servante sagittas” (Serving the Lord, he bears the lodged arrows). 28 On the fresco, see Carrara and Mannini, Lo Spedale della Misericordia, 135. 29 Boureau, La légende dorée, 21–25.

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Fig. 4.1. Anonymous, The Martyrdom of Sebastian, ca. 1173–79. Fresco, crypt, Anagni Cathedral, Anagni, Italy. Photo by author.

Making of a Plague Saint

defiled Sebastian’s temple, and Paul the Deacon’s story of Sebastian’s intercession against the plague of Pavia and Rome in 680.30 Apparently, the latter miracle had lain in oblivion until Jacobus encountered it serendipitously while compiling his History of the Lombards based on Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century chronicle. Jacobus explains in the Legenda Aurea that he undertook a recapitulation of Paul the Deacon's De gestis langobardorum “because many do not know the history of this people”; from this statement, it can be assumed that Jacobus’s contemporaries were equally ignorant of the story contained therein of the Pavian and Roman plagues of 680.31 Jacobus concludes his expansive Sebastian legend with a passage he ascribed to Saint Ambrose: Lord, the shedding of the blood of the blessed martyr Sebastian for the confession of your name shows your wonderful works: you confer strength in weakness and success to our efforts, and at his prayer give help to the infirm.32 Later events would prove that some members of Jacobus’s readership forged an associative chain between of the story of the Pavian epidemic and Ambrose’s endorsement of Sebastian as the advocate of the infirm, giving rise to the special application of Sebastian’s cult to the problem of plague. Previous to the Legenda Aurea, there is no evidence that Sebastian’s intercession was believed to be particularly suited to countering plague. From 1330, however, there are signs that his formerly protean powers had been funneled into specific functions, including this one. That year, a chronicler noted that Sebastian’s annual feast day was traditionally celebrated at San Pietro in Vincoli in Pavia with the distribution of two different blessed items, each serving a distinct prophylactic purpose: bread rolls called avicule were eaten by humans and animals alike to ward off pestilence, and miniature arrows made by parish goldsmiths were worn as protection against arrow wounds.33 Significantly, the foodstuff, not the talismanic arrows, transmitted Sebastian’s protection against plague.34 Contrary to received wisdom, then, the origins of Sebastian’s plague cult did not require a metaphorical association of arrows with plague or with divine ire. Moreover, the phenomenon of Saint Sebastian’s healing breads suggests that resistance to plague was seen

30 If Sebastian’s cult had by this time attained fame as a plague saint, surely there would have been more notices of his intervention against epidemics than just this one in Paul the Deacon’s account. 31 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 2:367. 32Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 1:101. 33 Opicino de Canistris’s 1330 chronicle of Pavia is cited in Webb, Patrons and Defenders, 201. 34On the related issue of bread and nourishment in Saint Roch’s imagery, see Worcester, “Saint Roch vs. Plague,” 154, 158–59. Healing breads have been traditionally distributed at the shrine of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino at the Basilica of Tolentino, commemorating the saint’s recovery from sickness after the Virgin Mary appeared to him in a vision and instructed him to eat such breads.

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as an effect not only of heavenly intercession, but also of the proper nourishment of the body. This latter theory, based in the materialistic theories of disease taught at the medieval universities, seems to have been seamlessly integrated with the religious forms of Sebastian’s early plague cult in Pavia.

A PLAGUE SAINT AND A SECULARIZED DISEASE This secular medicine detectable at the incipit of Sebastian’s plague cult described above represents an influence other than Jacobus de Voragine’s Sebastian legend, since his interpretation of epidemic disease is exclusively religious. Paraphrasing his eighth-century source, Jacobus described how pestilence was dispersed throughout the city by angels knocking at the doors of its houses. Clearly, this plague was a supernatural event. Permitting no doubt on this point, Jacobus omitted from his paraphrased account the record of an eclipse that had preceded the Roman plague, presumably because he wished to depict only the plague’s religious causes and not its natural ones.35 He further removed this “divine disease” from the physicians’ realm by noting none of its symptoms and only vaguely alluding to its high mortality rate (“hardly anyone was left to bury the dead”).36 Indeed, even this reference to improper burial underlined Jacobus’s religious perspective, since it indicated a fate held by the church to be more dreadful than plague itself: a bad death laden with unatoned sins. Some of Jacobus’s contemporaries were pursuing quite different theories about plague in particular, and about human disease in general. Weaned on medical treatises of classical origin such as the Articella, university-trained physicians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries believed that health could be optimized by adjusting the body’s humoral composition and regulating the body’s exposure to the “six nonnaturals”: environment, food, exercise, purgation, emotion, and sleep. They diagnosed diseases based on the functioning of organs within a systemic equilibrium, and they offered their patients specific cures as well as regimens to live by. Indicative of the extraordinary prominence some physicians attained in this age is Filippo Villani’s portrait of the Florentine physician Tommaso del Garbo: His name being famous in all of Italy, [Tommaso del Garbo] acquired such esteem and such reputation for his learning and his diligent practice of medicine, that the mighty tyrants in which Italy abounds believe that they would die if Tommaso didn’t treat them…. Thus being regarded by Italians as an idol of medicine,

35In the Liber Pontificalis, mention of an eclipse immediately precedes the notice of Rome’s epidemic; Paul the Deacon included the note of the eclipse in his own account of the epidemic, which in turn was consulted by Jacobus de Voragine. See Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 346. 36 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 1:101.

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and considered almost an Asclepius, [Tommaso] was paid such large salaries that he became very wealthy.37 Recent studies suggest that university medicine was the primary lens through which the authorities of the Tuscan city-states analyzed and responded to the problem of epidemic disease, even as early as the plague of 1348.38 Giovanni Boccaccio’s picture of Florence during the Black Death upholds this assertion. His Decameron depicts a society replete with profane concepts of plague, and largely indifferent to the religious services at Santa Maria Novella, the seat of Jacopo Passavanti’s (1302–57) penitence movement. Although the Decameron’s female protagonists piously attended masses at Santa Maria Novella long after most others had quit, even they exhibit an essentially secular outlook on the plague, and their reasons for taking refuge in the countryside ignore altogether the calamity’s otherworldly dimensions.39 Boccaccio’s own views on the plague also evince a secular bias. He carefully balances religious and profane viewpoints when discussing the plague’s origin and the city’s failed efforts to stop it, yet in describing the disease itself, his clinical approach to its symptoms, pathology, and contagious transmission reveals a fundamental sympathy with the physician’s perspective. Amidst this rift between lay and religious perspectives on plague, a priest named Filippo di Neri dell’Antella introduced Sebastian’s cult to Florence.40 A letter written in May 1348 by a Vallombrosan monk named Benigno offers precious insight into the event.41 It reports that dell’Antella contracted plague while at the papal court in Avignon and soon after, he feverishly recollected having read about Sebastian’s intercession during the Pavian plague “in some Roman chronicle.” Gravely ill, dell’Antella had his friends carry him to a church so he could dedicate a mass to Sebastian and subsequently he experienced a complete recovery. Dell’Antella, who went on to serve as Florence’s bishop from 1357 to 1363, demonstrated his gratitude to the saint who had saved his life by seeking to bring Sebastian to the forefront of the metropolitan cult. It was not a simple task, for the Sebastian legend was apparently rather obscure in these parts: Benigno wrote in his letter that when he first heard of dell’Antella’s experience, he had not known of Sebastian’s intercession against the Pavian plague. Having since located the account in the “new legends of the saints” (that is, the Legenda

37 Author’s translation. Filippo Villani, Le vite d’uomini illustri fiorentini, cited in Santa Eugenia, “Contre la mort,” 354. 38 Mazzi, “La peste e l’assistenza,” 37–38. Clerics, too, adopted the physician’s point of view on the plague; see the clinical description of plague symptoms by a monk in Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 375. 39 Battaglia Ricci, Ragionare nel giardino, 96–97. 40 Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 379–80. 41 Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 375–77.

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Aurea), Benigno transcribed it in his letter, presuming that his interlocutor did not know the story either. When the plague returned to Tuscany in 1353, dell’Antella donated to Florence’s cathedral a relic of Sebastian (apparently an arrow, since the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo still has a reliquary labeled “de sagittis sancti Sebastiani”).42 It is interesting to note that this donation occurred at approximately the same time that Petrarch was writing his Invectivae contra medicum, an attack on the excessive prestige and pride of physicians, particularly those who presumed to cure souls as well as bodies.43 In promoting Sebastian’s cult, dell’Antella may have shared Petrarch’s antagonism towards physicians. Surely he recognized that the miraculous healings worked by Sebastian’s relics would prove that the plague’s origin and cure were in the hands of God, thereby affirming ecclesiastic authority in the realm of illness.44 With Florence again in the grips of the plague in 1362, dell’Antella, now bishop of Florence, seized the opportunity to draw attention to Sebastian’s relics by consecrating one of the cathedral’s altars to the saint. 45 Dell’Antella also commissioned a decoration for that altar: a polyptych with the Madonna and Child in the central panel and, in one of the side panels, the first unquestionable depiction of Saint Sebastian in Florence. 46 That side panel, the so-called Wildenstein Panel identified by Richard Offner and attributed by him to the Master of the Fabriano Altarpiece, represents Sebastian with a light brown beard, dressed like a soldier, and holding both an arrow and a palm branch. Approximately ten years later, following another wave of plague in 1374, a new altarpiece took its place: Giovanni del Biondo’s Saint Sebastian Triptych (fig. 4.2), now at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence. Though the plague outbreak was probably the catalyst for the substitution of the first altarpiece, it seems there was also an underlying need for an altarpiece that could teach the Florentine populace about the saint’s particular virtues. Del Biondo’s triptych remedies this ignorance, portraying in the wings four scenes from Jacobus de Voragine’s Sebastian legend. The first

42 Minerbetti, Relazione delle sante reliquie, 60; cf. Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 381. Dell’Antella may have obtained the arrow during a hypothetical pilgrimage to Rome during the Jubilee year 1350. 43 Petrarch was attacking the physicians, but not learned medicine itself; see Park, Doctors and Medicine , 221–22. 44 On the church’s critique of medicine during plagues, see Gianni, “Per una storia letteraria della peste,” 83–84. On learned medicine in the medieval church, see Amundsen, Medicine, Society, and Faith, 196–216; and Palmer, “The Church, Leprosy and Plague,” 79–99. For the later period, see Palmer, "Medicine at the Papal Court,” 49–78. 45 Franco Sacchetti’s statement in his Trecentonovelle that “il vescovo dell’Antella di Firenze [ha] fatto dipingere l’altare di santo Bastiano nella maggior chiesa” (Bishop dell’Antella of Florence had the Saint Sebastian altar at the main church painted) was first noticed by Detlev von Hadeln (Die wichtigsten Darstellungsformen, 8–9). 46 Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus, 162.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.2. Giovanni del Biondo, Saint Sebastian Triptych, ca. 1375. Tempera on panel, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Photo reproduced by permission from Scala/Art Resource, NY.

(upper right) depicts Sebastian clubbed to death and thrown in the cloaca; the second (lower right) shows Lucia’s dream and her burial of Sebastian beside the apostles; the third (upper left) shows punishment of a woman who profaned a temple dedicated to Sebastian; and the fourth (lower left) depicts Sebastian and Mary directing to heaven the prayers of the Pavians during the plague of 680. The central panel, synthesizing narrative and icon conventions, shows a light-bearded Sebastian bound to a pole, his nude body pierced by a multitude of arrows launched by the swarming archers below him, while a small angel at his ear presents him with the crown of martyrdom. This central image, although based on an established typology, also takes fresh inspiration from the ancient passio account repeated in Jacobus’s

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Sebastian legend, exploiting the black humor of its memorable line about Sebastian being shot full of so many arrows that he looked like a hedgehog. As a skilled preacher might have done, the altarpiece exploits the rhetorical devices of analogy and hyperbole to make a calculated and lasting impression upon the congregation. The smaller narrative scenes of del Biondo’s triptych may have played a key role in the subsequent development of Sebastian’s cult as a plague saint in Florence. They recount Sebastian’s posthumous history, beginning with his death and followed by dramatic and miraculous demonstrations of his power. Their arrangement results in a meaningful juxtaposition between the scene of the saint’s own salvation from a bad death and the one directly across from it, portraying plague as a sudden, unpredictable mortality that threatens a whole community with the danger of a bad death. Bridging the two narrative scenes, the central image of Sebastian pierced by arrows reinforces the idea of sudden death because the arrow was known for its speed as well as its deadliness. Continuously visible, del Biondo’s morbid imagery in Florence’s cathedral would have thus reminded citizens of the danger of sudden death, even when the city enjoyed perfect health. As a memento mori, del Biondo’s triptych fueled the “cult of remembrance” that was one of the Black Death’s lasting legacies to Florentine culture.47 Nor was this an isolated instance: for centuries to come, Sebastian’s image was used to remind Italian audiences to prepare for death, particularly in the ambit of the mendicant orders. Clearly that is its function in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s circa 1493 Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece in the Museo Civico (Rimini), where Saint Vincent Ferrer stands between Sebastian and Rocco repeating the prophetic warning of the book of Revelation, “Timete deum et date illi honorem q[u]i[a] venit ora iudicii eius” (Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come [Rev. 14:7, AV]).48 The same memento mori function underlies a gruesome and horrifying image such as Andrea Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian from circa 1506 (fig. 4.3), whose chilling inscription warns of the evanescence of everything on earth. Such mortifying images of Sebastian may also pertain to the usage described by Elvio Lunghi in his study of the Sebastian imagery at the hospital church of San Sebastiano in Panicale.49 Lunghi suggests that to raise funds for building and running their charitable hospitals, confraternities and religious orders employed Sebastian’s image to alert communities to the danger of sudden death, and this in turn spurred individuals to prepare for death and the afterlife, often resulting in donations and legacies in favor of the annexed hospitals.

47

Cohn, Cult of Remembrance. On this work’s authorship, see Milantoni, “S. Vincenzo Ferrer,” 50–53. 49 Lunghi, Il “Martirio di San Sebastiano,” 135–38. 48

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.3. Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian, ca. 1506. Tempera on canvas, Ca' d’Oro, Venice. Photo reproduced by permission from Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY.

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PROTECTING THE PUBLIC WELFARE Perhaps Florentines with predominantly secular outlooks on disease remained indifferent to the spiritual danger of plague represented in del Biondo’s Saint Sebastian Altarpiece. By the same token, however, they would have been startled by the material danger represented by its depiction of streets littered with unburied corpses, whose decomposition was thought to contaminate the air with pestilence. In contrast to Jacobus de Voragine’s account, del Biondo’s plague scene encourages such reflections upon the plague’s natural causes because it omits the angels that were so prominent in Jacobus de Voragine’s description of the Pavian plague. In effect, del Biondo’s altarpiece represents plague as a natural disease while bringing it into direct association with the iconic image of a Christian saint. The combination was unprecedented in Italy and it gave a tremendous impulse to the cult of Sebastian as a plague saint, that is to say, a saint whose intercession was particularly efficacious against the pestilential disease described by doctors.50 Since aspects of del Biondo’s Saint Sebastian Altarpiece reflect the physician’s understanding of the plague as a natural disease, it can be considered an instance of the convergence of religious and medical outlooks on disease, which was driven by two late fourteenth-century developments. One of these was the medicalization of ecclesiastic charity hospitals that has been documented by John Henderson.51 The other was the incursion of Christian values into the practice of learned medicine, as when Franciscan alchemist John of Rupescissa formulated medicines so that the poor could afford them, or when the lay congregation known as the Gesuati organized in 1350 with the mission of providing free medicines of its own manufacture.52 An exemplary synthesis of religious and secular perspectives on disease is found in Niccolò Falcucci’s Sermones medicinales (circa 1400). This work cites Galen and Avicenna to explain the plague’s causes, but as a plague defense it recommends—along with avoidance of the contagious sick and the miasmic city air—prayers to Saint Sebastian.53 Although a marked individualism underlies Falucci’s advice to flee from the cities and the sick, more typically the confluence of secular and religious medicine was animated by a communal ethic and directed towards 50 Other saints would also be linked with specific diseases. Roch was identified with bubonic plague since the 1420s; Worcester, “Saint Roch vs. Plague,” 156. In Pistoia in 1479, Saint Blaise was associated with the cure of sore throats and Saint Sigismund with the cure of fever; Webb, Patrons and Defenders, 110. 51 Henderson, “‘Splendide case di cura,’” 40. 52 John of Rupescissa’s recipe for the gold-based quintessence employed gold coins but did not damage them; thus, the coins could be borrowed and then returned to owner almost intact, resulting in a low-cost alternative to other quintessences; Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies,” 16. On the Gesuati, who became a clerical order in 1611, see Bensi, “Gli arnesi dell’arte,” 33–34; Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies,” 22; and Vasari, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, 534–35. 53 Park, Doctors and Medicine, 212.

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the welfare of an entire city. Public health had long been a concern in medieval cities and since at least the thirteenth century, it had been safeguarded through the municipal regulation of food and water safety, garbage disposal, air pollution, and street cleaning.54 As a result of the Black Death, however, it became clear that public health—and likewise public welfare— also depended upon the availability of medical care.55 For this service, the Italian city-states turned to the charitable hospitals run by ecclesiastic institutions, fueling rapid growth in this sector. By 1428, Florence boasted thirtyfive hospitals.56 In 1448, the commune of Florence resolved to build a public hospital specifically for the treatment of plague victims; it was to be staffed by four doctors, four barbers, and sixty servants, and called San Bastiano. 57 The naming of Florence’s plague hospital after Sebastian was doubly meaningful, for he had come to be identified not only with the problem of plague, but also with the related concepts of public welfare and communal preservation that were the plague hospital’s raison d’être. The story of Sebastian’s intercession on behalf of all Pavia during the plague of 680, along with his ancient title of Defensor ecclesiae romanae, had fomented the belief that the saint protected the welfare of entire communities. The belief had been transposed into modern terms as early as 1382, when the Signoria of Florence chose his feast day (along with Saint Anthony’s) for the annual celebration of their return to power.58 In 1386, the Signoria marked these celebrations by presenting a new relic (one of the martyr’s finger bones) to Sebastian’s altar at the cathedral; with this donation, they manifested their commitment to the city’s publica utilitas by consigning it—in a parallel spiritual realm—to Sebastian’s tutelage.59 In later decades, numerous Italian towns called on Sebastian to defend their welfare, particularly in times of plague: the commune of Parma sought his protection against plague in 1411, as did the communes of Assisi and Foligno in 1448 and the commune of San Gimignano in 1462.60 Related to the vow of San Gimignano is Benozzo Gozzoli’s 1464 Saint Sebastian fresco 54

García-Ballester, Medicine in a Multicultural Society, 120. For example, Cardone de Spanzotis’s 1360 Preservatione a pestilentia describes how to protect the city of Milan from plague. It recognizes human-to-human contagion and advocates fumigation of goods brought into the city; Patetta, “Nuove ipotesi,” 25. 56 Henderson, “‘Splendide case di cura,’” 39–40; and Park, Doctors and Medicine, 94. 57 Park, Doctors and Medicine, 103 58 See Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 213; and Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 222–23. Wright and Trexler believe that Sebastian’s cult represented the “antiplebian” faction of Florence; however, the cult seems to have appealed to far more of the population than just the privileged families that promoted it in this instance. 59 del Migliore, Firenze città nobilissima illustrata, 24. 60On Parma and San Gimignano, see Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 39, 50. Ahl suggests that Giovanni del Biondo’s altarpiece may have been a communal commission. On Assisi and Foligno, Lunghi (Il "Martirio di San Sebastiano," 132–33) states that the plague of 1447 to 1450 “brought about a kind of civic cult directed towards Saint Sebastian” (author’s translation). 55

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for the church of Sant’Agostino, showing San Gimignano’s population gathered under the saint’s mantle, where they are safe from a shower of arrows sent from heaven and symbolizing divine anger.61 In 1457, the priors of Florence ordered the guild captains to make an offering at Sebastian’s altar at the church of the Santissima Annunziata to keep the plague at bay.62 Similarly, in 1476 the Sienese government decided, in light of the fear of plague and famine, that funds collected for their annual palio should instead be spent on a silver statue of Sebastian.63 This statue served to petition Sebastian’s protection, as well as to reserve in the form of the precious metal some public funds that could be used in case of emergency.

PACIFYING DIVINE IRE Sebastian’s cult offered to late fourteenth-century Florence more than a banner of faith under which they could gather as a community during the repeated onslaughts of pestilence. Amidst the flowering of the flagellant movement fueled by the terror of the Black Death, Sebastian’s cult also helped to counter the heterodox perception that justification before God could be achieved through individual penitence without the mediation of the priesthood.64 This erroneous and antiauthoritarian stance had earned the flagellant bands that invaded Avignon in 1349 Clement VI’s harsh condemnation.65 Before long, autonomous lay penitential movements had given way in Italy to so-called disciplinati confraternities, an orthodox and socially advantageous alternative.66 No doubt, images of Sebastian’s martyrdom fostered the religious values of these disciplinati confraternities, particularly in cases where images of Sebastian’s elevated, wounded, and bleeding body evoke the Crucifixion or the Flagellation of Christ (as in Agnolo Gaddi’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian at Sant’Ambrogio in Florence).67 Such images of Christlike suffering could be seen as endorsements of penitential practices. At the same time, they discouraged the individual from viewing his body as an autonomous instrument of conversion and salvation by demonstrating to the flagellant that he or she was not in a closed, reciprocal relationship with Christ, but part of a larger Christian hierarchy, in which the suffering saint occupied an 61 Ahl (“Due San Sebastiano,” 42) compares the iconography of Gozzoli’s fresco to the Madonna della Misericordia type. Also relevant is Bicci di Lorenzo’s 1445 Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Protecting Empoli from the Plague, a gold-ground panel at Santo Stefano in Empoli that shows the saint using his hand to protect the city from the arrows Christ is shooting at it. 62 Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 32. 63 Webb, Patrons and Defenders, 211, 289. 64For the Italian plagues of 1381 to 1389 and 1399 to 1400, see Corradi, Annali delle epidemie, 525– 32, 536–41. 65Henderson, “The Flagellant Movement,” 147–49. 66 Henderson, “The Flagellant Movement,” 147–60; and Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399, 165–69. 67 On the resemblance of Sebastian’s imagery to flagellation scenes, see Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 47–48.

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intermediary position between the flagellant community and the perfection of Christ. Upon seeing themselves in relation to Sebastian’s place in this heavenly hierarchy, the flagellant community may have believed Sebastian’s suffering could supplement their penitential practices, the intensity of which diminished in the fourteenth though fifteenth centuries.68 Particularly relevant to the outlook of the disciplinati are images that represent Sebastian’s endurance of the arrows while indicating his position within the larger Christian scheme of salvation. Outstanding in this respect is Benozzo Gozzoli’s 1466 ex-voto image of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian at the Collegiata in San Gimignano (fig. 4.4), a work that, seen within its pictorial context, links up with an encyclopedic vision of salvation. 69 For this commission, Gozzoli depicted Sebastian’s arrow-pierced body receiving a blessing from Christ above as Mary prays at Christ’s side. A continuation of the theological scheme can be seen outside Gozzoli’s image in the preexisting Last Judgment fresco program created by Taddeo di Bartolo in 1410 to 1415, depicting the hierarchies of heaven surmounted by Christ in judgment above, and paradise and hell on the flanking walls; attached to the wall on either side of Gozzoli’s fresco are Jacopo della Quercia’s circa 1421 to 1426 polychrome wood statues of the archangel Gabriel and the annunciate Virgin. Similar in their purpose are the prevalent pairings of Sebastian’s martyrdom scene with an image of the Annunciation to the Virgin or the resurrected Christ. Examples include Giovanni del Biondo’s above-mentioned 1374 Saint Sebastian Triptych; the Master of Staffolo’s 1449 Misericordia Standard for Fabriano (now at Palazzo Venezia in Rome); Giovanni Bellini’s circa 1468 Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece at Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice; the altar wall decoration in the Vaselli chapel at San Petronio in Bologna, dating from circa 1487–97; and Titian’s 1522 Resurrection Polyptych at Santi Nazaro e Celso in Brescia (fig. 4.5). Associated with such emblems of salvation, Sebastian’s extraordinary suffering opened a conduit for penitents seeking Mary’s and Christ’s power over sin and death. Also relevant to the outlook of the disciplinati and the orthodox channeling of flagellant piety are the nearly life-size wooden statues of a naked, arrow-ridden Sebastian (fig. 4.6). These light and durable statues, whose popularity peaked in the early sixteenth century, must have figured prominently in public processions where they expressed the community’s penitential fervor by means of Sebastian’s patent suffering. Insight into the surrogate function of these Sebastian statues is offered by the ritual pilgrimage of the nuri (nudes) practiced for centuries in Melilli (Sicily). This annual ceremony originated after a nude statue of Sebastian washed ashore in 1411 and cured a leper. On the eve of the feast commemorating the

68 69

Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 206–7. Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 48–49.

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Fig. 4.4. Benozzo Gozzoli, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1466. Fresco, counterfaçade, Collegiata, San Gimignano, Italy. Photo by author.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.5. Titian, The Resurrection Polyptych (also called The Averoldi Polyptych), 1522. Oil on canvas, SS. Nazaro e Celso, Brescia, Italy. Photo reproduced by permission from Scala/Art Resource, NY.

statue’s miraculous arrival, men of the region would leave their homes barefoot and naked except for a red sash, convening by morning at Sebastian’s sanctuary to make their offerings of flowers.70 Liliane Dufour has theorized that the participants’ nudity referred to the degradation endured by Sebastian as well as to the penitential nudity of the older flagellant confraternities that had probably given origin to Melilli’s pilgrimage ritual.71 Clearly nudity was central to the ritual’s meaning; by establishing a close analogy between the living bodies of the male participants and the emblematic body of the nude martyr, it seems to have facilitated a kind of symbolic transference that

70 71

The ritual was codified by 1588; Dufour, Il Santuario di San Sebastiano, 3–5, 22. Dufour, Il Santuario di San Sebastiano, 22–23.

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Fig. 4.6. Anonymous, Saint Sebastian, ca. 1520. Polychrome wood, Museo della Collegiata di Sant’ Andrea, Empoli, Italy. Photo by author.

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“animated” the suffering Sebastian statue and enabled it to function as a surrogate for the participants. The use of the wooden statues of Sebastian as penitential surrogates for the living bodies of a community provides a critical context for understanding Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (fig. 4.7). Completed in 1475, this panel was originally located in the Pucci chapel, an oratory attached to the Santissima Annunziata as well as the location of Florence’s second relic of Saint Sebastian, probably obtained shortly before 1451.72 With this altarpiece, the Pollaiuolo brothers sought as much as possible to render Sebastian the equivalent of a living body. They enhanced the illusionism of Sebastian’s three-dimensionality by disposing the archers around him in a circle; they modeled his appearance on the prominent Florentine youth Gino di Lodovico Capponi (1453–78); and they depicted his body with careful attention to anatomical verism (Vasari had admired especially their rendition of the swelling of the veins and muscles in the archer who bends over to adjust his weapon).73 The youth of this Sebastian was by now a common feature of the saint’s iconographic typology.74 Nevertheless, it also complemented the penitential interpretation of the image, recalling the participation of children and adolescents in penitential causes such as the processions led by itinerant preacher Roberto da Lecce during the plague of 1448.75 Pietro Perugino’s circa 1490 painting of Saint Sebastian (fig. 4.8) also pertains to the penitential dimension of Sebastian’s cult. However, whereas the Pollaiuolo brothers had explored the anecdotal aspects of Sebastian’s martyrdom, Perugino focused on its anagogical significance. By eliminating the archers from the scene and inclining the arrows stuck in Sebastian’s flesh so that they appear to have been launched from on high, Perugino had recast Sebastian’s arrows as emblems of divine ire.76 Indeed, Perugino’s 72 Construction of this oratory began in 1452. On the Sebastian cult at the Santissima Annunziata, see O’Brien, “The Compagnia di San Sebastiano.” On the altarpiece’s commission, see Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 197–98. On a possible Eucharistic symbolism in the altarpiece, see Marshall, “Reading the Body,” 254–56. 73 Vasari, Le vite, 489 74 One of the earliest painted images of Sebastian as a youth is in Piero della Francesca’s circa 1445 to 1448 Polyptych of the Misericordia in Sansepolcro; however, sculpted images of Sebastian as a youth may predate painted ones. On the rejuvenation of Sebastian in art, see Cannata, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 789–801; Marshall, “Reading the Body,” 247; and Schütze, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” 76. 75 Trexler, Public Life, 368–87, 474–82; Corradi, Annali delle epidemie, 583–84; and Infessura, Diario della città, ed. Tommasini, 47–48. According to Infessura, when the friar reached Rome, a throng of “nude young men flagellated themselves while walking from the church of the Aracoeli all the way to Santa Maria Maggiore, continually crying for mercy because of the great plague at that time” (author’s translation). 76 In Perugino’s 1478 image of Sebastian in the fresco fragment at Santa Maria in Cerqueto, as well as his Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (1493, Uffizi), the arrows seem to have been shot into Sebastian’s body from above; neither picture includes archers. In contrast, in Perugino’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in Panicale, the arrows are lodged in the saint at an angle that indicates they were launched by the archers depicted below him.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.7. Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1475. Oil on poplar panel, The National Gallery, London. Photo reproduced by permission from Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.8. Pietro Perugino, Saint Sebastian, ca. 1490. Oil with tempera on panel, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo reproduced by permission from Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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conception shares more in common with an emblematic image such as Benozzo Gozzoli’s 1464 Saint Sebastian at Sant’Agostino than it does with Pollaiuolo’s naturalistic and anecdotal representation in the altarpiece for the Pucci chapel. Making clear the expiatory purpose of Sebastian’s passion, Perugino inscribed along the painting’s base a line of a penitential psalm sung by King David to the Lord, here intoned by Sebastian with a heaven-bent head: “sagittae tuae infixi sunt michi” (Thine arrows stick fast in me. Psalm 38 [AV]). In the background, a paradisaical landscape free of all human traces suggests that Sebastian’s suffering pertains more to the history of salvation than to the history of men. This lovely prospect also affords the viewer a subtle note of pleasure, as if to anticipate the joyful reconciliation that is the goal of penitence.

SEBASTIAN’S BEAUTY Like the landscape, the perfection of Sebastian’s form in Perugino’s work is also pleasant to look upon. Indeed, Perugino has clearly studied the heroic proportions of antique statuary and other artworks to achieve an abstracted ideal of beauty in contrast to the naturalism of the Pollaiuolo brothers’ Sebastian. This point leads one to consider the frequently made observation that Sebastian’s imagery in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century emphasizes his beauty.77 Mostly this is a result of general tendencies in Renaissance culture; however, there are some additional factors with particular relevance to Sebastian’s cult. One of these is the above-mentioned use of Sebastian’s image in association with penitential rituals to pacify divine anger. Since it was a widely accepted principle that the more precious the offering, the more God would be placated, the attractiveness of Sebastian’s imagery may have been regarded as a factor in attaining divine mercy. This seems to explain, for example, why the priors of San Gimignano vowed during the plague of 1464 to commission an image of Sebastian “as best, as fitting, and as beautiful as possible.”78 Janet Cox-Rearick has shown that the proliferation of beautiful Sebastians was also linked to the suitability of his nude body for demonstrations of artistic excellence, which in the Renaissance was equated with the graceful and expressive depiction of the human body, informed by the study of anatomy and ancient art.79 The tendency of artists to use Sebastian’s image as a platform for their skill explains why Giorgio Vasari praises so many different representations of this saint in his Vite. 80 In the case of one of these, 77 On Sebastian’s beauty, see Freedman, “Saint Sebastian in Veneto Painting,” 9–10; Schütze, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” 76; and Marshall, “Reading the Body,” 247. 78Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 39 (author’s translation). The image they commissioned was Gozzoli’s fresco of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian at the Collegiata. 79 See Cox-Rearick, “Fra Bartolomeo’s ‘St. Mark Evangelist,’” 344. On this topic in general, see Freedman, “Saint Sebastian in Veneto Painting,” 5–20. 80 Bernardo Rossellino’s Sebastian is “regarded as a very beautiful work”; Pollaiuolo’s is “the most XXXXX

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Fra Bartolomeo’s 1514 Saint Sebastian, it would appear that the primary rationale for the image was the artist’s desire to vaunt his skill in depicting nudes. According to Vasari, other artists had often teased Fra Bartolomeo because of his inability to paint the nude figure. But after a trip to Rome to study nudes in both ancient and modern art, he returned and at that point decided to prove himself, demonstrating with his labors that he was highly skilled in every aspect of that art [of painting], and as good as anyone else. To demonstrate this, he made a picture of Saint Sebastian, nude, painted to resemble living flesh, with a sweet appearance, and executed with a beauty that matched the beauty of the figure, and it won infinite praise from the other artists.81 A number of artists took such pride in their creations that they went so far as to seal Sebastian’s figure with their own identity. Andrea Mantegna prominently signed his 1459 Saint Sebastian (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) in ancient Greek. Around 1495, Perugino inscribed his name on an arrow piercing the saint’s neck in his Saint Sebastian (fig. 4.9). Titian, in 1522, signed his above-mentioned Resurrection Polyptych on the marble column below Sebastian’s foot, metaphorically designating his painterly triumph over sculpture—in particular, his triumph over Michelangelo’s Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave (circa 1513–16), which served as models for Titian’s hulky, middle-aged Sebastian.82 A similar artistic paragone centered on Sebastian’s figure occurs in Veronese’s portrait of the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria (circa 1570, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Veronese painted Vittoria with a statuette of the work he was proudest of: his marble Saint Sebastian, made in 1561/62 for the church of San Francesco della Vigna, and based on Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. With artists striving to endow Sebastian’s nude figure with both beauty and animate vitality, it was perhaps inevitable that some of their works would have an erotic impact on viewers. Vasari noted one such instance in his account of Fra Bartolomeo’s Saint Sebastian: apparently, its beauty and “lascivious” nudity had induced impure thoughts in some of San Marco’s female parishioners.83 Despite this, looking at and delighting in Sebastian’s 81

highly praised work he ever made”; Perugino’s is “most highly praised”; Andrea del Sarto’s “shows its back, which appears to all who see it as being not painted, but completely alive”; Sodoma’s is “truly beautiful and very praiseworthy”; Titian’s is “studied after life and free of artifice…the whole figure seems to be taken from life, such is its carnal and natural appearance, but even so it is considered beautiful.” Vasari, Le vite, 438, 489, 534, 708, 1061, 1289 (author’s translation). 81Vasari, Le vite, 593 (author’s translation). 82On Titian’s Sebastian as a paragone of sculpture, see Rosand, “Titian’s Saint Sebastians.” 83 Cox-Rearick (“Fra Bartolomeo’s ‘St. Mark Evangelist,’” 351) believes Vasari’s story to be false. Yet even if the story is apocryphal, it nevertheless indicates that Vasari’s society had reservations about XXXXXX

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.9. Pietro Perugino, Saint Sebastian, 1495. Oil with tempera on panel, The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo reproduced by permission from Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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beauty was not discouraged—at least not yet. Leonardo Tassi’s nude wood sculpture of Sebastian in the Florentine church of Sant’Ambrogio remained on display long after Fra Bartolomeo’s disruptive work was removed from public sight around 1520. Andrea del Sarto’s circa 1527/28 Gambassi Altarpiece, with a mostly nude Sebastian as well as a barebacked Saint John the Baptist and a less appealing nude Saint Onofrius, was commissioned for a church belonging to Benedictine nuns.84 Moreover, for viewers who hesitated to look at Sebastian, there were saintly models to encourage them in this practice: in Perugino’s Saint Irene and Saint Sebastian panel (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble), Saint Irene fixes her eyes on Sebastian’s athletic build, while in Perugino’s 1493 Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (fig. 4.10), the Virgin Mary looks lovingly upon Sebastian’s torso. Evidently, these beautiful Sebastians were designed to enamor viewers in heaven and on earth. By the close of the Council of Trent, artworks with a potential to inspire eros were often systematically removed from churches.85 The theme of agape, meanwhile, had become ever more explicit in church art. In 1606 through 1608, the Pucci chapel at the Santissima Annunziata was redecorated and emblematic figures representing Sebastian’s virtues were painted in the oratory’s four lunettes. One of these represents Sebastian’s love for Christ, and shows a man with a stag beside the inscription “Ita anima mea ad te deus,” referring to the first line of Psalm 42 (AV): “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, My God.” 86 Of Florentine origins, Maffeo Barberini, the future Urban VIII, employed this same passage a few years later as the final conceit in his “In Imaginis Sancti Sebastiani,” a poem describing a painting of Sebastian transfixed with arrows and near death, praying to be near to his Lord.87 While these examples of the agape theme in Sebastian’s cult certainly reflect the goals of the CounterReformation, already in early sixteenth century the agape theme had been represented explicitly in Sebastian’s imagery. Bernardino Luini’s circa 1526–28 Saint Sebastian shows the saint as a brown-bearded, fully matured man of rather pedestrian features who stoically endures his martyrdom. He reveals the meaning of his agony by pointing to a sign that reads, “Quam 84

potential reactions to Sebastian’s nudity. On the erotic and the homoerotic appeal of Sebastian’s imagery, see Spear, The ‘Divine’ Guido, 69–76; and Bohde, “Ein Heiliger der Sodomiten?” 84 Natali and Cecchi, Andrea del Sarto, 112. 85 On this issue in relation to images of Sebastian, see Brown, “Between the Sacred and the Profane,” 282–90; see also Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 32. 86According to the program for the chapel, the figure represents “Desiderio di stare sempre unito con il Signore Iddio” (Desire to be united eternally with the Lord God); Fabbri, “La sistemazione seicentesca," 98. 87 Written during Urban VIII’s cardinalate (1606-23), the poem was published in his Maphaei S.R.E. Card. Barberini, 184. On the poem and Sebastian’s cult in Rome, see Barker, “Art in a Time of Danger,” 60–65, 70–78, 113–14, 253–83; Schütze, “Urbano VIII,” 91; and Schütze, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” 80.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.10. Pietro Perugino, Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian, ca. 1493. Oil with tempera on panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo reproduced by permission from Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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libens ob tui amorem dulces iaculos [p]atiar memento” (Remember how willingly I will suffer these sweet arrows on account of your love).88

PAINTED CURES AND PAINTED POISONS One striking detail of Luini’s Saint Sebastian is the large yellow citron on a branch of the tree to which he is tied. In the Renaissance, citrons and lemons were highly prized pharmaceutical ingredients. Pietro Mattioli’s Discorsi, first published in 1544, recommends citron extract because it “calms the choleric humor and preserves [the body] against plague, and thus in the case of pestilential fevers, modern doctors use it in syrup form with great benefit.” Lemon extract, similarly, cures “the heat of cholera, pestilential fevers, and contagious fevers.”89 The juxtaposition of the citron with Saint Sebastian must have provoked contemporary viewers to compare the citron’s medicinal efficacy against plague with Sebastian’s spiritual power over the disease, or to compare the fruit’s medicinal suppression of the choleric humor with Sebastian’s pacification of divine ire. Religious imagery of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century is rife with such allusions to medicinal substances, and images of Sebastian are no exception.90 Perugino’s circa 1489/90 Saint Sebastian (now in the National Museum of Stockholm) places the saint amidst a veritable garden of medicinal simples, including the iris, whose root was considered a universal antidote to poison, and the lily, whose root was used to heal wounds, lower fevers, and cure skin diseases.91 Bacchiacca’s circa 1550 Saint Sebastian also pairs the saint with the iris (fig. 4.11). But the most compelling image of this type is the right wing of Albrecht Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece (fig. 4.12), commissioned by Frederick the Wise in about 1503.92 In this work, Sebastian clasps his hands in prayer while looking towards the Madonna in the central panel of the altarpiece; his arrows are missing from his body—as is their association with divine anger. On the shelf in front of the saint, there are various objects, all with medicinal applications: an herb probably to be identified with betony (the wonder drug celebrated by Caesar Augustus’s doctor); the liquid in which it stands, either the water or white wine in which betony was decocted; a slice of the apple that was frequently com88 The author thanks Alessio Assonitis for this translation. It seems that a restorer has changed the p to a d in the word that should read as “patior.” Bohde (“Ein Heiliger der Sodomiten,” 85–98) interprets this inscription as a reference to earthly love—specifically of a homoerotic nature. 89 Mattioli, I discorsi, 1:269. 90 In addition to the works discussed here, other examples include the circa 1487 Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Master of the Augustinian Altar in the Germanisches National Museum in Nuremburg and the frescoed floral decoration by Veronese and his assistants on the walls beneath Veronese’s 1558 Saint Sebastian frescoes in the church of San Sebastiano in Venice. 91Mattioli, I discorsi, 1:21, 3:872. 92 On the work’s patronage and dating, see Anzelewsky, Albrecht, 1:140–41. Elisabeth Hipp has kindly pointed out to the author that arrows do nevertheless appear in the picture: a bundle of them is held by a small angel, probably serving to identify the saint.

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Fig. 4.11. Il Bacchiacca (Francesco Umbertini), Saint Sebastian, ca. 1550. Oil on panel, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL. Photo reproduced by permission from the Birmingham Museum of Art.

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.12. Albrecht Dürer, The Dresden Altarpiece, ca. 1496 (central panel) and ca. 1503 (wings). Tempera on oak panel, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany. Photo reproduced by permission from Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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bined with betony in medicinal recipes; and a bulbous plant root of some kind, perhaps the groundnut (Apios) whose purgative effect was noted by Mattioli and Dioscorides.93 What might have been the rationale for depicting medicinal simples alongside Saint Sebastian in religious imagery? In cases where pictures of this kind were displayed at hospital churches, they would have reflected the ecclesiastical role in the production and distribution of plant-based medicines to patients who could not afford the cures of the private physician.94 The placement of herbal medicine under the auspices of Saint Sebastian in these images may have enhanced patients’ confidence in these remedies; it may have also reminded physicians employed by the hospitals that the practice of charitable medicine differed in motives, goals, and means with respect to private practice among the wealthy. Speaking more generally, however, the prominence of medicinal simples in depictions of Saint Sebastian indicates the image’s implicit consonance with both secular and religious explanations of illness. This last point is particularly significant in light of the fact some images of Sebastian, when examined from the perspective of secular medicine, would have actually constituted a danger to health, especially during plagues. The scene of a plague-ridden city littered with human cadavers in del Biondo’s altarpiece, for example, stands in contradiction to Tommaso del Garbo’s warning issued during the plague of 1348 “not to think of death, or of anyone’s suffering, or of things that might make you sad or pain you, but instead let your thoughts be of delightful and pleasant things.”95 For Renaissance physicians and many of their patients, it was a prevailing belief that thoughts of plague and death could have disastrous consequences for a person’s health.96 From their point of view, pictures

93 Mattioli, I discorsi, 4:993–96, 1335–36. An early example of betony’s use in a plague remedy is in Tommaso del Garbo (Consiglio contro a pistolenza, 45–47), where it is one of the primary ingredients of certain pills that “maravigliosamente conservan il corpo dell’uomo del tempo di pistolenza da febri e da ogni infermità di quore” (marvellously protect the human body in time of plague from fevers and every malady of the heart). The author is indebted to Dr. Alain Touwaide of the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, for his generous assistance in identifying the plant in Dürer’s work. This identification should be considered probable, not definitive. 94 Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies,” 10–12. By the fourteenth century, plants and herbals remedies are associated with the medicine of the poorer classes; the wealthy used expensive ingredients of animal or mineral origins, imported spices, and powders. The inscription of class and cultural divisions within these two different systems of medicine in the late Middle Ages is studied in Park, Doctors and Medicine, 36. On this topic, see also Gentilcore, Healers and Healing. 95 del Garbo, Consiglio contro a pistolenza, 40 (author’s translation). Cf. Santa Eugenia, “Contre la mort,” 353. 96 See, for instance, Cohn, “Triumph over Plague,” 41. On this relationship between fear and disease in later centuries, see Gentilcore, “Fear of Disease,” 184–208; and Barker, “Poussin, Plague and Early Modern Medicine,” 660–63. Medical warnings about the dangers of fear, sadness, and worry were not easily reconcilable with the exhortations of the mendicant orders to dwell on and prepare for death. The Dominican preacher Savonarola, for instance, insisted that the physician’s advice to avoid thinking of death was the work of the devil: “Il diavolo quando savede che tu vuoi pensare alla morte va XXXXXXXX

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whose morbid or terrifying imagery was designed to make viewers think of their own death, such as the above-mentioned Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece by Ghirlandaio and the Saint Sebastian by Mantegna at the Ca’ d’Oro, would have been extremely dangerous objects.

THERAPEUTIC BEAUTY In contrast to these horrific memento mori images of Sebastian are those that not only take into account both secular and religious explanations of illness, but also seem to follow medical prescriptions for sustaining health through the moderate happiness induced by specific viewing practices. Dating back at least to the composition of the Regimen sanitatis, these theories can be found in the plague treatise of Tommaso del Garbo, who recommended that to stay healthy during plagues “one of the best things in such times is to seek happiness with sound measure.”97 The activities that del Garbo indicated for this purpose—including spending time in gardens with fragrant herbs, looking at precious substances such as gold, silver, and gemstones, looking at things made of these precious substances, and wearing these same precious substances—provided pleasure through the senses, as pointed out in the analysis of this text by Francisco Javier Santa Eugenia.98 The conventionality of del Garbo’s advice is demonstrated by the fact that, more than a century later, Marsilio Ficino recommended nearly the same sensual pleasures for staying healthy (including looking at green plants, the color green, gold, coral, and gemstones; wearing silk; and smelling spicy aromas), noting that “the greater pleasure you gain daily in smelling, hearing, and seeing,…the longer you extend the thread of life.”99 Although del Garbo did not mention looking at paintings or sculptures as a source of this salutary pleasure, artworks could be considered “things made of precious substances” because of the composition of their mineral-based pigments and the gold, silver, and gemstones sometimes used to decorate them. Moreover, the painter’s art permitted the imitation of all these things, so as to create an equally pleasant impression on the senses through the illusion of them.100

97

excitando altri per levarti da questo pensiero: & mette in fantasia alla moglie tua & alli tuoi parenti cosi al medico che ti dichino che tu guarirai presto & che tu non ti dia pensiero & che tu non creda per questo avere ad morire” (The devil, when he realizes that you want to think about death, goes about provoking others to distract you from these thoughts; he sets it in the mind of your wife and your relatives as well as the doctor that they should tell you that you will soon recover and that you should not worry and that you should not think that this (illness) means that you shall die). Savonarola, Predica dell’arte, fol. 12r. 97del Garbo, Consiglio contro a pistolenza, 40 (author’s translation). 98 del Garbo, Consiglio contro a pistolenza, 40–41; and Santa Eugenia, “Contre la mort,” 355. 99Ficino, Three Books on Life, 207, 211. 100 Boccaccio’s Decameron provides a literary precedent for the use of a representational work of art to substitute for actual sensory experiences that lead to a salutary happiness. Glending Olson (Literature as Recreation, 182) calls the pleasant imagery of the book “not merely escapist but therapeutic.”

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A work that conforms perfectly with del Garbo’s and Ficino’s medical advice for attaining salutary happiness through beautiful substances is the circa 1475–80 Saint Sebastian Tabernacle (fig. 4.13). This multimedia altarpiece comprises Bernardino Rossellino’s marble statue of Saint Sebastian (noted for its beauty by Vasari), a predella painted by Francesco Botticini with scenes from Sebastian’s life, and, flanking the statue, two large side panels painted by Botticini with adoring angels and the donors’ portraits, all set within a framework sumptuously decorated with gilded architectural ornaments. While the altarpiece’s resplendent gilded framework enables viewers to look upon gold, Botticini’s side panels cheer viewers with the pleasant things it represents: these sweet, graceful angels are dressed in gowns with golden embroidery; their green silk sleeves are studded with gemstones and pearls; they wear crowns of fragrant roses; and they stand in a verdant, flowering meadow. Rossellino’s marble statue of Sebastian in the center of the altarpiece, because of its pleasing form, may also have been among the things in this altarpiece that fortified the viewer’s health through means of moderate pleasure. Many Renaissance images of Sebastian, in fact, may have been regarded as a form of visual medicine when the beauty of the saint’s form was sufficient to afford viewers with sensual gratification. This seems to apply above all when the saint’s visible perfection is accompanied by a mitigation of the wounding arrows’ frightening effect, as with Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio’s circa 1500 Casio Altarpiece (fig. 4.14), where Sebastian’s radiant flesh is blemished by only a few minuscule wounds, or as with Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child between Saints Peter and Sebastian (now in the Louvre), where Sebastian’s flesh is immaculate and unbroken. Images that portray Sebastian’s corporal beauty without violent or painful associations perhaps ought to be compared to the “perfect substances,” including precious gemstones, gold, bezoars, and the famous philosopher’s stone. These “perfect substances,” which were employed in the costly medicines that were the privilege of the wealthy, cured and protected the patient by disseminating their own tempering, rejuvenating, and fortifying force within the patient’s body to instigate a kind of “beneficial contagion.”101 Some Renaissance viewers may very well have expected analogous salutary effects from looking upon the pleasing form and perfect, harmonious proportions of the beautiful Sebastians. This link between visible beauty and physical health would have been appreciated above all by the elite readership of Ficino’s De vita triplici (Three Books on Life). In this treatise, Ficino called vision “the principal part of the animal spirit” and he judged visual experience to be an integral

101 Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies,” 29–31. This information is drawn from Thomas of Bologna’s late fourteenth-century description of the philospher’s stone.

Fig. 4.13. Bernardino Rossellino and Francesco Botticini, Saint Sebastian Tabernacle, ca. 1477–80. Multimedia, Museo della Collegiata di Sant’Andrea, Empoli, Italy. Photo by author.

Making of a Plague Saint 125

126 Sheila Barker

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 4.14. Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Madonna with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian and Two Donors (also called The Casio Altarpiece), ca. 1500. Oil on poplar panel, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo reproduced by permission from Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

component of an individual’s life force, implying that the things we look at have an impact on our health.102 Looking at perfect things (temperata) was said to impart an exhilarating and rejuvenating effect upon the animal spirit and bring it into harmony with the supreme perfection of the macrocosmic heavenly order. In this same context, Ficino asserted that “nothing on earth, aside perhaps from gold, is more perfect than the human body.”103 Quite plausibly, then, Ficino’s readership would have regarded

102 103

Ficino, Three Books on Life, 207. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 207.

Making of a Plague Saint 127

beautiful images of Sebastian not only as sources of moderate, healthy pleasure, but also as visible expressions of the perfection of the human body, with the power to harmonize the viewer’s vital spirit with the heavenly order. Certainly, no saint was more easily associated with the human body than Sebastian, whether due to the frequent nudity of his images, the prevalence of three-dimensional statues of the saint, or the fact that the arrow wounds he often displays draw attention to his physiological dimension. This essay has explored the wide range of functions that Sebastian’s cult and imagery served in its first millennium, with particular attention to the history of Sebastian’s body: it has been considered a relic of a Christian martyr, a symbol of a geopolitical body, a reminder of mortality, a suffering scapegoat for ritual transference, a platform for artistic skill, and a vision of beauty with therapeutic benefits for the viewer. No doubt, for most Renaissance audiences, Sebastian was what modern historians call a plague saint. However, this designation is only the initial step of a full investigation of Sebastian’s cultic function and the reception of his ever-changing image, especially in light of the interplay between secular and religious perspectives on human bodies and their diseases.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahl, Diane Cole. “Due San Sebastiano di Benozzo Gozzoli a San Gimignano: Un contributo al problema della pittura per la peste nel Quattrocento.” Rivista d’arte 40 (1988): 31–61. Amundsen, Darrel W. Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Anzelewsky, Fedja. Albrecht Dürer: Das malerische Werk. 2 vols. Berlin: Deutsche Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1971. Barker, Sheila. “Art in a Time of Danger: Urban VIII’s Rome and the Plague of 1629–1634.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2002. ———. “Poussin, Plague and Early Modern Medicine.” Art Bulletin 86, no. 4 (2004): 659–89. Barker, Sheila. “Plague Art in Early Modern Rome: Divine Directives and Temporal Remedies.” In Hope and Healing, 45–64. Bartolozzi Casti, Gabriele, and Maria Teresa Mazzilli Savini. “Il culto parallelo a S. Sebastiano nelle chiese di S. Pietro in Vincoli di Roma e di Pavia.” Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia 76 (2004): 345–448. Battaglia Ricci, Lucia. Ragionare nel giardino: Boccaccio e i cicli pittorici del “Trionfo della Morte.” Rome: Salerno, 2000. Bensi, Paolo. “Gli arnesi dell’arte: I Gesuati di San Giusto alle Mura e la pittura del Rinascimento a Firenze.” Studi di storia dell’arte 3 (1980): 33–47. Bohde, Daniela. “Ein Heiliger der Sodomiten? Das erotische Bild des Hl. Sebastian im Cinquecento.” In Männlichkeit im Blick, visuelle Inszenierungen in der Kunst seit der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Mechthild Fend and Marianne Koos, 79–98. Cologne: Böhlau, 2004. Bornstein, Daniel E. The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Boureau, Alain. La légende dorée. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1984. Brown, Beverly Louise. “Between the Sacred and the Profane.” In The Genius of Rome, edited by Beverly Louise Brown, 274–303. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Cannata, Pietro. “Sebastiano, santo, martire di Roma: Iconografia.” In Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 11: 789-801. Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII nella Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1968. Cardini, Franco. “Una nuova fonte sulla peste del 1348 ad Avignone, Firenze e Siena: Il culto di san Sebastiano e Filippo dell’Antella.” Bolletino senese di storia patria 82/83 (1976): 372–84. Carrara, Francesca, and Maria Pia Mannini. Lo Spedale della Misericordia e Dolce di Prato: Storia e collezioni. Signa: Masso delle Fate Edizioni, 1993. Cohn, Samuel K. The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ———. “Triumph over Plague: Culture and Memory after the Black Death.” In The Here and the Hereafter: Memoria, Art and Ritual in the Middle Ages, edited by Truus van Bueren in collaboration with Andrea van Leerdam, 35–53. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Corradi, Alfonso. Annali delle epidemie occorse in Italia dalle prime memorie fino al 1850. Vol. 1, Dalle prime memorie fino a 1500. Bologna: Tipi Gamberini e Parmeggiani, 1865. Cox-Rearick, Janet. “Fra Bartolomeo’s St. Mark Evangelist and St. Sebastian with an Angel.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 18 (1974): 329–54. Crisciani, Chiara, and Michela Pereira. “Black Death and Golden Remedies: Some Remarks on Alchemy and the Plague.” In The Regulation of Evil: Social and Cultural Attitudes to

Making of a Plague Saint 129 Epidemics in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Francesco Santi, 7–39. Florence: Sismel, 1998. Davies, Colin. The Emergence of Western Society: European and English History 300–1200. New York: Humanities Press, 1970. Deichmann, Friedrich Wilhelm. Geschichte und Monumente. Vol. 1, Ravenna: Haupstadt des Spätantike Abendlands. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1969. Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain. Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1936. Del Garbo, Tommaso. Consiglio contro a pistolenza. Edited by Pietro Ferrato. Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1968. Del Migliore, Ferdinando Leopoldo. Firenze città nobilissima illustrata. Bologna: Forni, 1968. “De S. Sebastiano Mart. Romanae Eccl. Defensore.” In Acta Sanctorum, January, vol. 2 (Jan. 20), 621–60. Paris: Palmé, 1863. Dufour, Liliane. Il Santuario di San Sebastiano di Melilli: Arte e devozione. Palermo: Arnaldo Lombardi, 1993. Fabbri, Maria Cecilia. “La sistemazione seicentesca dell’Oratorio di San Sebastiano nella Santissima Annunziata.” Rivista dell’arte 44 (1992): 71–152. Ferrau, Antonio. La Basilica e la Catacomba di S. Sebastiano. Catacombe di Roma e d’Italia. Vatican City: Libreria editrice vaticana, 1990. Ficino, Marsilio. Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes. Edited by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with The Renaissance Society of America, 1989. Freedman, Luba. “Saint Sebastian in Veneto Painting: The ‘Signals’ Addressed to ‘Learned’ Spectators.” Venezia Cinquecento 8, no. 15 (1998): 5–20. Gagé, Jean. Apollon romain: Essai sur le culte d’Apollon et le développement du ‘ritus Graecus’ à Rome des origines à Auguste. Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome. Paris: Boccard, 1955. García-Ballester, Luis. Medicine in a Multicultural Society: Christian, Jewish and Muslim Practitioners in the Spanish Kingdoms, 1220–1610. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Gentilcore, David. “The Fear of Disease and the Disease of Fear.” In Fear in Early Modern Society, edited by Willam Naphy and Penny Roberts, 184–208. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. ———. Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Giammaria, Gioacchino, ed. Un universo di simboli: Gli affreschi della cripta nella cattedrale di Anagni. Rome: Viella, 2001. Gianni, Francesco. “Per una storia letteraria della peste.” In The Regulation of Evil: Social and Cultural Attitudes to Epidemics in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Francesco Santi, 63–124. Florence: Sismel, 1998. Gigli, Laura. S. Sebastiano al Palatino. Le chiese di Roma illustrate. Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1975. Gordini, Gian Domenico. “Sebastiano, santo, martire di Roma.” In Bibliotheca Sanctorum, 11:775–89. Rome: Istituto Giovanni XXIII nella Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1968. Hadeln, Detlev von. Die wichtigsten Darstellungsformen des H. Sebastian in der italienischen Malerei bis zum Ausgang des Quattrocento. Strassburg: Heitz, 1906. Henderson, John. “The Flagellant Movement and Flagellant Confraternities in Central Italy, 1260–1400.” Studies in Church History 15 (1978): 147–60.

130 Sheila Barker ———. “‘Splendide case di cura’: Spedali, medicina ed assistenza a Firenze nel Trecento.” In Ospedali e città : L'Italia del Centro-Nord, XIII–XVI secolo, edited by Allen J. Grieco and Lucia Sandri, 15–50. Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1997. Hope and Healing: Painting in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800. Edited by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas Worcester. Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 2005. Distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Infessura, Stefano. Diario della città di Roma. Edited by Oreste Tommasini. Rome: Forzani e C. tipografi del Senato, 1890. Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. 2 vols. Translated by William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Jessop, Lesley. “Pictorial Cycles of Non-Biblical Saints: The 7th and 8th Century Mural Cycles in Rome and Contexts for Their Use.” Papers of the British School at Rome 67 (1999): 233–80. Krautheimer, Richard. Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Llewellyn, Peter. Rome in the Dark Ages. London: Faber, 1971. Lunghi, Elvio. Il "Martirio di San Sebastiano" di Pietro Perugino a Panicale. Perugia: EFFE Fabrizio Fabbri Editore, 2005. Marshall, Louise. “Reading the Body of a Plague Saint: Narrative Altarpieces and Devotional Images of St. Sebastian in Renaissance Art.” In Reading Texts and Images, edited by Bernard J. Muir, 237–72. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. Mattioli, Pietro Andrea. I discorsi…nelli sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride anazarebeo della materia medicinale. 5 vols. Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1568. Mazzi, Maria Serena. “La peste e l’assistenza agli appestati in Italia ai tempi di San Rocco.” In San Rocco nell’arte: Un pellegrino nella via Francigena, 34–40. Milan: Electa, 2000. Meiss, Millard. Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951. Milantoni, Gabriello. “S. Vincenzo Ferrer fra S. Sebastiano e S. Rocco venerati da Pandolfo IV Malatesta,” in Pittura a Rimini tra Gotico e Manierismo. Rimini: Museo Civico, 1979. Minerbetti, Cosimo. Relazione delle sante reliquie della chiesa metropolitana della città di Firenze fatta nel 1615. Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1685. Mormando, Franco. “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy: What the Primary Sources, Printed and Painted, Reveal.” In Hope and Healing, 1–44. Natali, Antonio, and Alessandro Cecchi. Andrea del Sarto: Catalogo completo. Florence: Cantini, 1989. Oberste, Jörg. “Heilige und ihre Reliquien in der politischen Kultur der frühen Ottonenzeit.” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 37 (2003): 73–98. O’Brien, Alana. “The Compagnia di San Sebastiano and the Lost Founders.” Confraternitas 16, no. 1 (2005): 5–15. Offner, Richard. A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. Ser. 3, vol. 5, Master of San Martino alla Palma, Assistant of Daddi, Master of the Fabriano altarpiece. New York: The Institute of Fine Arts, 1942. Olson, Glending. Literature as Recreation in the Late Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Palmer, Richard. “The Church, Leprosy and Plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Studies in Church History 19 (1982): 79–99. ———. “Medicine at the Papal Court in the Sixteenth Century.” In Medicine at the Courts of Europe, 1500–1837, edited by Vivian Nutton, 49–78. London: Routledge, 1990.

Making of a Plague Saint 131 Park, Katherine. Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Patetta, Luciano. “Nuove ipotesi sul lazzaretto Quattrocentesco di Milano.” Bollettino d’arte 71, no. 35/36 (1986): 25–42. Paulus Diaconus (Paul the Deacon). Historia Langobardorum. Vol. 9, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum ex Monumentis Germaniae Historicis recusi. Hannover: Impoensis bibliopoli Hahniani, 1878. Pesci, Benedetto. “Il culto di San Sebastiano a Roma nell’antichità e nel medioevo.” Antonianum 20 (1945): 177–200. Ressouni-Demigneux, Karim. Saint-Sébastien. Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2000. Rosand, David. “Titian’s Saint Sebastians.” Artibus et historiae 15, no. 30 (1994): 23–39. Santa Eugenia, Francisco Javier. “Contre la mort, l’exercice hédoniste des sens: Le ‘Consiglio contro a pistolenza’ de Maestro Tommaso del Garbo.” Micrologus 10 (2002): 353–64. Savonarola, Girolamo. Predica dell’arte del bene morire. Florence: Bartolomeo de’ Libri, 1496. Schütze, Sebastian. “Gian Lorenzo Bernini, ‘Hl. Sebastian.’” Kunsthistorische Arbeitsblätter 7/8 (2003): 73–84.“ ———. Urbano VIII e il concetto di Palazzo Barberini: Alla ricerca di un primato culturale di rinascimentale memoria.” In Pietro da Cortona: Atti del convegno, Roma–Firenze, 12–15 novembre 1997, edited by Christoph Luitpold Frommel and Sebastian Schütze, 86–97. Milan: Electa, 1998. Sigerist, Henry. “Sébastien Apollon.” Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin 19 (1927): 301–17. Spear, Richard. The ‘Divine’ Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Trexler, Richard C. Public Life in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1980. Urban VIII (Pope). Maphaei S.R.E. Card. Barberini nunc Urbani Pp. VIII. Poëmata. Rome: In aedibus Collegij Romani Societ. Jesu. typis Vaticanis, 1631. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti. Rome: Newton, 1991. Webb, Diana. Patrons and Defenders: The Saints in the Italian City State. Internal Library of Historical Studies Series. London: I. B. Tauris, 1996. Weissman, Ronald. Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence. New York: Academic Press, 1982. Worcester, Thomas. “Saint Roch vs. Plague, Famine, and Fear.” In Hope and Healing, 153–76. Wright, Alison. The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Zupnick, Irving L. “Saint Sebastian in Art.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1958.

CHAPTER

5

Protestants and Plague THE CASE OF THE 1562/63 PEST IN NÜRNBERG

Ronald K. Rittgers

FROM JANUARY 1562 TO APRIL 1563, the Protestant city of Nürnberg experienced the worst outbreak of plague in its long history. During this sixteenmonth period, some 9,000 of the city’s 40,000 inhabitants succumbed to the deadly pestilence.1 At its peak, the plague claimed as many as 500 people per week.2 The city’s clergy were utterly overwhelmed by the sheer number of funerals to be performed.3 One prominent female burgher observed at the height of the plague, “The clerics like the candles are melting away.” 4 Many Nürnbergers left the city, seeking shelter in nearby towns and cities unaffected by plague. A contemporary report claims that the streets of Nürnberg were empty, the majority of citizens having fled for their lives. 5 This outbreak of plague in mid-sixteenth-century Nürnberg provides a valuable case study of how the Reformation shaped early modern burgher responses to physical suffering, a topic that has not received adequate scholarly attention. Central to the Evangelical agenda was an attempt to change rather radically how Christians understood and coped with misfortune, part 1

All translations from the original German are my own unless otherwise noted. 1 The official number of plague victims was 9,034; Porzelt, Die Pest in Nürnberg, 40. See also StadtAN, Reichsstadt Deputation 480. 2 Porzelt, Die Pest in Nürnberg, 40. 3 At times the clergy resorted to burying the dead in mass graves; Porzelt, Die Pest in Nürnberg, 107–8. 4 On 2 October 1562, Marggrettha Cristoff Hallerin wrote to her brother, Paulus Behaim, who was then living in nearby Fischbach, about the progress of the plague in Nürnberg. She observed, “des strebens [sic] halben wiss das es ser uber hand nymt…es ist 2 tag so gar hefftig gestorben / das es der pfaffen vnnd der kertzen syn zurunen / der almechtig got wol vns allen genedig vnnd parnhertzig sein. vnnd wol seinen zorn vonn vns abwenden.” GNM-HA, Rep. II/67, Behaim Archiv, Nr. 29h, Paulus I, Briefe von verschiedenen an denselben (860 Dok.) v. 1533–1568, VIII Faszikel von 1559–1568, item 21. 5 Porzelt, Die Pest in Nürnberg, 46.

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of the reformers’ larger effort to re-Christianize Christendom, that is, to make it less “superstitious,” less “pagan”—at least according to Evangelical lights.6 The Reformation may be seen as a missionary enterprise committed to the re-evangelization of Europe. The goal was to root out what the reformers took to be pagan or quasi-pagan beliefs and practices, and to plant in their place biblical substitutes. Protestant preachers and their sympathizers had been engaged in this re-Christianization effort in Nürnberg for some forty years when plague struck the city in the early 1560s. Evangelical teaching had made its way into the imperial city in the late 1510s, and then in 1525 the council of patricians who governed the polis had officially adopted the reformed faith, thus making Nürnberg the first imperial city to become Protestant. Because of its early and consistent commitment to the Evangelical cause, along with its size, wealth, and cultural significance, Nürnberg had quickly become a leading center of Protestant reform, especially in southern Germany. By midcentury, Nürnberg was among the most staunchly Lutheran cities in the empire. What difference, then, did this Protestant identity make in the way Nürnbergers responded to plague? Was there a reformation of attitudes toward suffering in early modern Nürnberg? If so, what did it look like, and was it limited to so-called elites or did it also affect common burghers? Before examining these questions, a brief history of responses to plague in pre-Reformation Nürnberg is in order.

PLAGUE AND LATE MEDIEVAL NÜRNBERG Prior to the Reformation, Nürnbergers employed several means for contending with the outbreaks of plague that afflicted their city every eleven years or so.7 In 1482, the master singer and barber-surgeon Hans Folz (1450–1513) composed a Plague Regimen (Pestregimen) that listed many of these means. In the first place, Folz recommended immediate flight from the infected area: “Before fear becomes deeply rooted, flee fast, flee far, and return late, so that the next time [of infection] does not become worse than the first.”8 Folz also recommended moderation in eating and drinking; avoidance of all 6 Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard, esp. xvii. On the malleability of the term “superstition” in early modern Europe, see Parish and Naphy, Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe, 1–2. 7 Charlotte Bühl (“Die Pestepidemien,” 123) states that from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century Nürnberg experienced plague on average every 10.3 years, while the figure for the whole of Germany was 11.1 years. In her more recent study, Carolin Porzelt (Die Pest in Nürnberg, 37) claims that Nürnberg suffered outbreaks of plague every eleven years. In 1490, a prominent Nürnberger named Sebald Schreyer observed that the plague “gemainklich in zehen oder zwelf Jahren ungeverlich ein mal ereignet.” Quoted in Porzelt, Die Pest in Nürnberg, 37. 8“Pestregimen in Prosa,” in Hans Folz, ed. Fischer, 1:434, lines 196–97. Folz also produced a rhymed version of the “Pestregimen” that appeared earlier in the same year; “Pesteregimen,” in Hans Folz, ed. Fischer, 1:412–28. In recommending his audience to “flee fast, flee far, and return late,” Folz was, in fact, repeating a commonplace of the time, often expressed in its Latin formulation, “Cede mox, recede longe, redi tarde” see Mormando, “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy,” in Hope and Healing, 15–16.

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large gatherings, including church attendance; periodic bloodletting and the taking of various purgatives; avoidance of foul smells associated with graves, stagnant water, and human or animal waste; limitation of bodily exertion (including sex) and restraint in emotional expression; avoidance of all unnecessary contact with infected people, especially their breath; and avoidance of the breeze at certain times of day. All of this was very common in late medieval Germany and stemmed from the assumption that plague was the result of poisoned air—in many cases owing to astral influence— and an imbalance in the body’s four humors.9 This explanation, along with its implications for prevention and treatment, continued well into the early modern period. In keeping with his vocation as a barber-surgeon, Folz made a point of arguing for the validity of natural means of combating plague, insisting they were gifts of God.10 Such means were not to be maligned, provided one did not confuse medicine with magic and other “superstitious” means of coping with misfortune.11 But natural medicine had its limits, something Folz readily acknowledged. The most reliable source of protection was a more narrowly spiritual regimen. “The greatest medicine and the surest way [to avoid plague],” he wrote, “is to do penance, love God above all things, fear him, [and] keep his commandments, completely submitting your will to them.”12 Plague might be the result of poisoned air, but behind this natural cause was the supernatural First Cause, God.13 This emphasis on divine sovereignty over plague, indeed, over all of life, is readily evident in the extant private letters of prominent burghers from the pre-Reformation period. These letters always depict God both as the ultimate cause of plague and as humanity’s final hope for deliverance from it. On 20 September 1520, Linhart Tucher (1487–1568)14 wrote a let-

9 Sebald Schreyer (see note 7 above) accounted for the 1490 plague in the following way: “Durch die wurckung der cörper des himmels [habe] sich in disen landen vergiftung des luftes regirung der pestilenz begeben.” Caesar, “Sebald Schreyer, 109. See also Esser, Pest, Heilsangst und Frömmigkeit, 14–15. 10 “Pestregimen,” in Hans Folz, ed. Fischer, 1:429, line 19. 11 Folz observed, “…wir finden, das worhaftige erczney, so sie an zauberlist, karackter, segen oder anders unglaubes halben nit beswert werden, nit zu versmeen sint.” “Pestregimen,” in Hans Folz, ed. Fischer, 1:430, lines 27–29. Here we see evidence of the Catholic Christianization campaign that pre-dated the Reformation. 12 Folz asserted, “die höchst erczney und der sicherst weg ist: puß thun und got ob allen dingen liben, in fürchten, seine gepot halten und im deinen willen gancz heimseczen.” “Pestregimen,” in Hans Folz, ed. Fischer, 1:434, lines 193–95. 13 The private letters of prominent burghers reflect Folz’s attempt to combine natural and spiritual means of combating plague, all the while giving priority of place to the latter. On 25 October 1506, council member Michael Behaim (1459–1511) wrote to his son, Friedrich (1491–1533), who was then serving as a merchant’s apprentice in Lyon, that he should observe the following advice when faced with plague: “gee nit vil unter die Leut vnd gee nit nüchtern aus iß das pulffers vnd anders das dir die muter geschichkt hat vnd piß frum vnd gotz forchtig daß ist die pest ertzenney.“ GNM-HA, Rep. II/67, Behaim Archiv, no. 64, Friedrich VII, Sohn Michels Briefwechsel, von 1503–1533. For a discussion of how late medieval theologians related natural and supernatural causes in seeking to account for plague, see Esser, Pest, Heilsangst und Frömmigkeit, 37, 56–57.

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ter to his father, Anton Tucher (1458–1524),15 from the safe haven of Nördlingen, a small imperial city to which Nürnbergers often fled during outbreaks of plague. Having received news from his father about the course of the plague in Nürnberg, Linhart observed, “I was pleased to learn from your letter that things are more stable at home with respect to the plague. I hope to God that he will continue to give us his grace. There is no plague here and the air is good…. My children and I, along with all of our relatives, are fresh and healthy. I hope to God the same is true for you, sir, and yours.”16 Unfortunately for Linhart, his young family did not remain healthy: he lost his wife and two children to the plague.17 The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away. Given the widespread assumption that God was the ultimate cause of plague, and that God used plague to punish sin, it was logical for Hans Folz to assume that the most important defense against plague was penance and single-hearted devotion to the divine will. This penance could take the form of going to confession, although during outbreaks of plague it more typically meant participation in special penitential processions designed to assuage divine wrath. The Nürnberg city council regularly called for such processions during outbreaks of plague,18 hoping that God would be moved to mercy by these communal displays of contrition. In addition to individual and corporate acts of penance, Nürnbergers also had recourse to another important means of coping with plague, the intercession of the saints. As was true throughout late medieval Germany, inhabitants of the imperial city regularly turned to the Virgin Mary for protection and healing during times of plague. In 1483, the Nürnberg magistrates instructed the city’s clergy to sing “Salve Regina” every day after vespers and to conduct biweekly processions, all in an effort to ward off the deadly plague that was then threatening the city.19 Similar measures were taken in 1520 during another outbreak of plague.20 That burghers took 14 Although Evangelical teaching was present in Nürnberg in 1520, there is no evidence in Linhart’s letters that he had embraced it. He continued to greet the recipients of his letters in the name of Christ and the Virgin Mary. 15 From 1507 on, Anton was Nürnberg’s chief financial officer (Vorderster Losunger), arguably the most influential governmental position in the whole city; Beer, “Private Correspondence in Germany,” 933. 16 “So hab ich in eurm schreyben gern vernomen das do haympt mit dem sterben zimlich stett hoff zu gott er soll sein genad furtter auch mit thaillen / / man weyß hie gar von keinem sterben zu sagen und ist gutter luft …so pin ich sampt kindern und allem anndern gesindt frysch und gesunt der gleiche hoff ich zu gott E. W. auch seyen.” StadtAN, Rep. E 29 IV, Fasz. I, 10a: 9 Briefe des Linhart Tucher (1487–1568) an seinen Vater Anton Tucher den Älteren, no. 2. On Linhart Tucher, see Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 38:770–72 (available online at mdz1.bib-bvb.de/~ndb/adb_index). 17 Beer, “Private Correspondence in Germany,” 936. 18For example, during the 1483/84 plague, the city council ordered penitential processions in both parish churches and in the city’s monasteries from early 1484 through Lent of the same year; Schlemmer, Gottesdienst und Frömmigkeit, 276. 19 The council members ordered, “der regierenden pestilentz halber alle tag nach der vesper zu lob der Hymelkunigen Marie die Antiphon Salve Regina zu singen mit der dazudienenden collecten [und] XXXXX

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these measures to heart is illustrated by their regular custom during plague of commending their loved ones to the care of God and the Virgin Mary. For example, on 23 August 1520, Anton Tucher received a letter from his sister-in-law, Cordula Anthoni Deylin, with the following conclusion: “I commend you to Almighty God and the Virgin Mary that they will protect you from the sickness.”21 Pre-Reformation Nürnbergers also sought protection from the two most important plague-saints, St. Sebastian, to whom burghers dedicated a hospital for plague victims,22 and St. Rochus, whose cult the city’s faithful helped spread throughout early modern Germany.23 As was true throughout late medieval Europe, devotion to the cult of the saints in Nürnberg went hand in hand with a desire for protection and healing from misfortune and sickness. It was believed that the saints—and especially the Virgin—could persuade God not to shoot his flaming missiles at Christendom, or, in the event that God had already let them fly, provide healing for those pierced by the divine arrows.

20

in iren gotsheusern zwischen hie und Egidii die wochen zwiemal proceß halten und got umb mittelung seiner gnade der pestilentz und auch des gestrengen dürren wetters halben demütigklich anzeruffen.” Dormeier, “St. Rochus,” 35. 20 See Schlemmer, Gottesdienst und Frömmigkeit, 276. 21 “damit befyl ich auch dem almechtigen got und der junckfrauwen maria das euch woln behuten vor der kranckeyt….” StadtAN, E 29 IV, Fasz. II, 5a, no. 1. 22 According to tradition, St. Sebastian had survived the efforts of a Roman execution squad armed with bows and arrows. Hence it was believed that he could help Christians endure God’s arrows of plague, war, and famine. On Sebastian, see Mormando, “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy,” in Hope and Healing, 30–31; and Sheila Barker’s essay in this volume. In 1501, Sebald Schreyer announced his plans to found a hospital for those suffering from plague that would be dedicated to St. Sebastian. A notice was nailed to the doors of a Nürnberg parish church that promised donors protection from serious illness through the intercession of St. Sebastian, along with an indulgence. The notice read, “durch furpet des lieben heiligen und nothelffers sant Sebastians, in deß ere auch an sollichem haus ein capellen gepawt wirt, den lon von got mit behuttung vor sollicher swerer kranckheit erlangen, sich auch darinnen teilhaftig machen mogen deß ablaß, so dartzu gegeben ist.” Dormeier, “St. Rochus,” 34. 23 Rochus (Roch in French, Rocco in Italian) was a medieval Christian who had reportedly healed others of plague and had even survived the deadly pestilence himself; Worcester, “Saint Roch vs. Plague, Famine, and Fear,” in Hope and Healing, 164–65. Nürnbergers contributed a great deal of money to the cult of St. Rochus in their city, a fact illustrated by the elaborate altar dedicated to the saint in the St. Lorenz church, one of the earliest and certainly most impressive of its kind in late medieval Germany. One of the external panels of the altar has St. Rochus praying the following prayer: O got zu dir ich schrey vn[d] gliff, Dem folck vm solch rett[u]ng vn[d] hilff, Wem pestilentz ode[m] vergifft, Des luffts forcht oder grawen stifft, Vnd dir zu ern mich ruffen an, Welstu dar in nit sterbe[n] lan. (Dormeier, “St. Rochus,” 27)

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PLAGUE, SUFFERING, AND THE EARLY YEARS OF THE REFORMATION IN NÜRNBERG The Nürnberg council’s decision to adopt the Evangelical faith in 1525 had immediate consequences for the way burghers were expected to cope with plague and other forms of suffering. As part of the council’s larger effort to combat “superstition” and “idolatry” in the imperial city, the magistrates abolished most saints’ days,24 declaring the veneration of the saints to be unbiblical, as it detracted from Christ’s unique mediatory role between God and humanity.25 This move marked the official end of the cults of Saints Sebastian and Rochus in the imperial city. The council also prohibited the singing of the “Salve Regina”26 and abolished traditional processions and private masses. Following Luther, leaders of the Evangelical movement in Nürnberg argued that the true Christian had no need of such “pagan” practices: faith alone in the good God who cloaked himself in suffering and the cross should suffice, come what may.27 The new teaching about salvation was supposed to change the way believers understood and coped with suffering. The Nürnberg preacher Wenzeslaus Linck discussed this change in a 1528 pamphlet entitled How a Christian Person Should Console Himself in Suffering (Wie sich ein Christen mensch im leyden trösten sölle). Linck explained that the believer did not have to view her suffering as a punishment for sin, because Christ had already borne the full penalty for sin on the cross. When the Christian was united with Christ through faith, both her sin and her suffering came to belong to him, and his righteousness now belonged to her. Thus, the Christian could be confident that she did not suffer as a thief or a criminal, but “as an innocent saint” (als ein vnschuldiger heylige), and her suffering was not a payment for sin, but simply a “pleasing sacrifice to God” (ein angeneme opffer fu[e]r Got). 28 Suffering was no longer a good work that atoned for (the penalty of) sin; it was now a test of faith in Christ’s work on the cross, and thus of the Christian’s

24

StadtAN, Rep A6, Mandate, 1525, Mai 24, “Neuordnung der gesetzlichen Feiertage,” Einblattdruck. On Lutherans and the cult of the saints, see Heming, Protestants and the Cult of the Saints; and Kolb, For All the Saints. 26 See Dormeier, “St. Rochus,” chap. 7. 27 See the following works by council secretary Lazarus Spengler: “Ein tröstliche christliche Anweisung und Arznei in allen Widerwärtigkeiten” (1521), “Ein kurzer Begriff und Unterrichtung eines ganzen wahrhaften christlichen Wesens” (1522), and “Ein kurzer Begriff, wie sich ein wahrhafter Christ in allem seinem Wesen und Wandel gegen Gott und seinen Nächsten halten soll” (1525), in Lazarus Spengler Schriften, ed. Hamm and Huber, 1:224–43, 280–97, 411–26. See also the following works by the Nürnberg preacher Wenzeslaus Linck: “Wie sich ein Christen mensch im leyden trösten sölle” (1528) and “Wie man Christenlich die krancken tro[e]sten mu[e]ge / durchs vater vnnser / Zehen gebot / vnnd Artickel des glaubenns / sampt nu[e]tzunge der Sacramennt / darauff das gantz Christliche wesen stehet” (1529), in Wenzeslaus Linck, ed. van der Kolk, 86–92, 115–36. 28 Linck, “Wie sich ein Christen mensch im leyden trösten sölle,” in Wenzeslaus Linck, ed. van der Kolk, 90. 25

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willingness to “let God be God,” that is, to see God as the creator and source of all things, especially salvation. The city fathers sought to promote this understanding of suffering further when they adopted the Brandenburg-Nürnberg Kirchenordnung (1533),29 an Evangelical guide for worship and belief that was extremely influential in the German Reformation.30 The ratification of this church ordinance marked a decisive and final break with the imperial city’s spiritual overlord, the bishop of Bamberg, and signaled the magistrates’ intention to become Nürnberg’s new spiritual overlords. The Kirchenordnung had the force of law in the imperial city and its surrounding environs: the clergy who ministered at the council’s pleasure were required to preach, teach, preside, and exercise pastoral care in accordance its stipulations, or forfeit their posts. The authors of the new church ordinance were Andreas Osiander, the leading preacher and reformer in the city, and Johannes Brenz, an influential reformer in Schwäbisch Hall. Osiander contributed a section to the church ordinance that was specifically designed to encourage the Evangelical approach to suffering. Entitled “Concerning the Cross and Suffering” (Vom kreuz und leiden), it urged pastors to dissuade their flocks from turning to magic and “superstition”—both pagan and Catholic—as they faced suffering, and instead to see God as the author of all misfortune, the ultimate end of which was their temporal and eternal good. The common folk were to trust in God’s goodness, knowing that God only disciplined those whom he loved (Hebrews 12:3–11).31 Such instructions on the pastoral care of the sick and the suffering were a common feature of most Evangelical church ordinances. The clergy in Nürnberg and its surrounding environs soon had an opportunity to put Osiander’s advice into practice. In the summer of 1533, plague struck the city with unprecedented ferocity. One contemporary witness claimed that fully one-third of Nürnberg’s 40,000 inhabitants—nearly 13,000 people—left the city for fear of their lives.32 By the time the deadly pestilence had relented in February of 1534, over 5,800 inhabitants of the city had succumbed to its ravages.33 29

Brandenberg-Nürnberg Kirchenordnung (1533), in AOGA, 5:57. Most of the major Franconian cities, towns, and principalities adopted the 1533 BrandenburgNürnberg Church Ordinance. It also influenced church ordinances in Swabia, Württemberg, northern Bavaria, Mecklenburg, and Saxony. Based on its widespread influence, the editor of the 1955 edition of the Sehling volume has written of the 1533 Brandenburg-Nürnberg Church Ordinance, “one may properly refer to it as the stem-mother [Stammutter] of a very important family of clearly Lutheran church ordinances.” Sehling, Evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 11:125. 31 “Vom kreuz und leiden,” in AOGA, 5:97–106; and Sehling, Evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 11:160–65. 32 Porzelt, Die Pest in Nürnberg, 46. 33One of the more reliable Nürnberg chronicles records that, according to some sources, 5,830 people died in the 1533/34 plague, along with another 1,130 in the Lazareth hospital, which lay outside the city walls. In contrast, in his own chronicle, Johannes Müllner, puts the number of dead in the city at 5,526; Diefenbacher, Johannes Müllner, 3:642. 30

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The plague of 1533 marked the first time Nürnberg faced the deadly pestilence as a Protestant city. The precedents set and measures taken in 1533 had a direct bearing on how the city would deal with plague in the future, including the outbreak in 1562. In many ways, the city’s response was thoroughly traditional. On 16 July 1533, the magistrates issued a document authored by the city’s doctors entitled A Short Regimen for How One Should Conduct Oneself during Plague (Ein kurtz Regiment, wie sich zu zeiten der pestilentz zuhalten sey). It recommended many of the measures seen in Hans Folz’s Plague Regimen: flight from infected persons and places; avoidance of large crowds; recourse to various “potions” to ward off or treat plague; avoidance of putrid air; modesty in eating and physical activity; periodic bloodletting, sweating, and taking of purgatives.34 While the Short Regimen recommended little that was new by way of practical means of combating plague, the religious measures it urged were quite novel, and clearly revealed the impact of the Reformation on how the city’s leaders viewed suffering and plague. The 1533 Short Regimen began by observing, In such dangerous times there is nothing more necessary, fruitful, salutary, or comforting than for a Christian to lift up his heart and mind [gamüt] to God the Father through a genuine, strong, [and] constant faith in the gracious [gnadenreich] gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to believe without doubt that [God] is our ever-gracious Father, who has mercifully forgiven us our sin through the suffering and death of Christ, and who will truly and certainly give us eternal life when this life is over. The Evangelical emphases on faith, grace, and the certainty of salvation are readily apparent. The Regimen then continued by encouraging burghers to regard all that God might do with them in the meantime as the efforts of a loving father to discipline his beloved children and to conform them to the image of Christ, their lord and hertzogen (duke). It followed from this that whatever God ordained for them—joy or sorrow, health or illness, life or death—was to be received as “nothing more than good gifts or healing medicine [heylsame ertzney] that flow forth from the tender and good hands of our heavenly father.” The Regimen then exhorted burghers to ask God in this same faith to protect and rescue them from the plague through his angels and through his gifts of natural medicine. If burghers approached God in such faith they could be assured that he would hear them, although God was left free to respond as he saw fit. The Regimen went on to argue that

34 StadtAN Rep. B19 Reichsstädische Deputationen, No. 470, “Ein kurtz Regiment, wie sich zu zeiten der pestilentz zuhalten sey,” Gedruckt zu Nürnberg durch Jo: Petreium, 16. Julii / anno 1533, fols. a iii–c iiii'.

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those who entrusted themselves to God would experience joy, security, and health in their earthly lives, and also be able to bear up under times of crisis with greater ease.35 In other words, there were tangible benefits in this life for those who embraced justification by faith—one could face hell on earth with the same confidence one could have before the prospect of hell itself at the Last Judgment.36 In both cases, the source of this confidence was faith, a trust in God that looked away from human experience to assess God’s character and instead looked toward the Word—that is, Christ and Christ’s promises contained in scripture—for knowledge of God’s true intentions toward humankind. Martin Luther once referred to this Wordbased epistemology as a “Christian art,” conceding that it was a very difficult skill to master.37 Nine days after the Nürnberg council issued the doctors’ Short Regimen, Osiander delivered a sermon on Psalm 91 that dealt with the issue of flight from plague.38 Osiander’s central task in this sermon was to deliver his audience from the false fear he believed was causing them to respond to the pestilence in an unchristian manner. The Nürnberg preacher observed that

35 [a ii] “Zum ersten. Ist in solchen farlichen zeiten nichts nützer / fruchtbarer hailsamer / noch tröstlicher / dann das ein Christen mensch sein hertz und gemüt / durch ein rechten festen / bestedigen glauben / an das gnadenreich Euangelion unsers herrn Jesu Christ / gegen Gott dem vater erhebe / und ungezweyfelt dafür halte / Er sey unser aller gnediger vatter / der uns unnser sund / durch das leyden und sterben Christi gnedigklich vergeben hab / und das ewig leben nach disem / trewlich und gewißlich geben wöll / Darzu alles das / das er mitler zeit mit uns handele / dahin richte / das er uns als seine liebe kinder züchtige / und dem ebenbild Christi unsers herrn und hertzogen / gleych mache / Daraus wird dann ervolgen, das wir / freud und traurigkeit / glück und widerwertigkeit / gesundheit und kranckheit / leben und sterben / und alles was uns in disem zergencklichen leben begegnen mag / nicht anderst an sehen / dann als eitel gute gaben / oder heylsame ertzney / die aus der milten und gütigen hand unsers vatters im himel herfliessen. Aus solchem glauben / sollen wir darnach Got den herrn ernstlich bitten / das gleich wie er uns sonnst on unterlaß / vor sund unnd schanden / vor unglauben und unwissenheit / vor armüt und elendt / vor krieg und auffrhur / durch sein heiligs wort / durch seine heylige Engel / durch fromme und redliche Obrigkeit / unnd durch fruchtbar segen und wetter behüttet / Also wölle er uns auch in diser farlichen zeit / durch seinen vatterlichen willen / durch seine heyligen Engel / und durch seine natürliche unnd heylsame gaben der ertzney / die er uns zu gut beschaffen hat / nach seinem götlichem willen behütten unnd erretten. Dann wann wir das thun / wird on zweyfel solch unser gepet erhöret / und so es unser seel heyl und nutz ist / das wir lenger leben sollen / wird uns alle ertzney / uns natürliche gaben / durch Gottis wort und unsern glauben gesegnet / und zu erhaltung unserer gesundheit krefftig. Ist es dann der güte will Gottis vaters im himel / das er uns wil fordern / so können wir sicher und frölich / sund / todt und hell / durch den glauben an sein wort uberwinden / Unnd wer durch diesen weg / sein hertz also gegen Gott zu friden stelt / wirt allzeit befinden / das auch das leiblich leben / dester geruter [?] / frölicher / sicherer / gesundter / und in aller gefarlicheit dester leichter zu erhalten ist.” Ibid., fols. a ii–a ii'. 36 Steven Ozment (Protestants, 214) has argued that justification by faith freed burghers from worrying about things they could neither understand nor control, both in this life and the next. 37 “Sermon vom Leiden und Kreuz” (1530), in WA 32:34; and LW 51:203. 38 “Wie und wohin ein Christ fliehen soll” (1533), in AOGA, 5:384–411. The sermon appeared in print on 3 August 1533, and was reprinted four more times that year in Nürnberg. The sermon appeared again in Nürnberg during the plagues of 1543 and 1562, and was also reprinted in Augsburg (1533), Basel (after 1533), and Königsberg (1549). The English translation by Miles Coverdale was printed twice in Southwarke (1537 and 1538) and once in London (1564); ibid., 5:387–89. Similar to Luther, Osiander referred to the Evangelical word-based epistemology in his sermon as “die rechte kunst”; ibid., 5:402.

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many people had completely abandoned their obligation to love their neighbors as themselves as they sought to preserve their own lives. The result was that the gospel was defamed and God was moved to punish Nürnberg even more for its lack of obedience to his commandments.39 In order to combat this inordinate fear and its deleterious effects on the city, Osiander endeavored to teach his auditors how they could “flee” the plague in a more Christian way, namely, through repentance, faith, and loving service to neighbor.40 The Nürnberg preacher stated several times that it was not his intention to denigrate natural means for dealing with plague. He simply wanted to make sure that those who employed such measures did nothing contrary to their faith in God or to their obligation to love and serve others, whether in their specific vocations or in their more general calling as Christians.41 Osiander similarly maintained that he was not opposed to naturalistic explanations of the plague (such as movement of the stars, comets, unusual weather, winds from the south, putrid water), as long as one looked to the word to find the ultimate cause of such disasters.42 According to Osiander, the clear testimony of scripture was that plague was an expression of divine wrath against human sin, especially the sins of unbelief, disobedience, and lack of gratitude for the gospel (cf. Deut. 28:15, 21–22, 59–61; Num. 13:27– 14:13; 2 Sam. 24:10–16).43 Because plague was ultimately the result of sin, Osiander concluded that the surest way to “flee” the pestilence was to repent.44 Hans Folz had recommended the same course of action some fifty years earlier. However, Osiander’s call to repentance had a uniquely Evangelical tone. For him, the 39

“Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:394–95. The full title of the sermon was “Wie und wohin ein christ die grausamen plag der pestilentz fliehen soll.” 41 “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:391. 42 “Wer nun Gottis zorn förcht und diser greulichen plag zu entfliehen begert, der frage nicht sein eigne vernunft, wie er im thun söll, sonder glaub und folge dem wort Gottis.” “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:396. 43 Osiander wrote, “Dann wir wöllen inen [i.e., those who look to natural causes] solche ihre weyßhait unveracht lassen und nichts darwider fechten, sonder wir wöllen uns als christen zum wort Gottis halten, dasselbig unser höchste weyßhait sein lassen und im glauben und volgen. So werden wir vil pessern und gewissern bericht finden, nemlich das dise greüliche plag der pestilentz kom aus Gottis zorn von wegen der verachtung [seines heiligen euangelions] und ubertrettung seiner göttlichen gepot.” “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:391–92. Elsewhere Osiander specifically mentioned the sins of “unglaub, ungehorsam und undanckbarkait” as causes of the plague. Ibid., 5:393. 44 Osiander argued, “Dieweil wir dann die rechten ursach diser grausamen plag aus dem wort Gottis erkennen, nemlich, das es unserer sunden als unglaub, ungehorsam und undanckbarkait schuld ist, so wirt vor allen dingen vonnoten sein, das wir derselben abstehn, büß thun und unser leben bessern, wöllen wir anderst vor diser greulichen plag behüt und errettet werden. Dann so uns Gott umb der sunde willen strafft, ist gut zu ermessen, das wir zuvor unser sund erkennen und meyden müssen, sol er sein zorn und straff von uns wider abwenden und nachlassen. Dann so wir in unserm bösen, sundlichen und straflichen leben verharren, wirt er warlich mit der straff auch nicht auffhören, sonder ymer fortfaren, bis er uns gibt und bezalt nach unsern wercken.” “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:393. Later Osiander argued that repentance and reformation of life were “die einig gewiß und heilsame flucht in diser gefarlichen zeyt, dardurch man diser plag entgehen und errettet werden kann.” Ibid., 5:396. 40

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root sin was unbelief, lack of faith in God, which necessarily led to diminished love for neighbor, because the source of this love, God, only dwelt in the hearts of those who put their trust in him.45 According to the Nürnberg preacher, inhabitants of the imperial city had committed “spiritual adultery” (gaistliche hurerey) by trusting in reason and natural remedies, rather than in God.46 Only by placing their full confidence in God alone would they be delivered from fear and premature death—this is what God promised in Psalm 91.47 Osiander argued that those who trusted in their own wisdom, strength, wealth, and friends would ultimately be disappointed. The Nürnberg preacher explained, “when people want to hide themselves behind such things it is the same as if they were to hide behind a ladder, and when they want to seek protection in such things, it is the same as if a wolf were supposed to protect a sheep or a goose.”48 Osiander conceded that those who put their full trust in God might still perish, though similar to the doctors’ Regimen, the preacher claimed that those who replaced fear with faith and flight with service to neighbor generally fared better than did their fearful and self-absorbed counterparts.49 Still, Osiander readily acknowledged that believers and unbelievers alike succumbed to the plague. The difference was that believers died at the divinely preordained time and went to heaven, while unbelievers had their length of days cut short and went to hell. God used plague both to summon the faithful home and to dismiss the faithless to damnation. Osiander conceded that this distinction was only open to the eye of faith.50 Both the city council’s 1533 Short Regimen and Osiander’s plague sermon were reprinted in 1543, when some 1,500 burghers succumbed to 45 There are clear indications in this sermon that already in 1533 Osiander believed that salvation consisted in a real union between the believer and the divine nature of Christ (cf. “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:397, 408, 409), a position that would later earn him much disdain from Lutheran and Reformed theologians alike. 46 “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:398. 47 “Wer unter dem schirm des höchsten sitzt und unter dem schatten des almechtigen bleibt, der spricht zum Herrn: Mein zuversicht und mein burg, mein Gott, auff den ich hoffe. Dann er errettet mich vom strick des jegers und von der schedlichen pestilentz.” “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:390. Osiander emphasizes later in the sermon that these verses are not a “menschenwort,” but the very words of the Holy Spirit spoken through the mouth of the “prophet.” Ibid., 5:396. 48 “Wann sie sich darhinter wöllen verpergen, so ists eben, als wann sich ainer hinter ein laitern verpirgt, und wann sie darpey wöllen schutz suchen, ists eben, als wann ein wolf ein schaff oder ein ganß beschützen solt.” “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:398. 49 “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:395. The editor of this sermon, Bernhard Schneider, notes that during the plague of 1533 only one out of forty clergymen died, although all forty ministered to plague victims: see ibid., 5:395n7. 50 “Darumb, wann gleich ein frommer, rechtgeschaffner christ an diser plag stirbet, so ist es gewißlich sein rechte stund, im von Got auffgesetzt…. Aber es sterben darneben on zweyfel vil sunder, die wol lenger leben köndten, wann sie puß theten.” “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:410. A little later in the sermon, Osiander summarized his argument: “In summa: Wer glaubige augen hat, der sihet, das die rechtglaubigen zur rechten zeit, aber die gotlosen vor der zeit sterben. Darumb, es sterben die frommen oder leben, so geschicht es in zugut. Sterben aber die bösen oder leben, so geschicht es in zur straff und werden in alle weg geplagt und wirt in ihr boßhait wol vergolten.” Ibid., 5:411.

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plague,51 and then again in 1562, when the death toll was much higher. Between 1533 and 1562, the civic and religious leaders of Nürnberg expended a great deal of effort to uproot the old faith and plant the new one in the hearts and minds of burghers. Magistrates, teachers, and preachers made use of every means at their disposal—legislation, catechesis, preaching, private instruction, and the printing press—to promote the reChristianization of Nürnberg. They were quite successful at changing the theological content of sermons and catechisms, and enjoyed similar success at reforming worship and public piety. But what about the beliefs and practices of burghers as they faced suffering; did the reformation of official policy correspond to a change of burgher hearts, minds, and actions?

BURGHER RESPONSES TO THE PLAGUE OF 1562/63 The Reformation did little to dissuade burghers from fleeing Nürnberg during plague. Those with means and connections outside the city followed the advice of Hans Folz and fled. Osiander never condemned this traditional means of contending with plague in his 1533 sermon, but he was clearly not satisfied that all refugees had fulfilled their Christian duties to their neighbors before escaping the infected area. Osiander was less willing to justify flight than Luther in the latter’s 1527 pamphlet, Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague.52 According to Osiander, the Reformation seemed only to have decreased love of neighbor, as burghers fled in unprecedented numbers. The Nürnberg preacher lamented this development, as did the faithful remnant in 1562/63,53 but these expectations of human altruism were rather high, especially given the Evangelical view of human moral potential and the severity of the 1533 and 1562/63 plagues. The Reformation also seems to have done little to discourage the stoicism that was so much part of traditional burgher piety.54 One continues to see this sense of resignation before the divine will in the letters of prominent burghers. In February of 1562, Linhart Tucher, who by now had become both a Protestant and a leading member of the city council, wrote a letter to one Hans Tiedeshoren in which he commented on the death of a mutual friend (it is not clear from the letter if the friend died of plague or some other cause). Tucher wrote, “I have a true empathy with [the deceased’s] beloved and remaining relatives, but we still must allow the will of God to please us and we must be prepared, for he will also summon us.”55 A 51 From 25 September 1543 to 15 April 1544, 1,508 inhabitants of Nürnberg succumbed to the plague; StadtAN, Reichst. Deput. 480. 52 Luther, “Ob man vor dem Sterben fliehen möge” (1527), in WA 23 (323) 339–79; and LW 43:113–38. 53See discussion of Hans Sachs below. 54 See Hamm, Lazarus Spengler, 50–53. 55 StadtAN, Rep. E 29 IV, Fasz. I, 10b: Breifwechsel Linhart Tucher (1487–1568), no. 27, 13 February 1562.

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burgher named Sebastian Imhoff (1511–72) was similarly stoic in the face of death. He wrote from his safe refuge in nearby Nördlingen to a Nürnberg relative, observing of a friend’s passing, “because it is the will of God, one must commend the situation to him. Whatever God allows here on earth is most fitting.”56 Imhoff observed in another letter that people could take whatever measures they wanted against the plague; “nevertheless, the whole affair is in the hands of God, whom we must ask to take away this punishment from us.”57 A city council member named Joachim Haller (1524–70) informed a friend in Speyer about the progress of the plague in Nürnberg, and then shared the news that the recipient’s cousin had “paid the debt of nature” while living in Nördlingen. Haller concluded, “because it is according to the gracious decree of God, we must give it over with patience to his divine will.”58 Far from discouraging traditional burgher stoicism, Evangelical teaching may have actually strengthened it.59 Protestant Reformers were opposed to the cult of the saints, one of the late medieval Christian’s most important sources of consolation in the midst of suffering. The result, some scholars maintain,60 was an even greater sense of resignation before the divine will, because now the Christian was left with far fewer defenses before the “visitations” of heaven. The extant burgher letters attest the decreasing importance of the saints in lay piety, along with a pronounced emphasis on the sovereignty of God. The saints begin to fade from burgher letters after 1525, and then disappear altogether by the mid-1530s. Objects associated with the cult of the saints also disappear. Inventories of burgher households conducted in 1530 discovered that about half of the households contained rosaries, while similar inventories conducted from 1550 to 1560 revealed just one.61 It is possible that some burghers continued to invoke the saints.62 A church visitation that took place just before the outbreak of the 1562/63 plague discovered several instances of the common folk turning to traditional piety—and magic—when faced with misfortune.63 However, this visitation was limited to the countryside surrounding Nürnberg; it did not examine the religious life of the city itself. A sermon preached during the 1543 plague reminded

56 GNM-HA, Rep. II/67, Behaim Archiv, Nr. 29h, Paulus I, Briefe von verschiedenen an denselben (860 Dok.) v. 1533–1568. VIII Faszikel 1559–1568. The letter from Sebastian Imhoff is dated 28 September 1562 (no. 15). 57 GNM-HA, Rep. II/67, Behaim Archiv, Nr. 29h, Paulus I, Briefe von verschiedenen an denselben (860 Dok.) v. 1533–1568. VIII Faszikel 1559–1568. The letter is dated 25 September 1562. 58 GNM-HA, Rep. II/76a, Kress Archiv, Schachtel XXXIV, Fasz. C. The letter is dated 2 October 1562. 59 Ozment, Protestants, 198–200. 60See works listed in notes 88–91 below. 61 See Heal, “Images of the Virgin Mary and Marian Devotion,” 39. 62Heming (Protestants and the Cult of the Saints, 105) argues that many Protestants continued to invoke the saints, regardless of what their preachers and rulers mandated to the contrary. 63 See Hirschmann, Die Kirchenvisitation, 49, 54, 83, 110, 116, 161, 168, 182, 191, 211, 233, 236, 237, XXXXXXX

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burghers that the practice of seeking help from the saints during plague belonged to Nürnberg’s papist past. The preacher Veit Dietrich urged his hearers to call upon “the one, eternal, almighty God, who will help in such times of need, and from whom alone one can seek help, and nowhere else.”64 It seems that many burghers had taken the Protestant message concerning the saints to heart. To cite one striking example, up until 1528, a merchant’s son named Michael Behaim (1510–69) began all his letters with “Praise be to God and Mary.” From 1528 on, he changed the dedication to “Praise be to our Lord Jesus Christ.” This change is quite significant because Michael had earlier believed that the Virgin Mary had helped to deliver him from the plague in Milan.65 The opening dedications of letters written during the 1533 plague reveal a similar resolve to look to God alone for hope and help in times of suffering. Instead of a traditional header like “In the name of Jesus and Mary” (In nomen Jhus ett maria), one finds more Protestant sounding dedications: “Glory to God” (Laus deo),66 or “God our protection” (Got unser schutz), or “God our consolation” (Got unser trost).67 One finds the same resolve in letters from the early 1560s. When a nobleman named Christoff Kress (1541–83) wrote to comfort his mother at the passing of his father—this was before the outbreak of plague in 1562— he concluded his letter, “May Almighty God give you health and a long life, in whose protection and defense I now commend you.”68 Linhart Tucher concluded his letter to Hans Tiedeshoren in similar fashion, saying that they should commend themselves to God “every moment” (alle augenplick).69 There are no intermediaries between God and humanity in these letters, save Christ alone. The authors simply commend themselves and

64

249, 251, 252, 253. 64 When preaching on Psalm 90 [91], Dietrich asserted, “Wir wissen alle / was für abgötterey im Bapstumb gewesen ist / vnd noch / Sonderlich in sterbenßleufften / das man S. Rochus / S. Sebastian / S. Barbara angeruffen / vnd mancherleyweyse jhnen gedienet hat / Darumb / das man durch solche verstorbene heiligen / so es anders heiligen sind / verhoffet hat für der pestilentz sicher zu sein. Wie reimbt sich aber solches zum Befelh vnsers Herren Gottes hie? [Ps. 91:15] Denn klar ist es / das er nit spricht / Rüffe disen / oder jhenen menschen an. Sonder / Er rüffe mich an. Wer ist der MICH? Es ist der einige / ewige / allmechtige Gott / der will in solcher not helffen / vnd kan allein / vnnd sonst nirgend hilff suchen.” Dietrich published his sermon in early 1544 under the title, “Der XCI. Psalm. Wie ein Christ in sterbßleufften sich trösten soll.” Cited in Klaus, Veit Dietrich, 224. 65 Ozment, Three Behaim Boys, 19, 25. Ozment (Protestants, 197–98) also discusses the change in Michael’s greetings. 66 StadtAN, Rep. E 29 IV, Fasz. I, 11: 43 Briefe des Lorenz Tucher (1490–1554) an seinen Vetter Linhart Tucher in Nürnberg. 67The latter two dedications come from letters written by Lazarus Spengler, secretary to the city council and defender of the Reformation; Oohlau, “Familiengeschichte der Spengler,” 243–44. 68“Gott der Almechtig verleihe euch gesuntheit vnd langes Leben. In welches schutz vnnd schirm ich euch uf ditz mal thu bevelh.” GNM-HA, Rep. II/76a, Kress Archiv, Schachtel XXX, Fasz E, no. 8, Christoff Kress an Helena Christoph Kressin, 7 January 1561. 69 See note 55 above.

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their loved ones to God, and humbly accept his will for their lives, whether it means life or death. Burghers further down the socioeconomic ladder displayed a similar stoicism—or perhaps, faith—during the plague of 1562/63. In early December of 1563, the shoemaker-poet and master singer Hans Sachs (1494–1576) published a poem that took up the controversial issue of flight from the plague.70 The city’s doctors had recommended flight,71 but Osiander’s sermon had raised concerns about this advice. Sachs had known Osiander quite well before the latter’s departure from the city in the 1540s. The shoemaker had been an early supporter of the Reformation in Nürnberg, and had authored the single most important artisan pamphlet of the Evangelical movement, The Wittenberg Nightingale (1523). In his 1562 poem, Sachs sided with Osiander on the issue of flight from the plague. The main body of the poem is a dialogue between the Tichter (poet), Sachs, and an interlocutor referred to simply as Der Freund, a character based on an actual friend of Sachs’s who had put the question about flight to him at the beginning of the plague. Sachs responds to his friend’s query in the poem, saying, “O friend, how may a person escape the hand of God in this or that land so that God does not know how to find him?”72 The friend then references the doctors’ advice to flee the city and thus escape the poison air that is causing the plague. Sachs retorts that if the air were really poisoned then everyone would die, because everyone breathes the same air. When the friend asks why so many die in Nürnberg and not elsewhere, Sachs replies that God has sent the plague to punish sinners in the city. His friend objects that many seemingly innocent people die as well, including children. Sachs argues, “God through divine wisdom does the best in all things. If he takes away a young blood, the child will be delivered from the many burdens it would have to suffer here on earth.”73 The friend again objects, charging, “Whether a person is evil or pious, God does not much care” (Er sey geleich böß oder frumb, Gott kümmert sich nicht vil darumb).74 This is too much for the pious and elderly Sachs (the shoemaker was in his late sixties at the time of writing): “This word that you have spoken does not proceed from a Christian heart.”75 Sachs reminds his friend that according to the gospel, God counts every hair on our heads, and not one can fall to the ground without his willing it (Matt. 10:30; Luke 12:7). Sachs writes, “I let this word still my heart, that no one will die in this time unless he has been ordained to it. Everyone’s end is set; we can do nothing about it 70 The poem appears at the beginning of the fourth book of poems Sachs was then composing and thus bears the misleading title, “Der eingang diß vierdten buchs,” in Hans Sachs, 15:17–28. 71 Porzelt, Die Pest in Nürnberg, 45. 72Sachs, “Eingang,” in Hans Sachs, 15:20, lines 19–22. 73 Sachs, “Eingang,” in Hans Sachs, 15:21, lines 13–17. 74 Sachs, “Eingang,” in Hans Sachs, 15:21, lines 19–24. 75 Sachs, “Eingang,” in Hans Sachs, 15:21, lines 26–27.

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and will not die before our appointed time. Therefore, I will not flee, because God’s will is my goal.”76 The friend then confesses to Sachs that he wants to escape all the gruesome sights and sounds of the dying in Nürnberg. But the poet urges his friend not to ignore death, especially his own; he must consider his mortality well and frequently, which is the only sure antidote to fear of death and an even surer curb to sin and disobedience to God’s word. When the friend persists in his fear of death, especially a death that comes so quickly and takes so many at once, Sachs replies that it is better to go quickly than to linger, provided one is prepared to die. The poet then observes that if one regards the present situation from the perspective of faith one will conclude that “at this time heaven stands open.”77 The friend still wishes to flee, and points to the safety and happiness of those who have done so, especially the wealthy. But Sachs charges that such people cannot flee the fear of death, which only grows as one seeks to suppress it. Additionally, those who flee are consumed by concern for their servants and possessions that remain behind, and worry about the trustworthiness of those they have left in charge of their affairs.78 When such people return home, others refuse contact with them and their businesses crumble. They die sick with worry and a guilty conscience. Sachs repeats his determination not to flee Nürnberg: “If I die then it will happen in the name of God, to whom I commend everything together.”79 “You foolish man!” his friend exclaims, arguing that in Nürnberg there is only death and sadness.80 Sachs remains firm in his resolve, and concludes the dialogue by saying that he will stay in the city and write useful poems, which is exactly what he did. In the summer of 1563, Sachs produced another poem that captured very well his Evangelical understanding of suffering.81 In the poem, a commentary on Hosea 13, Sachs lamented the all too human tendency toward trusting in creatures rather than in the Creator, forgetting that God alone is the source of all good. God responds to such disobedience by sending war, famine, and plague. According to Sachs, God wishes to communicate

76

Sachs, “Eingang,” in Hans Sachs, 15:21, line 31–22, line 3. Sachs, “Eingang,” in Hans Sachs, 15:23, lines 16–17. 78 Sebastian Imhoff, who had fled to Nördlingen, seems to have experienced little of the anxiety Sachs says is all too common among those wealthy people who seek to escape the plague through flight. Imhoff wrote to a relative in Nürnberg that he and his family have found “such good company (gesellschafft) that I have in part grown accustomed to it here, because there is nothing to do but eat, drink, and go for walks.” GNM-HA, Rep. II/67, Behaim Archiv, Nr. 29h, Paulus I, Briefe von verschiedenen an denselben (860 Dok.) v. 1533–1568. VIII Fasxikel von 1559–1568. The letter is dated 25 September 1562. 79Sachs, “Eingang,” in Hans Sachs, 15:25, lines 25–27. 80 Sachs, “Eingang,” in Hans Sachs, 15:25, line 29. 81 “Das 13 capitel Osee, des propheten. Got ist allein unser heyland, und wir sind unser eygen verderben,” in Hans Sachs, 15:240–44. 77

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through these punishments and their removal the following message: “O man, I alone am your salvation; in yourself stands only your destruction.” 82 It is the “alone” part of this sentence that makes it so uniquely Protestant.83 The Evangelical burgher stood alone before God alone on the basis of faith alone.84 There were no intermediaries, no ways to access the divine, save Christ alone (and perhaps the angels).85 In this scheme, the believer’s sense of confidence rested squarely on the character of the God who so completely ruled all things. Was this God for him or not? As Steven Ozment has observed, In the classic Protestant traditions…as distinct from the reigning Thomist tradition of the later Middle Ages, God’s freedom and sovereignty were seen to transcend his goodness and love, though Protestants believed that the latter were also very real. One approached such a God not with the offerings of good works expecting fairness, but in simple faith and trust hoping for mercy. Such a perspective on religion, with its roots in late medieval Augustinianism and Ockhamism, made the nature of God a far more burning question for Protestants than the quality of an individual’s moral life. Everything in religion hinged on God’s keeping his word and proving to be as good as the Bible portrayed him.86 Hans Sachs believed that God was both faithful and good, despite appearances to the contrary. This is why he responded so strongly to his friend’s charge that God was purely arbitrary in his dealings with human beings—that God did not care whom his pestilential arrows killed, he simply let them fly. Sachs did not have a St. Sebastian to intercept such arrows for him, or even a Virgin Mary to persuade God not to fire his missiles in the first place—he had flatly rejected the cult of the saints already in The Wittenberg Nightingale.87 Sachs had God and God alone, which is the way the 82

Sachs, “Das 13 capitel Osee,” in Hans Sachs, 15:243, lines 33–34. A devout Catholic could have agreed with much, if not all, of what Sachs had argued in both of his poems, including the statement that God alone was the Christian’s source of help during adversity. But a Catholic burgher would have understood the “alone” differently than his Evangelical counterpart. The former would have seen recourse to the saints and a whole host of sacraments and sacramentals as being perfectly in keeping with fidelity to God; they were simply the means the one true God used to comfort his people. The latter had a much narrower definition of “alone,” one that left no room for mediators, save Christ. 84 It should be noted that here “alone” refers to the Evangelical burgher’s relationship to God, not to her relationship to other believers. She was not alone on the horizontal plane, but she was on the vertical plane. She could expect prayers and other forms of support from the saints on earth, but nothing from the saints in heaven. 85For an interesting discussion of how Protestants replaced veneration of the saints with increased attention to angels, see Gordon, “Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels,” 87–109. The 1533 Short Regimen speaks of God employing angels to rescue burghers from plague, but burghers do not discuss this possibility in their private letters. There are no references to angels in the extant letters examined for this study. 86 Ozment, Protestants, 198–200. 83

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Protestant Reformers and the Protestant God wanted things. As it turned out, Sachs survived the 1562/63 plague in Nürnberg, a fact he no doubt attributed to the sovereign will of God alone.


Based on the relevant sources from the 1562/63 plague in Nürnberg, one can safely conclude that the Protestant identity of the city directly influenced the way its leaders and at least some of its inhabitants—from both upper and middle classes—responded to the suffering associated with the deadly pestilence. To be sure, there was still much continuity between how pre- and post-Reformation burghers understood and coped with misfortune, but the “sola existence” encouraged by Protestant teaching marks an important departure from late medieval piety. This is especially true where the abolition of the cult of the saints is concerned. Several scholars have argued that the Evangelical rejection of the saints was part of a larger process of “disenchantment” that left Protestant laypeople with very few resources as they faced suffering.88 The eventual result, such scholars contend, was a heightened apocalyptic outlook and concomitant fear of the devil,89 a fascination with astrology and various signs and portents,90 an obsession with moral discipline as a way of seeking divine favor,91 a stoic resignation in face of the inscrutable will of an utterly free and sovereign God,92 and a generalized sense of anxiety and collective guilt for having squandered the gospel that God provided to Germany through Luther.93 The stoicism in Evangelical burgher piety is clearly present in the letters of Protestant laypeople, and may well have grown stronger owing to the rejection of the saints, coupled with other Evangelical innovations. One may also find evidence in the extant sources for some of these other scholarly claims. For example, during the plague of 1533, eighteen-year-old Katherina Tucher (1515–61), daughter of Linhart, displayed in her letters a fascination with portents in the heavens. She wrote to her father from nearby Nördlingen about the signs she had recently seen in the sky, insisting that they were 87 Sachs referred to the cult of the saints as an example of the menschenfünd, human inventions, that preachers of the old faith sought to impose on the faithful; “Die wittembergisch Nachtigall,” in Hans Sachs, 6:381, line 14. 88 For example, see Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 191. 89 This is the argument of Robin Bruce Barnes’ Prophecy and Gnosis. See also Kolb, For All the Saints, 150; and Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 142. Heiko Oberman (Luther) argued persuasively for the apocalyptic nature of Luther’s theology. 90 See Zambelli, “Astrologi hallucinati,” 101–51; Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints, 147–50; Soergel, “Miracle, Magic, and Disenchantment,” 233; and Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis, 87. 91 Scribner, Religion and Culture, 355–57; and Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis, 6. 92 Ozment, Protestants, 198–200. 93 Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis, 262.

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not carriers of poison, as some thought; rather, they were portents of the Last Judgment, which would soon be upon Germans. The only appropriate response was to pray for divine mercy and the reformation of their hearts. 94 It should be noted that Catholic laypeople could display a similar fascination with portents. Katharina was almost certainly a Protestant, and therefore may have been predisposed toward such a preoccupation, but there was nothing exclusively Protestant about it. One also finds in the extant sources a certain anxiety about how the apparent abuse of the gospel has provoked divine wrath. After the 1533 plague subsided, the city council ordered its preachers to read out an exhortation to their congregations that specifically blamed the pestilence on the burghers’ sinful lives and “extreme ingratitude” (ubermessigen undanckbarkeit).95 The sin of ingratitude became a major source of concern for Evangelical leaders as the sixteenth century wore on, 96 and also helped them explain, in part, why Protestants continued to suffer catastrophes like the plague, even though they had renounced the alleged idolatry and superstitions of popish religion. God was punishing his chosen ones for showing indifference toward the gift of the gospel. In some ways, God was now more “dangerous” than ever, because his expectations of his children had increased considerably with Luther’s “discovery” of the gospel. Much was expected from those to whom much had been given. One sees these heightened moral expectations in the 1562 edition of the doctors’ Plague Regimen issued by the Nürnberg city council. The Regimen maintained that God had sent the plague as a punishment for “our godless, unrepentant lives and…great sins.” Therefore, the most effective means of combating the pestilence was heartfelt confession coupled with a firm faith in the grace of God and a resolve to follow Christ more obediently in the future.97 While there was nothing new about seeing plague as a punishment for sin, it is significant that the 1533 edition contained no such statements; it was much more consoling in tone. Another plague ordinance 94 StadtAN, Rep. E 29 IV, Fasz. II, 5a, letter no. 23 from 28 Nov. 1533, in Nördlingen, fols. 23–23'. Matthias Beer (“Private Correspondence in Germany,” 942) also mentions this letter. 95 “Ir allerliebsten, weyl uns Got der almechtig ein zeitlang here on zweyfel auß unser sundtlichen ubertretung und ubermessigen undanckbarkeit nit mit geringer straff als teuerung, pestilentz, krieg und andern teglichen zufelligen beschwerungen haimgesucht hat, weliche beschwerungen auch noch vor augen seyen, zudem das auch die leufft allerley konftiger ferligkeit droen, so werden eur lieb hiemit getreulich ermant, das sie mit enderung ires sundtlichen lebens zu Got dem herrn hertzlich ruffen und schreyen und den mit vleys bitten, das er die gaysell seiner gerechten wolverdienten straf von uns gnedigklich abwenden und vor kunftigen ferlicheyten der selen und leybs barmhertzigklich beworen und seinem cristenlichen heufflein fride, ainigkeit und rue mitteylen wolle. Solichs zu erwerben sprech ein ytlichs ein andechtigs vaterunser.” “Wie und wohin,” in AOGA, 5:385n14. 96Cf. Osiander’s above-cited comments about burgher ingratitude for the gospel in his 1533 plague sermon on Psalm 91. 97“Ein kurtz Regiment / wie man sich in zeit Regierender Pestilentz halten soll. Durch die Hochgelerten vnd erfarnen der Ertzney Doctores / zusammen gefast vnd gebessert. Anno 1562. Zu Nurmbergtrucks Valentin Geyßler.” StadtAN, Rep. A6, Mandate, 1562 (1), Pestordnung, Nürnberg 1562, fols. Aii– Aiii.

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issued by the city council in 1562 similarly asserted that the pestilence was God’s “rod” to punish Nürnbergers for their “manifold, sinful transgressions.” These transgressions included blasphemy, swearing, gluttony, lack of discipline, and lack of love for neighbors. The ordinance urged repentance and conversion to God so that the divine “Allmechtigkeyt” (omnipotence) might become “Barmhertzigkeyt” (mercy).98 Similar to Osiander and Sachs, the city’s leaders were obviously concerned that the Reformation had not had its intended effect on burgher morality, and now there was hell to pay, at least for the ungodly. The plague sources from sixteenth-century Nürnberg thus provide support for some of the claims made by recent scholars. However, these sources also challenge the aggregate image of the Evangelical burgher that emerges from this scholarly work. The Evangelical burgher was not an anxiety-ridden protopuritan completely devoid of the spiritual consolation preached by Luther and others.99 Recent scholarship has presented a one-sided picture of Evangelical burgher mentalities. There is no room for Hans Sachs and those like him in this scholarly literature. There is no discussion of burghers who may have actually preferred the Evangelical approach to suffering over its late medieval alternative, who may have found it more, rather than less, consoling. In fact, such a possibility does not seem to have occurred to most of these scholars. Perhaps this is because they have focused exclusively on what the Reformation took away from burghers and largely ignored the resources it offered as a replacement. Ironically, these scholars wind up depicting Evangelical burghers in the same way that a previous generation of scholars depicted the late medieval laity—as spiritually anxious and psychologically burdened.100 Standing alone before God alone on the basis of faith alone certainly had the potential to increase burgher anxiety in the face of suffering, and it most likely did so for a portion of those early modern Protestants who took their religion seriously. As Luther observed, the Christian art of suffering was difficult to learn. But this “sola existence” could also reduce a burgher’s anxiety, as the testimony of Hans Sachs and many others clearly illustrates. The source of this consolation was a belief articulated by Wenzeslaus Linck, the doctors’ Regimen, and Osiander’s sermon: that suffering and adversity were not finally indicative of God’s true character. Yes, God punished sinners, but God did not punish his faithful children—he only disciplined them. Those who clung to God and his promises through faith could have confidence that their suffering was not a punishment for sin, but a test of faith and call to greater conformity to Christ. Nor did the faithful Christian need to view her suffering as a summons to penance: she neither could nor 98

Cited in Porzelt, Die Pest in Nürnberg, 181. See note 36 above. 100 See Ozment, Reformation in the Cities, 22–32. 99

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needed to appease God with her good works. She needed only to trust in God’s good work in Christ. This divine good work transformed her into “an innocent saint” who no longer needed the traditional saints to protect her and intercede for her, because the full penalty for sin had been paid by Christ. God was no longer angry with her, provided she was in Christ. Armed with this confidence, the Evangelical burgher was freed from the burden of having to “read” her life for signs of divine favor or wrath, an integral part of traditional burgher piety. She could accept the hardships (and joys) of life with patience and humility, knowing they came from the hand of the gracious God who had shown himself to be good and loving beyond measure in Christ.101 Surely this approach to suffering could console as effectively as its Catholic counterpart—it certainly did so for Hans Sachs.102 Scholars may concede this point, but few have explored it in their work. The result has been an impoverished understanding of pastoral theology and lay piety in the Reformation.

101 In The Wittenberg Nightingale, Hans Sachs makes a direct connection between faith in the goodness of God as it relates to salvation, and faith in the goodness of God in the midst of trials and tribulations. The one who trusts in the divine promise of forgiveness in Christ, and who is thus born again and delivered from sin, death, and the devil, submits herself completely to God’s will, trusting in God’s goodness, come what may. Sachs writes, Wer also ist im geist verneyt, Der dient Gott im geist und warheit. Das ist, das er Gott hertzlich liebt Und sich im gantz und gar ergiebt, Helt in für ein gnedigen Gott; In trübsal, leyd, in angst und not Er sich als guts zu Gott versicht; Gott geb, Gott nem, und was geschicht, Ist er willig und trostes vol Und zweyffelt nit, Gott wöll im wol Durch Jesum Christum, seinen sun, Der ist sein fried, rhu, frewd und wun Und bleibt auch sein einiger trost. (Hans Sachs, 6:378, lines 27–39) 102 See note 101 above.

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ABBREVIATIONS AOGA

Andreas Osiander d.A., Gesamtausgabe, edited by Gerhard Müller, 10 vols. (Gütersloh: Gütersloh Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1975–97).

GNM-HA

Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Historisches Archiv (Nürnberg)

LW

Luther’s Works. Edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. American edition, St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955–76.

StadtAN

Stadtarchiv Nürnberg

WA

D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 127 vols. Weimar,1883– .

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barnes, Robin Bruce. Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Beer, Mathias. “Private Correspondence in Germany in the Reformation Era: A Forgotten Source for the History of the Burgher Family.” Sixteenth Century Journal 32 (2001): 931– 55. Bühl, Charlotte. “Die Pestepidemien des ausgehenden Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit in Nürnberg (1483/84 bis 1533/34).” In Nürnberg und Bern: Zwei Reichsstädte und ihre Landgebiete, edited by Rudolf Endres, 121–68. Erlangen: Universitätsbund ErlangenNürnberg e.V., 1990. Caesar, Elisabeth. “Sebald Schreyer: Ein Lebensbild aus dem vor reformatorischen Nürnberg.” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 56 (1969): 1–213. Diefenbacher, Michael, ed., with Walter Gebhardt. Johannes Müllner: Die Annalen der Reichsstadt Nürnberg von 1623. Vol. 3, 1470–1544. Nürnberg: Im Selbstverlag des Stadtarchivs Nürnberg, 2003. Dormeier, Heinrich. “St. Rochus, die Pest und die Imhoffs in Nürnberg vor und während der Reformation.” Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (1985): 7–72. Esser, Thilo. Pest, Heilsangst und Frömmigkeit: Studien zur religiösen Bewältigung der Pest am Ausgang des Mittelalters. Münsteraner Theologische Abhandlungen 58. Altenberge: Oros, 1999. Folz, Hans. “Pestregimen in Prosa.” In Hans Folz: Die Reimpaarsprüche; Münchner Texte und Untersuchungen zur Deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, edited by Hanns Fischer, 1:429– 37. Munich: C. H. Beck’sche, 1961. Gordon, Bruce. “Malevolent Ghosts and Ministering Angels: Apparitions and Pastoral Care in the Swiss Reformation.” In The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, 87–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hamm, Berndt. Lazarus Spengler (1479–1534): Der Nürnberger Ratsschreiber im Spannungsfeld von Humanismus und Reformation, Politik und Glaube. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Heal, Bridget. “Images of the Virgin Mary and Marian Devotion in Protestant Nuremberg.” In Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe, edited by Helen Parish and William G. Naphy, 25–46. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Heming, Carol Piper. Protestants and the Cult of the Saints in German-Speaking Europe, 1517– 1531. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2003. Hendrix, Scott H. Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. Hirschmann, Gerhard. Die Kirchenvisitation im Landgebiet der Reichsstadt Nürnberg1560 und 1561. Einzelarbeiten aus der Kirchengeschichte Bayerns 68. Neustadt a. d. Aisch: In Kommission bei Degener, 1994.

154 Ronald K. Rittgers Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800. Edited by Gauvin Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, and Thomas Worcester. Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 2005. Distributed by University of Chicago Press. Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany. New York: Routledge, 1997. Klaus, Bernhard. Veit Dietrich: Leben und Werk. Nürnberg: Selbstverlag des Vereins für bayerische Kirchengeschichte, 1958. Kolb, Robert. For All the Saints: Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reformation. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987. Linck, Wenzeslaus. Wenzeslaus Linck: Erbauungsschriften, Eigene Schriften aus den Jahren 1526– 1536 nebst vier von Linck übersetzen bzw. neu herausgegebenen Schriften aus den Jahren 1524 und 1525, edited by Helmich van der Kolk. Quellen und Forschungen zur Erbauungsliteratur des späten Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit 9. Amsterdam: Editions Rodolpi N.V., 1978. Mormando, Franco. “Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy: What Primary Sources, Printed and Painted, Reveal.” In Hope and Healing, ed. Bailey et al., 1–44. Oberman, Heiko. Luther: Man Between God and the Devil. Translated by Eileen WalliserSchwarzbart. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Oohlau, Jürgen U., “Neue Quellen zur Familiengeschichte der Spengler: Lazarus Spengler und seine Söhne,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 52 (1963/ 64):232–55. Osiander, Andreas. Andreas Osiander d.A., Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Gerhard Müller, 10 vols. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1975–97. Ozment, Steven. Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution. New York: Doubleday, 1992. ———. The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. ———. Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Parish, Helen, and William G. Naphy, eds. Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Porzelt, Carolin. Die Pest in Nürnberg: Leben und Herrschen in Pestzeiten in der Reichsstadt Nürnberg (1562–1713). St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag Erzabtei, 2000. Sachs, Hans. Hans Sachs. Vol. 6, edited by Adelbert von Keller. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964. ———. Hans Sachs. Vol. 15, edited by A. V. Keller and E. Goetze. Bibliothek des Literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart 158. Tübingen: Gedruckt für den Literarischen Verein in Stuttgart, 1885. Schlemmer, Karl. Gottesdienst und Frömmigkeit in der Reichsstadt Nürnberg am Vorabend der Reformation. Würzburg: Echter, 1980. Scribner, R. W. Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800). Edited by Lyndal Roper. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Sehling, Emil, ed. Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI Jahrhunderts. Vols. 1–5, Leipzig, 1902–13; vols. 6– Tübingen: Mohr, 1955– . Soergel, Philip M, “Miracle, Magic, and Disenchantment in Early Modern Germany.” In Envisioning Magic: A Princeton Seminar and Symposium, edited by Peter Schäfer and Hans G. Kippenberg, 215–34. Leiden: Brill, 1997. ———. Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Protestants and Plague 155 Spengler, Lazarus. Lazarus Spengler Schriften, vol. 1, Schriften der Jahre 1509 bis Juni 1525, edited by Berndt Hamm and Wolfgang Huber. Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 61. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995. Zambelli, Paola, ed. “Astrologi hallucinati:” Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986.

CHAPTER

6

The Canker Friar PIETY AND INTRIGUE IN AN ERA OF NEW DISEASES

William Eamon

ON A COLD JANUARY DAY IN 1567, two men, one a Dominican friar called Antonio Volpe, the other a servant in the house of a local nobleman, were walking in the Campo San Lio not far from the Ponte Rialto in Venice. Pausing near a baker’s shop in the tiny square, they were suddenly approached by guards wearing the insignia of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. As the captain of the guards grasped Volpe’s arm, the friar turned to his companion and cried out, “I’m ruined [assassinato]! May God help me!” His friend, perhaps hoping to distance himself from the friar in the eyes of the guards, responded, “Padre, if you’re a good man, God will help you; but should you be otherwise, so much the worse for you.”1 Fra Volpe was quickly led to a boat docked nearby and conducted to the Holy Office’s prison at the church of San Giovanni in Bragora. A few days later he was transferred to the offices of the Inquisition in Padua, since it was there that the charges against him had been filed. There he learned the full details of the accusations against him: that secretly he was a Lutheran, that he owned heretical books, and that he was planning to throw off his habit and emigrate to Germany. Other charges would emerge in the course of the proceedings, which dragged out for another thirteen months as Volpe languished in the Inquisition’s prison while his case was being prosecuted.

1

I am indebted to Elizabeth Horodowich for her critical comments on an early draft of this essay. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 1 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 23, testimony of Francesco Vulpino, 9 April 1567. The busta consists of loose, unpaginated testimony, letters, and supporting documents. All references to the trial testimony, unless otherwise noted, are from this source.

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Antonio Volpe’s trial was in many ways typical of those encountered in the archives of the Venetian Inquisition. Like most inquisitorial proceedings, his troubles began with a denunciation filed with the Holy Office. Having received a denunciation, the Inquisition then decided whether or not to follow it up.2 This process could take several months, as the accuser and other witnesses were interrogated to determine whether the case merited further action. In Volpe’s case, however, the denunciation was filed just two weeks prior to his arrest. The fact that a capitano of the Holy Office was sent to arrest the friar suggests that the inquisitors thought that his case was particularly grave or that they had reason to believe that he might flee; normally, when a decision was made to proceed with a case, the suspect was sent a citation to appear in court. Fra Volpe was a familiar figure around Venice. A native of Ferrandina, in Lucania, a poor region in the far south of Italy, he was a famous preacher whose sermons at the Dominican church in Gambarare, near Padua, were said to have “moved people to tears of devotion.” But he was even more celebrated for the medicines that he made at a distillery in the Campo dei Frari and sold at the San Marco pharmacy. Most Venetians simply called him the “Canker Friar” (il Frate del Cancaro) because he had remedies for the sores caused by Mal francese, the French disease, that were widely sought after and considered to be very effective. The French pox—in modern terminology, syphilis—was a new disease in Volpe’s time, having first appeared in Europe in the late fifteenth century.3 Although today syphilis is a relatively mild and treatable malady, it was a terrible scourge in the sixteenth century. Erasmus reckoned no disease to be more contagious, more terrible for its victims, or more difficult to cure. “It’s a most presumptuous pox,” exclaimed a character in one of his Colloquies. “In a showdown, it wouldn’t yield to leprosy, elephantiasis, ringworm, gout, or sycosis.”4 Like the plague, with which it was often confused, its origins were mysterious and it struck without warning, claiming victims of every social station. Fra Volpe’s clients, men and women alike, included patricians like Jacomo Badoer as well as countless poor people that he treated at the Ospedaletto at San Marco. People also consulted the friar for eye ailments and skin rashes. Rumor was that barbers and empirics would do almost anything to get hold of his secrets. As with all of its cases, the Holy Office kept a detailed record of Volpe’s trial. The proceeding, which is found in a lengthy dossier in the Archivio di Stato in Venice, is a fairly typical inquisitorial file. It consists of three bound folders, the first containing the initial examination of Volpe, the second 2 For the procedures followed by the Venetian Inquisition, see Schutte, Aspiring Saints, chap. 2. On the organization of the Venetian Inquisition, see Del Col, “Organizzazione, composizione e giurisdizione.” 3 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox. 4 Erasmus, Colloquies, trans. Thompson, 1:401, 405.

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containing testimony against him, and the third his defense. Scattered among the folders, in an apparently random fashion (doubtless reflecting the casual rearrangement of a succession of readers), are dozens of loose documents, letters, and testimony. Inevitably, gaps remain, as they do in most archival records. As anyone who has read an inquisitorial file knows, the archive does not present a clear and unambiguous narrative. Therefore the historian must intervene, interpret, extrapolate, and create a story. This essay will create that story, first of all about piety and healing in an era of new diseases; treachery, too, will be part of the tale, for Fra Volpe had made powerful and influential enemies who stood to benefit from his downfall. But there are really two parallel stories: one about the unfortunate Dominican friar, Antonio Volpe, and the other about how early modern people attempted to understand and arm themselves against the threat of new and mysterious diseases. The period between the onset of the Black Death and the end of the sixteenth century—from 1347 until 1600—was an era of new diseases. During this span of approximately two hundred fifty years, not only did Europe experience its most devastating demographic upheaval as a result of the rapid, epidemic spread of a new sickness the Europeans called the Black Death, but it was struck by a succession of new infectious diseases, including typhus, syphilis, virulent smallpox, and the mysterious “English sweat.” Retrospective diagnosis is fraught with danger and no disease illustrates the danger better than the Black Death. No dogma is more firmly imbedded in medieval and early modern history than the claim that the sickness known as the Black Death was bubonic plague. Yet this notion has been repeatedly challenged and with good reasons.5 As a number of historians have pointed out, the signs, symptoms, and epidemiology of the Black Death do not match that of modern bubonic plague. Most notably, medieval observers never mentioned an epizootic of rats, a precondition for bubonic plague. Moreover, the horrific mortality rates recorded for the medieval plague are much higher than that of modern plagues. Finally, contemporaries do not ever seem to have doubted that the Black Death was an extremely contagious disease. Boccaccio’s famous story of the pigs that dropped dead after rummaging through the rags of infected persons is one of the indelible images of the Black Death.6 Yet such an occurrence could never have happened if the disease were bubonic plague as it is now known, because plague is not particularly contagious, but instead is passed to humans from fleas infected by diseased rats. Plague (if that is in fact what the Black Death was) was not the only new disease that struck Europe in this era of new diseases. In fact, by Fra 5 The most recent and perhaps most uncompromising critique of the bubonic plague theory is Cohn, Black Death Transformed. 6 Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. McWilliam, 51–52.

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Volpe’s time it was already an old and familiar disease, having ravaged Europe for over two centuries. Yet there were many other epidemic diseases that struck with nearly equal ferocity, so many in fact that contemporaries referred to them all, simply, as peste.7 “Plague” hardly begins to carry a sense of the infinite variety of afflictions that word conveyed. Peste referred not only to bubonic plague but also to influenza, typhus, meningitis, smallpox, and a host of other diseases—in fact, to virtually any disease that contemporaries regarded as contagious or widespread. Neither do the myriad names contemporaries used to distinguish one form of peste from another (pestilenzia, morìa, mal de zucho [or malzucho], for example) help much in identifying early epidemics in modern medical terms. Often epidemics coexisted with other contagious and chronic illnesses, making identification in modern terms extremely difficult.8 During the epidemic of 1528 that raged in the Po Valley, contemporaries reported four different pesti occurring simultaneously.9 Although epidemic typhus is an ancient disease, it was a newcomer to Renaissance Europe, having first appeared during the 1490s. Another, more widespread outbreak occurred in Italy in 1527 and 1528, with cases reported from Naples to Milan.10 The Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro’s detailed description of the 1527 epidemic, in his De contagione of 1546, reads almost like a textbook account of typhus: fever and fatigue followed by general prostration and delirium in the first few days; then the body erupted into a general rash that looked like flea-bites or, in some cases, spots about the size of lentils, the characteristic symptom that gave the disease its contemporary Italian name, mal di petecchie or “spotted sickness.”11 Spread by human body lice, typhus is a disease of famine and squalid living conditions. Its telltale sign, a rash of red spots about the size of lentils, has led many historians to confuse it with the plague. But since the conditions that let down the bar for one type of infection usually admit a great many others, “pestilences”—or plagues—in the Renaissance were usually composed of a number of different types of transmissible diseases. One of the great puzzles of epidemiological history was the sudden appearance, and just as mysterious disappearance, of the so-called English sweating sickness (sudor anglicus), which first broke out in 1485.12 Subsequent outbreaks occurred in 1508, 1517, 1528, and 1551, all in England. It was a most astonishing disease, spectacular in the manner in which it 7 “Plague” is the English equivalent of the Latin pestis; the form peste occurs in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, while in German, the equivalent is Pest. On the linguistic variants and uses of the word, see Martin, Plague? 71–73. 8 Carmichael, Plague and the Poor, chap. 1. 9Cosmacini, Storia della medicina, 101–2. 10 Corradi, Annali delle epidemie, 1:395–98. 11 Fracastoro, De contagione, trans. Wright, 101–3. 12 Wylie and Collier, “English Sweating Sickness”; and Dyer, “English Sweating Sickness.”

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claimed its hosts. Suddenly attacked by a high fever and profuse sweating, victims lapsed into a coma and died within 24 hours. It is hard to imagine the fear that must have been caused by a sickness that, as Edward Hall reported in 1517, “killed some within two hours, some merry at dinner and dead at supper.”13 No one knows what the sweat was. An arbovirus infection—a disease spread by an insect vector—seems to accord best with the epidemiological data. Prior to the mid-sixteenth century, measles and smallpox were both described as relatively mild infections of childhood, as can be gathered from observations by the ninth-century Muslim physicians Rhazes and Avicenna.14 Girolamo Fracastoro wrote that smallpox, chicken pox, and measles “seem to attack everyone once in life.”15 Smallpox epidemics were rare in Europe before the 1560s, when the disease suddenly broke out in a virulent, epidemic form. The first major European epidemic occurred in 1570 in Venice, where it claimed almost 10,000 victims.16 In other words, prior to the 1560s, the Europeans knew only a relatively benign strain of the smallpox virus, presumably Variola minor, which claims less than 1 percent mortality rates. Variola major, virulent smallpox, evidently did not exist in Europe before that time. While Europe was spared the ravages of deadly smallpox, a disease that was undoubtedly smallpox was introduced into the New World by the Spanish conquistadores, and would within a generation destroy from one-third to a half of the indigenous population.17 How a nonvirulent strain of smallpox could have caused such high mortality among the Amerindians is still something of an epidemiological puzzle. It is possible, on the one hand, that the benign form of smallpox that Europeans knew underwent an early mutation that exposed a more virulent agent to the Native Americans. Or alternatively, the radically different response of Amerindians to Variola minor might be explained by genetic differences between Native Americans and Europeans (due presumably to a marked founder effect in the Americas) that made the indigenous population more susceptible to the disease. The New World gave much in return for what it received from the Old World.18 One of America’s most important gifts to Europe was the disease that Renaissance physicians called Morbus gallicus, the French disease, or what moderns term syphilis.19 The disease first appeared in Europe in the 13

Wylie and Collier, “English Sweating Sickness,” 431. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, 167–68. Rhazes considered the disease to be an almost salutary childhood distemper; Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, trans. Greenhill, 29. 15 Fracastoro, De contagione, 72–73. 16 Carmichael and Silverstein, “Smallpox in Europe.” 17Crosby, “Conquistador y Pestilencia”; and Cook, Born to Die. 18Crosby, Columbian Exchange. 19 The origins of venereal syphilis (as opposed to other forms of Treponematosis such as yaws and pinta) have been fiercely debated, but most historians now agree that the disease was endemic in the New World and was carried to Europe by Columbus’s sailors on his return voyage from America. For an XXXXXXX 14

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1490s. It was first noticed in Spain, whence, presumably, Columbus’s sailors carried it on their return from the New World. From there it was transported to Italy with the Spanish armies quartered in southern Italy during the battle of Naples in 1494. It gained its name from the erroneous belief that the Italians contracted the disease from the invading French, whose “armies of loose morals and loose discipline” had invaded the peninsula. The French, though, called it the Neapolitan disease, since they believed they caught it from the Italians.20 Whatever its origins, the French pox was an “opportunity disease,” a sickness that an ambitious healer could exploit for profit and reputation. The physicians had little to offer by way of a cure. They argued about whether the disease was new or ancient; initially because plague was a universal paradigm for epidemic disease, many thought the French pox was some new and more horrifying form of the plague. They debated whether it came from the New World or from somewhere else and so on, but they couldn’t agree on a mode of treatment. It didn’t seem to fit the Galenic model, which made some wonder whether it was a disease at all. Orthodox Renaissance medicine had much to say about the pox, but seemed powerless in the face of it. Meanwhile, empirics and popular healers entered the picture. 21 Few of them doubted the pox was curable. Indeed, nearly all of them had a special potion or surefire remedy for it. And why not? Finding a cure for the pox was the Renaissance healer’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and in the competition for cures, the natural history of syphilis gave the advantage to the empiric. Victims of the disease suffered from excruciating pain in the joints, pain so intense that patients “screamed day and night without respite, envying the dead themselves,” according to Sigismondo dei Conti, the papal secretary, who was able to observe the effects of the disease in the papal court.22 Sores and swellings erupted and spread all over the body, leaving hideous black scabs. It was said that those afflicted with the French pox were more repugnant than lepers. But these horrifying initial symptoms usually subsided in a few weeks, resulting in a period of remission that could last as long as six to eight weeks. Thus the sickness seemingly “healed” spontaneously, only to return much later with new and ever more horrifying symptoms. As the infection progressed in its inevitable march toward death, it consumed the flesh, eating away the nose and face. Victims of the disease, called malfranciosati, 20

overview of the dispute, see Guerra, “Dispute over Syphilis.” 20The most recent history of syphilis in the early modern period is Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox. See also Quétel, History of Syphilis. 21 By “empirics,” I mean nongraduate medical practitioners; see Gentilcore, “Charlatans, the Regulated Marketplace and the Treatment of Venereal Disease in Italy.” 22 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox, 26.

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stank from putrefaction. Even their physicians would not touch them, reported the German knight Ulrich von Hutten.23 Malfranciosati lying in the streets or dragging themselves along on little trolleys, begging for food from passersby, were a common sight in the streets of the major Italian cities, a sight that was repulsive to nearly everyone who encountered them. 24 Yet for a brief moment between the remission of the primary symptoms of the disease and the onset of its secondary symptoms, patients experienced a relief that seemed heaven-sent, and that was a circumstance empirics could use to their advantage. From the standpoint of the medical marketplace, the new plague was a disease that favored bold specifics. The most popular cure for Mal francese was guaiac (also known as lignum sanctum and lignum vitae), a New World tree whose bark and wood was ground into a powder and boiled into a strong infusion, of which the patient drank copious amounts while confined to a closed and heated chamber for at least thirty days.25 A sudorific, guaiac caused patients to literally sweat the sickness out. Ulrich von Hutten praised the virtues of the treatment, which to him underscored the inability of orthodox medicine to deal with the disease.26 Speaking from experience as a victim of syphilis, Hutten attacked the physicians for being more concerned with arguing about the causes of the illness than with finding ways to treat it. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the popularity of the guaiac regimen was overshadowed by another, even more potent specific— mercury.27 Applied in an ointment or taken internally, mercury’s effects on the body were dramatic. Rabelais, in the prologue to Pantagruel, painted a memorable picture of pox victims, “well anointed and thoroughly greased, with their faces shining like a larder lock-plate and their teeth rattling like the keys on the manual of an organ or a spinet when it is being played, and their gullets foaming like a wild boar that the hounds have driven into the toils.”28 Although much praised by the Swiss medical reformer Paracelsus, the mercury treatment was widely thought to be a form of torture worse than the disease itself. Although the empirics’ interventions may have had no more therapeutic effect than the regimens of Galenic medicine, unlike the latter, they sometimes produced violent physiological changes. When dramatic bodily alterations (such as prolonged bouts of vomiting) were followed by relief of symptoms, sufferers naturally established a causal relation between the rem23

Quétel, History of Syphilis, 28. Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox, 156. 25Munger, “Guaiacum.” 26 Hutten’s De guaiaci medicina et morbo gallico (1519) provided the first European description of the guaiacum tree and its use for treating syphilis; see Munger, “Guaiacum,” 205–6. 27 Quétel, History of Syphilis, 58–63; and Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox, 103–4, 139–42. 28 Rabelais, Histories of Gargantua and Panatruel, trans. Cohen, 167. 24

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edy and the cure. Even if the “cure” was simply a spontaneous remission of the disease’s symptoms, the empirics’ remedies appeared more efficacious than the physicians’ mild regimens, which did not seem to bring about any physiological changes at all. Thus the French pox was perfectly suited to the “medical self-fashioning” of empirics, who challenged orthodox medicine with remedies that really seemed to work.29 Not much is known about Fra Volpe’s treatment for Mal francese; only that he made it in a distillery in the Campo dei Frari. It is significant, however, that the friar’s small library contained only one medical book, Leonardo Fioravanti’s Capricci medicinali, which is devoted almost entirely to alchemical cures—that is, drugs made by distillation.30 Moreover, when the Inquisitors questioned Fioravanti, they learned that he had spoken to the friar “numerous times” about medical matters. In the 1560s, Leonardo Fioravanti was widely known in Italy as the founder of a sort of alternative medical system. He called it “the new way of healing.” And what was the “new way”? To begin with, it was founded on the belief that disease was a form of physiological pollution that began in the stomach and then proceeded to infect the entire body. Mal francese, he wrote in the Capricci medicinali, is “a corrupt and putrid contagion that offends all parts of the body.”31 Accordingly, his treatments of syphilis relied on drugs that purged the body of “pollutions.” To attack the corruption of the body, he had an imposing armory of emetics and purgatives whose active agents included hellebore, veratrum, antimony, and mercury. His favorite drug was Il precipitato, or precipitate of mercury (mercuric oxide, HgO), served up in an ounce of sugared rosewater. Precipitato was a strong drug all right. A deadly poison in large or prolonged doses, mercuric oxide is in small doses a powerful vomitive. Indeed, one of the most prominent features of Fioravanti’s therapeutics is the frequency with which he recommended violent purgations. At times his treatments took on truly heroic dimensions. To cure a Palermitan merchant of the French pox, he prescribed a regimen of drugs, including a good dose of precipitato, which caused the patient to vomit four to five times before being purged three times per day for ten days. When the man’s physician witnessed this, Fioravanti reported, “he was stupified, seeing such a miracle.”32 To Fioravanti, corruption and contagion were not merely physiological; they carried weighty ideological and moral overtones. To him, diseases were both moral and physiological corruptions. Syphilis carried the double stigma of being a disease both hideous in its effects and one associated with sexual 29

Eamon, “Pharmaceutical Self-Fashioning.” Fioravanti’s alchemy, see Eamon, “Alchemy in Popular Culture.” 31 Fioravanti, Capricci medicinali, 56r: “il mal francese è un morbo corrotto, e putrido, il quale offende tutte le parti del corpo.” 32 Fioravanti, Tesoro della vita humana, 36r–v: “resto tutto stupefatto, parendoli cosa miracolosa.” 30On

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promiscuity.33 To sixteenth-century observers, it was a deserved punishment for immoral living. Fioravanti did not believe the Native Americans gave the Europeans syphilis. Instead, he maintained that the Europeans brought it on themselves, when, during the siege of Naples, unscrupulous provisioners sold soldiers the flesh of dead bodies and the starving troops unwittingly engaged in acts of cannibalism.34 His bizarre theory of the origins of syphilis made the disease a penalty for violating a universal taboo against eating the flesh of one’s own kind, and attributed the sickness to a corruption that proceeded from the stomach to the entire body.35 Mal francese became an important actor in the drama of Volpe’s fall. As a character, it played several important symbolic roles. First of all, it was a retribution for sin. The due reward of unbridled lust, the French pox was the living hell that debauched souls brought upon themselves and a constant reminder of God’s justice.36 Mal francese also played a role in the unfolding drama of salvation. Widely believed to be incurable, it personified death and decay, the end of all human life. Yet the revulsion of syphilitics, a reaction brought about by fear of contact, also underscored the holiness of charity and the compassion of those who cared for victims of the disease. The French pox was known as the “disease of Saint Job” because of its association with the mysterious scourge that afflicted the biblical patriarch.37 The drama of Job’s suffering, whom God permitted Satan to afflict with “a malignant sore covering him from the sole of his feet to the top of his head,” seemed to be reborn in those who endured the terrible and mysterious new disease. 38 Although the cult of Saint Job was long-standing and widespread in Europe, largely due to the spread of the French disease, it peaked in the sixteenth century. As the patron saint of Mal francese victims, Job symbolized the holiness of the suffering that occurred as a consequence of an incomprehensible scourge. Excluded from the regular hospitals, the malfranciosati were cared for in special ospedali degli incurabili (hospitals for incurables) that were instituted by confraternities in most of the major Italian cities, and many of which were dedicated to Saint Job.39 As a healer, Fra Volpe keyed into these cultural signals. He anointed the sores of the afflicted in fearless disregard of the conventional dread of physical contact with the malfranciosati, and dosed patients with drugs that cleansed the evil from their bodies. A priest, alchemist, and healer who touched the sickness’s loathsome sores, Fra Volpe was a Christian shaman. 33

Schleiner, “Moral Attitudes toward Syphilis.” Capricci medicinali, 51v. 35 Eamon, “Cannibalism and Contagion.” 36Foa, “The New and the Old”; Schleiner. Medical Ethics; and Allen, Wages of Sin, chap. 3. 37 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, Great Pox, 52–54, 150–52. 38 Job 2:7–8. 39 Malamani, “Notizie sul mal francese.” 34Fioravanti,

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He could not have cured syphilis (although his medicines might have given some relief from the painful skin eruptions that accompanied the disease), yet he gave patients something more powerful than ordinary medicine could provide. As Lévi-Strauss put it, the shaman provides the sick person with a language that “render[s] acceptable to the mind pains which the body refuses to tolerate.” The shaman calls upon a myth—in this case the Christian myth of the suffering of the innocent—that makes it possible “to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible.”40 Fra Volpe’s healing touch evoked powerful religious symbolism, reintegrating a disordered physiological state within a whole where suffering becomes meaningful. Even the friar’s imposing figure seemed to add to his persona. A big man with a black beard, he always dressed in the habit of his order, its pristine whiteness doubtless stained with soot from the alchemical furnace and its black cape pocked with holes burned by the coals. The Great Pox propelled Fra Volpe to notoriety and made him vulnerable to those envious of his secret. Dozens of witnesses were called to testify in Volpe’s trial. Given the friar’s fame, it is not surprising that his troubles with the Inquisition were generally known among the circles of healers, distillers, and alchemists around Venice. The distillery in Campo dei Frari was a favorite meeting place of alchemists and empirics, who were always interested the latest concoction that might be brewing there. The friar was often seen in the pharmacies, including the “Bear,” where Leonardo Fioravanti practiced, and his secrets were much sought after by the empirics.41 Soon Volpe learned that his accuser was the physician Decio Bellobuono, with whom he had done business at the distillery in Campo dei Frari. Like Volpe, Decio was originally from the South, and had emigrated with his father, Prudentio, and his two brothers, Galeno and Propertio. After settling in Verona in the 1560s, the family moved to Padua, where Decio attended the university. Decio was well connected with the Venetian literary circles. A member of the tony Accademia della Fama, he published a work on the French Disease and wrote a sonnet to the Marchesa del Vasto.42 Suspicions about Volpe’s orthodoxy had actually surfaced earlier, however, in fact at least a month before his arrest, when the rumor began to spread that he had been decapitated in Naples as a Lutheran heretic. It was also rumored that he didn’t believe in the intercession of the saints, that he declared Saint Mary of Loreto to be the pope’s whore, and that he

40Lévi-Strauss,

Structural Anthropology, 197; and Burke. “Rituals of Healing,” 207–20, quote at 211. The Bear pharmacy, run by Sabbà da Franceschi, is depicted in a painting of the Piazza Santa Maria Formosa by Canaletto (Campo Santa Maria Formosa, 1730, private collection) and still exists in its original sixteenth-century building. The pharmacy, in the left side of the picture, is easily identified by the apothecary’s jars in the window. 42 The sonnet was published in Ruscelli, Lettura di Girolamo Ruscelli, 77v. 41

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proclaimed that Lutheran Germany was the “promised land and the Elysian fields.” As the case proceeded, other damaging testimony concerning Volpe’s personal life and religious orthodoxy emerged. There was a rumor that the friar wanted to throw off the habit and marry a woman from Padua, another that he had already married her and had a child by her, while others had heard that he said the sins of the flesh were not so bad, “because man leans that way.” It was even rumored that he planned to leave Italy and go to a monastery in Austria, in a remote place called Terra Domini or Terra Santa, where “people lived in a saintly and plentiful manner [santamente et abondantemente].”43 In densely populated Venice, where neighborhoods spilled over into one another and windows opened onto tiny courtyards, rumor and gossip played an important part in people’s affairs. It was difficult to keep a secret in Venice and privacy “was a luxury that even most patricians could not afford.”44 Gossip was useful to the Holy Office. It turned up suspects and made denunciations almost casual. As Volpe’s trial proceeded, rumor proved extremely damaging to his case. Even the booksellers talked about him; the physician Domenico della Cava testified that he heard from the proprietor of the Salerno bookshop that Volpe owned several heretical books. Decio Bellobuono counted on the gossip network in contriving his plot to frame Volpe. In fact, it turned out it was the Bellobuoni who were actually responsible for the rumors that got the friar in trouble in the first place—or at least that’s what people said. The summer before Volpe’s arrest, the friar had gone to Puglia to make aqua vitae, taking along with him Decio’s younger brother Propertio, who wanted to learn the art. 45 While there, Propertio met a rich widow and schemed to marry her for her property. Posing as a Venetian merchant awaiting a shipload of goods from Venice, he courted the widow and made promises to her, hoping that she would succumb to his solicitations. When Fra Volpe learned of the scheme, he went to the woman’s relatives and told them that Propertio was no rich merchant at all, but just a young wastrel seeking easy gain. His design on the widow ruined, Propertio returned to Venice and began spreading the rumor that the friar had been arrested in Naples and executed for heresy. When Fra Volpe returned unexpectedly to Venice in January 1567, the rumors about his heretical religious beliefs, his supposed concubine, his troubles in Naples, and his suspicious reading habits were well known all around town. As the authorities began to probe more deeply into his case, however, other troubling information surfaced. Practically everyone who knew Volpe testified that when they heard about his denunciation, 43

ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 23, Testimony of Dominico de Juliis della Cava. Horodowich, “Gossiping Tongue.” 45 Fioravanti, Tesoro, 146v, letter of March 1565 to Prudentio Bellobuono. 44

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they suspected it had to do with the business transactions between him and Decio Bellobuono. The details are murky and the testimony is contradictory, but the substance of the affair can be made out with reasonable certainty. Fra Volpe’s drugs, which he made at the distillery in the Campo dei Frari, brought him handsome profits. Soon he was lending money to various empirics and distillers around Venice. A few years before his trial, he had loaned Decio Bellobuono 200 ducats so that Decio could purchase the distillery under his brother’s name, since it was illegal for a physician to own a pharmaceutical establishment.46 When Volpe tried to collect the money owed him, Bellobuono refused to pay up, and when the friar threatened to take legal measures to collect the debt, Bellobuono denounced him to the Inquisition. But if the Bellobuoni could defame the Canker Friar to get out of paying their debt, it was a game that two could play; for Volpe knew a secret about the Bellobuoni and their unsavory past, and he was now prepared to reveal it. Volpe began to take charge of his case. He requested that other witnesses be examined and brought forth documents supporting his case. He charged the Bellobuoni of “seducing” false testimony and stirring up dissension in the Gambarare church. When the inquisitors began looking into the countercharges, they discovered that Decio himself had taken an unusual interest in Lutheranism, having pressed a confessed heretic for information about the doctrine. Was Decio’s curiosity about Protestantism aimed at making his charges against Volpe credible? Then the Canker Friar broke his silence and revealed his secret about the Bellobuoni. Not only was the heresy charge a frame-up to avoid repaying the loan, he declared, but the entire Bellobuono family had been banished from Naples for their involvement in a robbery and murder. Decio’s real name, he asserted, was Jacomo da Campania. Convicted of treason and murder, he fled with his family and migrated to Venice, where they changed their name to “Bello e buono,” or “Fine and Good.” As the Inquisition began to probe more deeply into the family’s past, Decio marshaled several well-connected witnesses to testify on his behalf. From this and other testimony, it becomes fairly clear that Volpe had made a number of enemies: some of the witnesses were physicians who had little good to say about empirics, others owed the friar money, and some were distillers who 46 It may seem strange that Volpe, a Dominican friar, should have led such an apparently loose lifestyle, living by himself outside the community, making and loaning money, operating a distillery, and (so his accusers charged) living with a mistress. Although formally he lived and preached at Gambarare, evidently in practice, he stayed where he pleased. Yet there is no question that Volpe was a member of the Dominican order. All of the archival documents identify him as such and no witness ever questioned it. Nor was practicing alchemy or operating a distillery unusual for a friar: the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella in Florence operated a profitable distillery (which still exists today, selling oil, soap, and perfume to tourists); while another order, the Gesuati (not to be confused with the Jesuits), or aquavitae brothers, as they were sometimes called, specialized in distillation and making cordials and elixirs; Mancini, L’Officina profumo-farmaceutica; and Zobi, “La Farmacia di S. Maria Novella.”

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seemed eager to get back at Volpe for refusing to reveal his secret cure and to thus eliminate a competitor from the medical marketplace. From his prison cell, Fra Volpe doggedly protested his innocence and repudiated one by one the accusations of the Bellobuoni. Refusing to give in to the Inquisition’s intimidations, he insisted on reviewing the trial testimony. In January 1568, he wrote an impassioned plea to the authorities proclaiming his innocence and refuting the Bellobuoni’s accusations. The deposition laid out the details of the loan and Bellobuono’s refusal to repay it, and charged Decio with intimidating witnesses to make false testimony against him. Volpe insisted that he had always preached orthodox doctrine at Gambarare and pointed out that while in prison he had converted two heretics. He denied owning any heretical books and claimed that he had only a breviary, a psalter, and a copy of Fioravanti’s Capricci medicinali, which he used in his practice. Finally, in February 1568, evidently eager to bring the case to a close, the Inquisition abruptly dismissed the charges and set Volpe free. As much as anything, the friar had simply worn the Inquisition down. Yet as far as Volpe was concerned, the case was not over. After his release from prison, he determined to get back at the Bellobuoni and clear his name. He requested that new witnesses be called and that former witnesses be reexamined in order to have his “honor and name restored.” He produced hard evidence to support his case, including letters of credit in Propertio’s name dating from 1565, when the transaction took place, as well as witnesses who confirmed his story about the loan to Decio. The proceedings dragged on for another six months. Eventually the Paduan authorities lost patience. They had heard enough and wanted to bring the affair to an end once and for all. In July, the Holy Office concluded its investigation, evidently without resolving the case in favor of either party. Who gets the last word in this sordid tale of war waged by lies, rumor, blackmail, and false accusations? Volpe, it appears. Although he vanished from history after his trial, he lent his voice to another man in similar desperate circumstances. In July 1568, about the time the last witnesses were deposed in Volpe’s appeal, the Holy Office opened a case against Francesco Annovazzo, a solicitor who practiced at the Rialto. Arrested in early August, Annovazzo was conducted to San Giovanni in Bragora and incarcerated. 47 Like Volpe, he had been denounced as a Lutheran and he spent the next eight months in jail defending himself against the charge. At first glance, it seems that the Bellobuoni were up to their old tricks again, for, as the trial testimony reveals, Decio and Galeno owed the notary money and refused to pay their debt. Did the Bellobuoni try to frame

47 ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 27, 10v: “in la casone di S. Zuane in Bragola, dove sia dalli ministri del S.to Officio condotto in quella et securamente custodito.”

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Annovazzo as they had framed the friar? That is what Annovazzo claimed and to prove his case, he used a clever stratagem: he brought forth the record of Fra Volpe’s trial with its squalid details of the Bellobuoni’s shady past, their lies and rumormongering, and their false denunciations. He hurled a litany of countercharges, calling Decio (among other things) an assassin, a fugitive, a seducer, a buyer of false testimony, a spy, a liar, and a traitor. Just as he had framed Volpe, Annovazzo charged, so Decio had falsely accused him in order to avoid paying his debt. Decio, evidently feeling the noose tightening around his own neck, wrote an apologetic letter to Annovazzo, still in prison, explaining how “infinitely astounded” he was that the lawyer could make such accusations, since “I’ve always held you in my soul and my conscience to be a gentleman and a good Christian.” 48 Although Annovazzo, under torture, was made to confess to having held Lutheran beliefs, his vigorous self-defense brought to light information that badly tarnished the reputation of Bellobuoni.


Few events are more terrifying or more demoralizing than the sudden and unexpected appearance of new diseases. As the panic following the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic demonstrated, the feeling of helplessness before forces we cannot see and do not understand can arouse fear and paranoia. Blaming the other is one possible response to new diseases; another is to blame oneself. During the recent outbreak of hantavirus in the American Southwest, the Navajo people believed they had brought the disease upon themselves because of the failure to follow traditional Navajo ways.49 And everyone in early modern Italy agreed that the root cause of all pestilence was God’s wrath visited upon a sinful people. Whether perceived as having come from within as the result of some moral failing or from malevolent forces from the outside, new diseases bring out a culture’s deepest phobias. Diseases are not just germs; they are relationships between microbes and hosts in which both sides have a history. Unlike animals, which experience diseases on a biological level but who do not socially construct their ailments, humans erect elaborate intellectual frameworks for understanding and controlling illness. The process of framing diseases inevitably involves an accounting for why certain persons (and not others) suffer from a particular disease. For this reason, disease helps frame debates about society. 50 48

ASV, Sant’Uffizio, b. 27. “The Explanatory and Predictive Power of History,” 375–401. 50 Thus in medieval and Renaissance Europe, plague epidemics often became occasions for imposing tight social controls that were particularly burdensome to the poor, although, since bubonic plague is XXXXXX 49Schwarz,

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The disparity between sickness and health that illness punctuates provides a ready metaphor for the perceived gap between what is and what ought to be. These disparities are especially glaring during epidemics such as plague and with the appearance of new diseases such as syphilis.51 This essay has discussed some of the ways in which plague and syphilis worked as social and religious metaphors. How might these observations lead to a deeper understanding of the trial of Antonio Volpe? And, conversely, how might Volpe’s trial increase understanding of the social and cultural impact of new diseases? There is a route, albeit a somewhat speculative one, toward finding answers to those questions. One important clue to understanding Volpe’s predicament is his immigrant status. In the trial record, he is always identified by his origins in Ferrandina in the far south of Italy. His speech, punctuated by the distinctive accent that characterized the dialect of the region, would have earmarked him as a man from the countryside. Even while living in Venice, the trial documents reveal, he had no settled or permanent domicile, staying with this person and that, shuttling back and forth between borrowed residences in Venice and the Terra Firma. In other words, even though Volpe had become a fixture in Venice, he was always thought of as an itinerant healer. By Volpe’s time, the image of the itinerant healer had already evolved into a well-defined literary trope. Described in travel narratives and guidebooks as well as in a growing number of treatises critiquing the errors of medicine, the itinerant healer was an endless source of fascination for tourists and a constant presence in the Piazza San Marco, where they typically set up their portable stages and sold their remedies.52 There were the pauliani, snake handlers who claimed descent from Saint Paul, sold antidotes against venomous bites, and sometimes competed in snake-handling competitions, occasionally with fatal or near-fatal results.53 Then there were ciarlatani, whom the English traveler Fynes Moryson described in the following way: They are called montibanchi or mounting banks or little scaffolds, and also ciarlatani of prating. They proclaim their wares upon these scaffolds, and to draw concourse of people they have a zani or fool with a visard on his face, and sometimes a woman, to make 51

not contagious, such measures would have had little effect on its course; Carmichael, Plague and the Poor. Similar constructions were made of leprosy; see Brody, Disease of the Soul; and Richards, Medieval Leper. On the social construction of illness, see Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” 305–18. 51On early responses to syphilis, see French and Arrizabalaga, “Coping with the French Disease,” 248–87. 52 Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, chap. 7. See also Gentilcore, “‘Charlatans, mountebanks, and other similar people’”; and Katritzky, “Marketing Medicine.” 53 Montinaro, San Paoli dei serpenti.

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comical sport. The people cast their handkerchiefs with money to them, and they cast them back with wares tied in them…. The wares they sell are commonly distilled waters and divers ointments for burning aches and stitches and the like, but especially for the itch and scabs, more vendible than the rest. Some carry serpents about them and sell remedies for their stinging, which they call the grace of St. Paul, because the viper could not hurt him. Others sell Angelica of Misnia at twelve pence English the ounce, naming (as I think) a remote country to make the price greater, for otherwise that cold country should not yield excellent herbs. Many of them have some very good secrets, but generally they are all cheaters.54 Cheats or not, charlatans, mountebanks, and pauliani were an important tourist attraction in sixteenth-century Venice, part of the standard repertoire of sights for anyone who visited the lagoon city. Indeed, the tourist trade played an important role in standardizing the practices of the charlatans, as visitors, tutored on guidebooks, expected to see scenes of theatrical healing acted out in the piazze.55 Although a staple of tourism, itinerant healers were also seen as a danger: drifting from city to city in troupes whose composition changed whenever they repacked their trunks, the ciarlatani were relatively free of the normal constraints imposed by society. As vagabonds, they had no clear legal status. They were accompanied by women of dubious reputation; they used charms, wore gaudy costumes, told vulgar jokes, and mocked the physicians in ridiculous burlesques that would later become (in politer circles) the basic elements of the commedia dell’arte. No wonder the authorities regarded the ciarlatani as dangerous to the moral fabric of the community. Cardinal Paleotti of Bologna declared that the mountebank’s comedies were excuses for youths to play truant and steal from their parents and employers. In times of heresy and pestilence, he warned, the crowding on the piazze to watch the spectacles was particularly undesirable.56 The growing criticism of itinerant healers in part mirrored the attitudes of the orthodox physicians, who saw the itinerant healers as competitors and wanted to monopolize the business of healing from above. Yet, as Katharine Park has suggested, these interests merely echo a broader and more important concern about the city as a moral and economic environment.57 The real issue, it seems, was fraud: whether you could trust those

54

Moryson, Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, ed. Hughes, 424–25 (spelling modernized). “Country Medicine in the City Marketplace”; and Katritsky, “Marketing Medicine.” 56 Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 311. See also, Katritsky, “Was Commedia dell’arte Performed by Mountebanks?” 57 For the following observations, I am indebted to Park, “Country Medicine,” 116–17. 55Park,

172 William Eamon

with whom you dealt on the piazza every day. As Moryson noted of the ciarlatani, “They are all cheaters.” The cutthroat competition in the medical marketplace reflected the competitiveness of the money economy as a whole. In this sense, concerns about the trustworthiness of itinerant healers reflected more general anxieties about a market in which trading in unfamiliar goods from distant places became a daily occurrence. Venice seemed particularly vulnerable to the dangers posed by the immigrant. Unlike most Renaissance cities, Venice was not surrounded by walls or moats. The sea protected it, but the sea also made it more permeable than other urban spaces, penetrable from an infinite variety of places and ever vulnerable to the dangers from without. In Venice, an open, porous city with a large population of immigrants, uneasiness about foreigners and exotic merchandise manifested itself in legislation against uncivil speech, laws regulating fraud in marketplace, and other measures. 58 Although Fra Volpe was no mountebank, nor a member of a troupe of traveling entertainers, as an itinerant healer, he embodied both the physical dangers of the countryside and the healing power of its natural products. His remedies, including the precious aqua vitae from Puglia and the distilled essence that he used to treat the French pox, are reminiscent of the patent medicines that the ciarlatani peddled in the market squares. An immigrant from distant, rural Lucania, he traveled back and forth to the South to manufacture the healing “water of life” for which he was renowned. Mysterious, foreign, and dark, he possessed powerful and seductive healing secrets that he learned who knows where? Volpe’s status as an itinerant healer thus made him vulnerable to the jealousy especially of physicians, who worried about competition. In fact, his principal accuser, Decio Bellobuono, was a physician. Yet the friar was also a lightning rod for concerns about the vulnerability of Venice’s urban space. Thus his trial may be read as a metaphor about relations between inside and outside, and between the city and the country. The uncertainties of the city’s relation to the countryside mirrored the uncertainties of the body’s relationship to its environment. Neither the body nor the city is autonomous; both are bound to their surroundings. Just as the health of the body is dependent on the outside for food, water, and air, so the health of the city depends on the flow of goods from without. The body’s nourishment comes from the outside, but so do the toxins that corrupt it. The city, too, depends upon the flow of goods and people from the outside; but with that flow come a host of social dangers. Purging the physical body of its toxins—the central metaphor of Renaissance popular healing—keyed into

58 On speech legislation in Venice, see Horodowich, “Civic Identity and the Control of Blasphemy.” On laws regulating the manufacture and sale of theriac, see Olmi, “Farmacopea antica e medicina moderna”; and Stössl, Lo spettacolo della triaca.

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a longing to purge the urban social body of its conflicts and its foreign influences.59 Plague and syphilis thus opened up—or rather, exacerbated—a debate about commercialization and its consequences. The decades following the Black Death were the decades of golden remedies. Elixirs, universal potions, and panaceas of all kinds became an increasingly important part of the healer’s arsenal. The search for the philosopher’s stone that would result in the perfect medicine reached an almost feverish pitch and the marketplace abounded in wonder drugs.60 At the same time, the niche in the medical economy opened up by the presence of a dreaded disease that appeared to be miraculously cured by a wonder drug was a perfect fit for entrepreneurial healers like Volpe, who made a lot of money on his remedies, enough to make substantial loans to other healers.


Nothing is heard about Fra Volpe after his unfortunate encounter with the Inquisition. Perhaps he did marry Donna Camilla, the widow rumored to be his concubine. Perhaps he left Venice and went to Austria. Maybe he did finally make it to that Holy Land where people live in common, in saintly ways, and with plenty. We shall probably never know. Like so many others, he disappeared in the mist of the past. And Decio? He contracted the plague during the epidemic of 1576 and died in the Lazaretto Nuovo. His son, Lelio, is heard in a pathetic plea to the Public Health Board to be allowed to recover his father’s meager goods.61

59I

owe these insights to Park, “Country Medicine,” 116–17. Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies.” See also, Pereira, “Mater Medicinarum.” 61 ASV, Provveditori alla Sanità, Reg. 734, 75r. 60

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Archives ASV

Archivio di Stato, Venice

Printed Sources Allen, Peter Lewis. The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Arrizabalaga, Jon, John Henderson, and Roger French. The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Translated by G. H. McWilliam. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. Brody, Saul Nathan. The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. Burke, Peter. “Rituals of Healing in Early Modern Italy.” In The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Carmichael, Ann. Plague and the Poor in Medieval Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———, and Arthur M. Silverstein. “Smallpox in Europe Before the Seventeenth Century: Virulent Killer or Benign Disease?” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 42 (1987): 147–68. Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. London: Arnold Publishers, 2003. Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Corradi, Alfonso. Annali delle epidemie occorse in Italia dalle prime memorie fino al 1850. 4 vols. Bologna: Forni, 1973. Cosmacini, Giorgio. Storia della medicina e della sanità in Italia: Dalla peste Europea alla guerra mondiale, 1348–1918. Rome: Laterza, 1987. Crisciani, Chiara, and Michela Pereira. “Black Death and Golden Remedies: Some Remarks on Alchemy and the Plague.” In The Regulation of Evil: Social and Cultural Attitudes to Epidemics in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Agostono Paravicini Bagliani and Francesco Santi, 7–39. Sismel: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998. Crosby, Alfred W., Jr. “Conquistador y Pestilencia: The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 47 (1969): 218– 27. ———. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972. Del Col, Andrea. “Organizzazione, composizione e giurisdizione dei tribunali dell’Inquisizione romana nella repubblica di Venezia (1500–1550).” Critica storia 25 (1988): 244– 94. Dyer, Alan. “The English Sweating Sickness of 1551: An Epidemic Anatomised.” Medical History 41 (1997): 362–84. Eamon, William. “Alchemy in Popular Culture: Leonardo Fioravanti and the Search for the Philosopher’s Stone.” Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000): 196–213. ———. “Cannibalism and Contagion: Framing Syphilis in Counter-Reformation Italy.” Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998): 1–31.

Canker Friar 175 ———. “Pharmaceutical Self-Fashioning, or How to Get Rich and Famous in the Renaissance Medical Fashion Industry.” Pharmacy in History 45 (2003): 123–29. ———. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Erasmus. The Colloquies of Erasmus. Translated by Craig R. Thompson. Volume 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Fioravanti, Leonardo. Capricci medicinali. Venice, 1582. ———. Tesoro della vita humana. Venice, 1570. Foa, Anna. “The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494–1530).” In Sex & Gender in Historical Perspective, edited by Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, 26–45. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Fracastoro, Girolamo. De contagione. Translated by W. C. Wright. History of Medicine Series 2. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930. French, Roger, and Jon Arrizabalaga. “Coping with the French Disease: University Practitioners’ Strategies and Tactics in the Transition from the Fifteenth to the Sixteenth Century.” In Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, edited by R. French, J. Arrizabalaga, A. Cunningham, and L. García-Ballester, 248–87. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Gentilcore, David. “‘Charlatans, mountebanks, and other similar people’: The Regulation and Role of Itinerant Practitioners in Early Modern Italy.” Social History 20 (1995): 297–314. ———. “Charlatans, the Regulated Marketplace and the Treatment of Venereal Disease in Italy.” In Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kevin Siena, 57–80. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Guerra, Francisco. “The Dispute over Syphilis: Europe Versus America.” Clio Medica 13 (1978): 39–61. Hopkins, Donald R. Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Horodowich, Elizabeth. “Civic Identity and the Control of Blasphemy in Sixteenth-Century Venice.” Past and Present 181 (November 2003): 3–33. ———. “The Gossiping Tongue: Oral Networks, Public Life, and Political Culture in Early Modern Venice.” Renaissance Studies 19 (2005): 22–45. Katritsky, M. A. “Marketing Medicine: The Image of the Early Modern Mountebank.” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 121–53. ———. “Was Commedia dell’arte Performed by Mountebanks? Album amicorum illustrations and Thomas Platter’s description of 1598.” Theatre Research International 23 (1998): 104–26. Lea, K. M. Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620. 2 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963. Malamani, Anita. “Notizie sul mal francese e gli ospedali degli incurabili in età moderna.” Critica storica 15 (1978): 193–216. Mancini, Gabriella, ed. L’Officina profumo-farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella in Firenze: Sette secoli di storia e di arte. Rome: IGER, 1994. Martin, A. Lynn. Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the 16th Century. Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 28. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1996. Montinaro, Brizio. San Paoli dei serpenti: Analisi di una tradizione. Palermo: Salerio, 1996.

176 William Eamon Moryson, Fynes. Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary. Edited by C. Hughes. London: Sheratt & Hughes, 1903. Munger, Robert S. “Guaiacum, the Holy Wood from the New World.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 4 (1949): 196–229. Olmi, Guiseppe. “Farmacopea antica e medicina moderna: La disputa sulla teriaca nel Cinquecento bolognese.” Physis 19 (1977): 197–245. Park, Katharine. “Country Medicine in the City Marketplace: Snakehandlers as Itinerant Healers.” Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 104–20. Pereira, Michela. “Mater Medicinarum: English Physicians and the Alchemical Elixir in the Fifteenth Century.” In Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, edited by Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, and Luis García-Ballester, 26–52. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Quétel, Claude. History of Syphilis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Rabelais, François. The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated by J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955. Rhazes. A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles. Translated by W. A. Greenhill. London: Sydenham Society, 1848. Richards, Peter. The Medieval Leper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Rosenberg, Charles E. “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History.” In Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine., 305–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ruscelli, Girolamo. Lettura di Girolamo Ruscelli, sopra un sonetto dell’illustriss. Signor Marchese della Terza alla divina Signora Marchesa del Vasto: Ove con nuove et chiare ragioni si prova la soma perfettione delle donne; & si discorrono molte cose intorno alla scala Platonica dell’ascendimento per le cose create alla contemplatione di Dio. Venice, 1552. Schleiner, Winfried. Medical Ethics in the Renaissance. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995. ———. “Moral Attitudes toward Syphilis and its Prevention in the Renaissance.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68 (1994): 389–410. Schutte, Anne Jacobson. Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Schwarz, Maureen Trudelle. “The Explanatory and Predictive Power of History: Coping with the ‘Mystery Illness.’” Ethnohistory 42 (1995): 375–401. Stössl, Marianne. Lo spettacolo della triaca: Produzione e promozione della ‘Droga Divina’ a Venezia dal Cinque al Settecento. Quaderni 25. Venice: Centro tedesco di studi veneziani, 1983. Wylie, John A. H., and Leslie H. Collier. “The English Sweating Sickness (sudor anglicus): A Reappraisal.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 36 (1981): 425–45. Zobi, A. “La Farmacia di S. Maria Novella.” Memorie Domenicane 16, ser. 2, vol. 1 (1899): 531– 40.

CHAPTER

7

Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod A WORK OF ART IN MULTIPLE CONTEXTS

Elisabeth Hipp

AN UNUSUAL, BUT VERY SUCCESSFUL PLAGUE PICTURE Nicolas Poussin’s painting The Plague at Ashdod (fig. 7.1), produced in Rome between 1630 and 1631, can be considered one of the most important and successful plague pictures of all time: many subsequent representations of historical or biblical plague epidemics are indebted to it, particularly in the way they depict the suffering masses and in their choice of visual motifs.1 Poussin’s canvas is now often regarded as a reflection of the contemporary experience of the bubonic plague cast in Old Testament garb. Yet, as has already been pointed out by scholars, the biblical epidemic depicted there was, in Poussin’s time, not generally understood as bubonic plague. Furthermore, although one now may take the painter’s choice of subject for granted, it was, in fact, an extremely unusual subject for an easel painting. 2

1

This essay summarizes, in revised form, selected topics from my recent monograph, Nicolas Poussin: Die Pest von Asdod. However, for important points raised therein, the present essay offers a reconsidered discussion and updated bibliographic references, while the monograph may be consulted for additional arguments and sources, as well as for the older literature. Sheila Barker merits warm thanks for her help with the English translation. I am also much indebted to Franco Mormando’s wise editing work and wish to thank as well Michael Korey (Dresden) who helped at a late state of the revision with his advice regarding the English language. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 1 See, for example, the painting by Michael Sweerts discussed by Franco Mormando in the present volume, as well as his essay, “Response to the Plague,” 12–15. 2See Boeckl, “New Reading,” 120, 124, 143n9. Further important studies of Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod are Mollaret and Brossollet, “Nicolas Poussin,” 171–78; Bonfait, “La peste d’Azoth,” 162–71; Keazor, “A propos,” 62–69; and Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 659–89. See also Blunt, Paintings of Nicolas Poussin, 24–25; Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 1:94; Schütze, “Aristide de Thèbes, Raphaël et Poussin,” 2:577, 582; and Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression contrôlée,” 345–46. A more complete discussion of the older literature can be found in Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 15–23.

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Fig. 7.1. Nicolas Poussin, The Plague at Ashdod, 1630–31. Oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo reproduced by permission from Photo RMN/ all rights reserved.

178 Elisabeth Hipp

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod 179

Poussin himself called the painting The Miracle of the Ark in the Temple of Dagon (Il miracolo dell’Arca nel tempio di Agone), thus placing stress on the cause of the epidemic—not on the epidemic itself.3 Nevertheless, it is indeed the calamity that dominates the composition. Giovan Pietro Bellori and André Félibien, two of Poussin’s early biographers, consequently accentuated the importance of the disease that is represented in the painting, using the expressions il Morbo (the Disease or the Pestilence) and la Peste (the Plague) to refer to the picture. Giambattista Passeri, however, used a designation that approached Poussin’s own title, while Joachim von Sandrart’s description refers both to the events that precipitated the epidemic and the epidemic itself.4 Clearly, both the plague and its cause have to be taken into account in order to understand and properly interpret the picture. The incident shown in The Plague at Ashdod is described in 1 Samuel 5:5–7. Having captured the Hebrews’ ark of the covenant during the battle of Ebenezer, the Philistines took it home with them to the city of Ashdod and placed it in the temple of their idol, Dagon. Poussin shows a city square lined with distinguished buildings, among them the temple of Dagon on the left. According to Bellori, the obelisk in the background indicates the fact that Ashdod was close to Egypt.5 As a punishment for this offense, God twice caused the idol of Dagon to fall ignominiously to the ground; the second time, its head and hands were broken off. God also struck the Philistines with an affliction “in the more intimate part of their flanks“ (in secretiori parte natium),6 as stated in the Vulgate, which was the authoritative version of the Bible in that age (as mandated by the Council of Trent). God also set upon them a plague of mice (et nati sunt mures). This plague of mice is mentioned explicitly only in the Greek Septuagint and in the Vulgate; in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, it can only be deduced from the guilt offering later made by the Philistines.7 Drawing upon his biblical source, Poussin shows a city being ravaged by the disease, while still including signs of the other punishments. The tribulations that the God of Israel has visited upon the Philistines and their god Dagon obviously have just begun to make Ashdod’s citizens—seen debating in the middle ground— realize that the stolen ark could not remain in their city. In recreating this episode on canvas, it is quite possible that Poussin consulted, beside the Bible, Flavius Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities. Another

3

See Costello, “Twelve Pictures,” 275. See Bellori, Le vite, 429; Passeri, Vite de’ pittori, 352; Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies, 20; and von Sandrart, Academie der Bau, 29, 258. 5Bellori, Le vite, 430. 6 The edition cited is Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam, nova editio, logicis partitionibus aliisque subsidiis ornata a Alberto Colunga (Matriti: Ed. Catolica, 1965). 7 Neustätter, “Mice in Plague Pictures,” 110; and Grimm, Darstellung der Pest, 22. For the plague of mice in scripture and in relation to medieval book illustration, see also the essay by Pamela Berger in this volume. 4

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book by Josephus, his Wars of the Jews, had already been the artist’s source for the first version of The Sack and Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem by Titus (1626, Jerusalem, The Israel Museum), and the Jewish Antiquities were definitely a source for some of his later pictures.8 Like the Vulgate, Josephus also includes a reference to the plague of mice in recounting the Ashdod episode. In the Jewish Antiquities, the description of the moment depicted by Poussin, including the scene before the temple, is more concise than that contained in the Bible: “Being, then, in this evil plight and powerless to withstand their calamities, the Azotians understood that it was from the ark that they arose and that their victory and the capture of this trophy had not been for their welfare.”9 Poussin portrays in detail the agony of the Philistines in the three figural groups dominating the foreground. In addition, vignettes of disease and death can be seen in the background. Among these suffering people, mice—depicted, actually, as the size of rats—are scurrying around. The large size of Poussin’s “mice” has a philological explanation. The Latin word mus, used in the Vulgate, is, in fact, ambiguous: it can signify “rat” as well as “mouse.” Thus, in various French translations of the Vulgate the Frenchman Poussin might have consulted, the Latin plural mures was translated either as souris (mice) or as “rats.”10 When Josephus’s work, originally written in Greek, was translated into Latin, his equally ambiguous Greek word mues (literally “mice,” but the term could also be applied to other rodents) was replaced by the likewise ambiguous Latin term mures. Nonetheless, some French translations did name the rodents unmistakably as “rats.”11 It is more likely, in any case, that Poussin encountered the reference to rats from a translated version of the Jewish Antiquities, rather than from a French or Italian translation of the Bible, since the reading of scripture in the vernacular was strictly regulated in this period: Poussin would have had to obtain ecclesiastical permission to use a French translation of the Bible and to obtain access to such a translation within the private collections of his former patrons and clients. However, it is here important to point out that the theory that Poussin had included the rats because he recognized an etiological connection between the plague and the rodents simply has no basis in the contemporary textual sources. No such scientific understanding, namely, that rats (or mice) were carriers of the disease, as yet existed.12 8 For Poussin’s knowledge of Josephus, see Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 180; del Bravo, “Temi biblici in Poussin,” 232; Deutsch, “Légendes midrachiques,” 47–53; and Bull, “Poussin and Josephus,” 331–38. 9 Josephus Jewish Antiquities, 167. 10 La Saincte Bible en Françoys (Antwerp, 1534), 100 (soris); La Sainte Bible traduite en françois sur la Vulgate. Avec de courtes notes pour l’intelligence de la lettre: par Monsieur de Sacy, vol. 2 (Brussels, 1701), 18 (“rats”). 11 See Josephus, Histoire de Fl. Josèphe, 185 (“rats”). The explanation of the rats in relation to translations of Josephus was also given by Bull, “Poussin and Josephus,” 335. 12 For the debated issue of what premodern science knew of the rodent-plague connection, see XXXXXXX

Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod 181

Generally speaking, the precise identity of the disease suffered by the Philistines was not a major focus of attention in traditional discussions of and commentary upon this biblical passage, nor in its early pictorial representation (mostly in medieval illuminations). Furthermore, the term “plague” (in Latin and the vernacular tongues) had always been ambiguous.13 More important in these analyses was the fact that it was God who had sent the disease as a punishment of the enemies of his people. By the time Poussin undertook the execution of this work, however, theologians had begun to attempt to shed light upon the various biblical plagues by using current medical knowledge and terminology in dealing with the historical/literal level of exegesis. Nonetheless, even in this early modern exegetical literature the Philistines’ affliction was not really understood as a “plague” in any specific medical sense. The great Jesuit biblical commentator Cornelius a Lapide (1567–1637), for example, discusses older interpretations of the Philistines’ malady as a kind of venereal disease (lues venerea) and as dysentery—the latter interpretation having been prompted by Josephus’s text, which was often cited in exegetical literature of the time. In the end, Cornelius concludes that the disease in question was a special one, sui generis, hitherto unknown and created only for this one specific case of divine punishment.14 Lapide’s avoidance of a diagnosis of the Philistine disease as bubonic plague is all the more notable because he refers to that disease elsewhere in his commentary on other biblical passages involving mass mortality. For instance, in his discussion of Exodus 9:3, the Jesuit adds to discussion of the passage on the pharaonic plague remarks about various remedies specifically for bubonic plague. Elsewhere, in his explanation of the Davidian plague (2 Sam. 24:12–17), he likewise mentions comparable historical plagues, including the outbreak of bubonic plague that struck Rome during the reign of Pope Gregory the Great in the early sixth century.15 In the exegetical literature of the early modern period, the Latin word pestis is found in reference to the Philistines’ disease at Ashdod only when commentators (such as Gaspar Sanchez [1594–1620]), for instance, cite the aforementioned Flavius Josephus. Yet, in this usage, the word pestis really means no more than “disease,” translating the original Greek term, nósos, which Josephus uses before he describes in detail the Azotians’ intestinal

13

Mollaret and Brossollet, “Nicolas Poussin,” 172 (against Georg Sticker’s view published in 1898). See also in a critical sense Neustätter, “Mice in Plague Pictures,” 105–6, 113. Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 665, points out, however, that rats and plague were associated already in the fourteenth century. See as well Pamela Berger’s essay in this volume. 13 For early modern times, see Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 3. 14 Lapide, Commentarius in Josue, 242. For other commentaries asserting this argument, see Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 85–89. 15 Lapide, Commentaria, 377; Lapide, In Josue, Judices, et Ruth Commentarii, 265.

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symptoms.16 This translation of the word nósos as peste also recurs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian and French translations of the Jewish Antiquities.17 However, there is another aspect of the biblical story that held even more importance for the early modern commentaries and that was also relevant to Poussin’s painting: it is the fact that the ark—and with it the Hebrew God—emerges as the winner of the story. This point frequently served as the basis for several of the commentators’ allegorical and moral interpretations of the story. Moreover, in the few pictorial representations of the ark in Ashdod that Poussin could have known—almost exclusively book illustrations, especially in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century biblical picture books18—the confrontation between the ark of the covenant and the idol Dagon occurs virtually always in the center of the composition. While the plague of mice is often shown, the suffering of the Philistines is generally omitted (although it had played a certain role in medieval illuminations).19 In Poussin’s painting, however, the Philistines’ suffering has become an essential component of the subject. Furthermore, the artist defines the illness specifically as bubonic plague by assembling a number of older pictorial formulations that the educated viewer would recognize as bubonic plague motifs.20 A prominent example is in the very center of the foreground: the dead mother lying on the ground with her children, seen in foreshortened perspective. This motif goes back to an old topos for the representation of catastrophe that already appeared in an ancient ecphrasis by Pliny the Elder, describing a work by the Greek painter Aristeides: according to Pliny, in the environment of a captured city, Aristides depicted a dying mother who watches her baby moving towards her breast, afraid that the child finally might drink blood.21 In the print known as the Morbetto (fig. 7.2), a representation of an epidemic of plague from Virgil’s Aeneid designed by Raphael and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi, this topos reappears; however, the specific figure of the mother lying on the ground was obviously inspired by Michelangelo’s scene of the Deluge from the Sistine ceiling frescoes. With Raphael’s drawing and Raimondi’s print thereof, 16

See Sanctius, In Quattuor libros regum, 117. Josephus, Histoire de Fl. Josèphe, 185; and Josephus, Di Flavio Giuseppe, s. 238. 18 Regarding the older iconographic tradition see Boeckl, “New Reading,” 124–33; Deutsch, “L’Arche d’Alliance,” 24–35; Liebl, Die illustrierten Flavius-Josephus-Handschriften, 107–111; and Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 52–76. Again, see also Pamela Berger’s essay in the present volume. 19 Bull, “Poussin and Josephus,” 334, believes that Poussin referred directly to the illustration of Amman in the 1571 edition of the Jewish Antiquities. However, this illustration reflects a comparable iconographic type, like other contemporary illustrations of the biblical scene (e.g., the figure in Matthäus Merian the Elder’s Figurae biblicae from 1630). 20 See Boeckl, ”A New Reading,” 120. 21 See Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 94. See also Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 268; and Schütze, “Aristide de Thèbes,” 573. 17

Fig. 7.2. Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), Il Morbetto, ca. 1515–16. Engraving, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, Austria. Photo reproduced by permission from the Albertina, Vienna.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

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the motif had received a new, more specific meaning that made it especially suitable for other plague representations as well.22 Viewers as early as Bellori recognized that Poussin had borrowed this motif from the Morbetto. Yet, notably, in the Morbetto and consequently also in the Plague at Ashdod, Pliny’s verbal image is modified in order to accord with these artists’ subjects: instead of being moribund, as in Pliny’s description, the mother is already dead in the two pictorial solutions.23 Another recognizable plague motif is the man who pinches his nose to protect himself from the stench and perhaps also the infectious miasma surrounding him: this image is likewise found in many plague pictures of the time, including the influential Morbetto print. An additional motif is the pale gray skin of the dead mother, which recalls the pale face that is part of Cesare Ripa’s description of the personification of plague in his Iconologia.24 Although a physical detail such as the skin color of a plague victim can be understood as reflecting some contemporary medical knowledge of the plague’s symptoms and effects,25 Poussin’s depiction does not intend to illustrate this medical data in any obvious or precise way. The artist, instead, employs almost exclusively those iconographic formulas and motifs that were already culturally encoded, irrespective of contemporary science. Thus, the figural groups in the foreground, composed of both the living and the dead, inevitably remind the viewer of previous plague representations. This is true as well of the middle-ground detail of the dead person being carried away.26 It is important to reiterate that, in deciding to represent the Philistines’ disease as “real” plague, Poussin deviates from the traditional exegesis of his biblical subject, as seen in the discussion above of this ecclesiastical literature. The artist’s decision is all the more striking since, not only is this connection between plague and Ashdod not found in the aforementioned exegetical literature; it does not exist in the contemporary historical-medical-scientific literature on the plague either. The Plague of King David, the Plague of Pope Gregory the Great, and other historical and biblical epidemics are mentioned frequently in such treatises, but all reference to the

22 For the borrowings from Michelangelo in the “Morbetto” see Schröter, “Raffaels Madonna,” 71. Regarding the motif’s use in plague art see Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence, 94; and Hope and Healing, esp. cat. 5. 23 This is also noted by Schütze, “‘Die sterbende Mutter des Aristeides,’” 179. 24 For the man pinching his nose, see Boeckl, “New Reading,” 89, 143n16; for the reference to Ripa, see Bonfait, “La peste d’Azoth,” 168; and Ripa, Iconologia, 351. 25For a more detailed argument, see Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 663–64. In a more general sense, it sometimes has been noted that people pinching their noses in plague pictures possibly referred to the theory of miasma; in reference to Raphael’s and Raimondi’s Morbetto and indirectly to Poussin’s Plague, see Achilles-Syndram, “‘So macht nun Abbilder,’” 100–101. 26 As an example of a depiction of carried bodies, see Sante Peranda’s painting of Saint Roch among the Plague-Stricken (Venice, Chiesa di S. Giuliano).

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suffering of the Philistines is omitted.27 Among the many early modern plague treatises, there is only one reference to be found to the Philistines’ disease as bubonic plague: this comes a few decades after the completion of Poussin’s painting, in Athanasius Kircher’s Scrutinium physico-medicum contagiosae luis.28 Though a unique case, Kircher’s reference does indicate that, by the later seventeenth century at least, interpretation of the Philistines’ disease as a bubonic plague—perhaps first proposed by Poussin in his painting—was a permissible as well as plausible deviation from traditionally accepted views. Poussin himself may have first had the idea of interpreting the Philistines’ disease as the “real” plague while undertaking an initial survey of his textual sources and finding in translations of Josephus the repeated mentioning of the word “peste” (though there used with a different sense). Inasmuch as Poussin has chosen a seldom-depicted biblical epidemic for the subject of his painting, and in doing so has decided to represent it, contrary to tradition, as “real” plague and, furthermore, does so in the form of a history painting destined for a collector’s cabinet or gallery, the canvas can be considered highly unusual. Both its rare Old Testament subject and its primary purpose distinguish it from traditional religious plague pictures: the latter devotional scenes usually have as their focus the figure of the Madonna or an interceding saint and sometimes also include crowds of suffering people.29 Moreover, it is unusual that Poussin depicts the plague exclusively by means of its effects, since the epidemic had traditionally been represented through symbolic agents such as angels of death, arrows, or other emblems of this kind. As a plague picture, Poussin’s painting ought rather to be situated in relation to the tradition of representations of pestilential epidemics from literary—and especially classical literary—sources. Yet here, too, examples before Poussin are rare, especially in the art of painting. (In case of the Morbetto print, it should be noted that some scholars assume that the work was intended to become a book illustration, but there were no plans for a related painted canvas.)30 Though research on Poussin’s painting has for a long time acknowledged the work’s relation to the plague epidemic that struck large portions of Italy in the years around 1630, it nevertheless has failed to explore the more precise nature of this connection and its possible implications. Only recently have there been attempts to identify the specific reasons for which this plague picture came to be, and to understand the purpose it might 27

See, for example, Settala, De Peste, 19–20, 73; and Sarasini, Trattato sopra, 10. Scrutinium, 228. In contrast, Neustätter (“Identification of the Philistine Plague,” 39) held that the interpretation of the affliction of the Philistines as a plague arose only in the eighteenth century. 29 In Poussin’s own 1657–58 plague picture of Santa Francesca Romana (Paris, Louvre), there is also a personification of the plague. 30 See Lord, “Raphael,” 86–87. 28Kircher,

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have served.31 This consideration, however, will not focus merely on the context of the historical plague of 1630: the function of Poussin’s canvas as a plague picture can only be fully understood if the artistic discourses that enveloped its creation are taken into careful consideration as well.

THE PICTURE AS A WORK OF ART One portion of the painting’s early history is well known, thanks to the records from a court trial involving the Sicilian art dealer and adventurer Fabrizio Valguarnera, first published by Jane Costello in 1950. These records secure the date of the painting, confirming that Valguarnera visited Poussin in his studio by the end of 1630, at which time the Sicilian dealer decided to acquire The Plague at Ashdod, the canvas being already under way but still incomplete. In addition, Valguarnera ordered from Poussin The Realm of Flora (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister). Upon the completion of the The Plague in early 1631 and the Flora two months later, the pictures were brought to Valguarnera’s house.32 Despite this documentary evidence, one of the many questions remaining about The Plague at Ashdod is when exactly Poussin began its execution. There are still other problems to resolve. For a long time, a drawing in the Louvre formerly ascribed to Poussin and a large early copy of the painting in London (National Gallery) now attributed to Angelo Caroselli were thought to reveal Poussin’s original concept, or some intermediary state of the painting’s evolution.33 Now, however, the documentary value of both of these works has been diminished. The drawing’s attribution is currently under debate,34 nor is it known when it was completed. As for the copy in London, it seems unlikely that this canvas was done after the unfinished original and documents an earlier state of The Plague at Ashdod, inasmuch as what is seen in the Caroselli version does not correspond to the compositional changes visible in infrared photographs of the Poussin painting; in particular, the scenery in the Caroselli copy does not relate to what an infrared photograph reveals about alterations in Poussin’s own architectural backdrop.35 The same infrared photograph also documents addi-

31 See especially Bonfait, “La peste d’Azoth”; Barker, “Poussin, Plague”; and Hipp, Nicolas Poussin. See also Barker’s brief discussion of the painting—together with Poussin’s Flora—in her dissertation, which does not contain the central theses and key arguments of her later article, but does propose a possible function of the Flora as a plague painting: Barker, Art in a Time of Danger, 301–11. 32 See Costello, “Twelve Pictures,” 256, 263, 272, 275. 33 See, for example, Boeckl, “New Reading,” 129; and Wine, “‘Poussin’s Problems,’” 26. 34See Thuillier, “Charles Mellin,” 616; in a more comprehensive sense, Rosenberg and Prat, eds., Nicolas Poussin, 2:998. 35See Thuillier, “Perspectives du XVIIe siècle,” 254n8; Bonfait, “Poussin aujourd’hui,” 75; Keazor, “‘Coppies bien,’” 255; as well as Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 42–51 and fig. 4. I am indebted to Patrick Le Chanu for communicating to me his observations concerning the infrared photograph at the time I was preparing my dissertation.

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tional changes not seen in the copy: for example, the relief in the temple was apparently conceived differently in a first version; originally, the sculpture of Dagon seems to have stood upright (Poussin’s revision of this latter detail to conform better with the biblical sources suggests that he refined his understanding of the story during the painting process).36 The suggestion that the Caroselli painting simply is reflecting a second earlier state—different from the one visible in the infrared photograph— does not seem satisfying.37 Another problematic thesis is that Poussin’s onetime housemate Jean Lemaire had invented or carried out parts of the scenery.38 Unfortunately, present documentation does not enable us to solve this specific question. However, it can at least be assumed that from the beginning, Poussin’s conception for his painting included several groups of the suffering people in the foreground. In addition, it seems that the total design of the painting originated with Poussin himself, even if it may be the case that in the actual process of painting he received assistance from another artist. As to the circumstances that prompted Poussin to undertake this canvas, it remains uncertain whether the artist began the painting with a specific commission that was subsequently withdrawn or whether he initiated this project without the benefit of a committed purchaser. At the time when he painted The Plague at Ashdod, Poussin was not in the service of any one particular patron. It must have been especially disappointing for him that his altarpiece for St. Peter’s basilica, The Martyrdom of Erasmus (1629, Pinacoteca Vaticana), had not led to further commissions from the papal court. Thus, with The Plague at Ashdod, he continued his former practice of making easel paintings destined for private walls and collections, but now obviously with even more ambition than before.39 Supporting the hypothesis of a specific original client for The Plague at Ashdod is its intellectual complexity. The picture is more than the representation of an Old Testament plague scene: with both its composition and its subject matter, Poussin tackles problems of significance to contemporary theories of art as well as to his Roman artistic environment. Among these problems was the representation of the passage of time in a single picture that nevertheless respects the goal of temporal unity. The painting seems to show a particular moment of the story; yet, this “particular moment” is a complex one and is thus elucidated through the depiction

36

See, in this sense, Keazor, “A propos,” 66. thesis of two earlier states of the architectural background is raised by Wine, National Gallery Catalogues, 19-–20. 38Salerno, I pittori, 44; Fagiolo dell’Arco, Jean Lemaire, 13–14. Mahon, “Gli esordi,” 28–29, presents the hypothesis that Caroselli’s painting copied the first conception of the scenery painted by Lemaire, which was later overpainted by Poussin. 39 See Bellori, Le vite, 431. 37This

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of various discrete actions that could have happened simultaneously.40 At the same time, however, the story’s larger narrative remains understandable. This occurs as the viewer’s eye is repeatedly steered by the composition from the groups of the suffering and fleeing people in the foreground back to the middle ground, especially to the group of the men near the temple. Indeed, according to the written account, the Azotians convene several times in the course of the story and the viewer might be reminded of all the meetings here, beginning with the discovery of the broken idol of Dagon. However, more specifically, the painting clearly shows the scene shortly before they decide their next course of action. From this middle-ground group, the viewer’s gaze is directed by the figures’ gestures and glances to the elevated ark. It is the ark that reveals itself as the picture’s real hero, triumphing over the broken Dagon while at the same time indicating the reason for the Philistines’ humiliation and suffering. The glance of the fleeing man in the blue cloak leads the viewer’s eye to the relief on the temple’s podium: there one observes a scene of worship, a reflection of the time before the fall of the god Dagon and, as will be discussed later, yet another reason for Yahweh’s punishment of the Philistines. Also in the trajectory of the same fleeing man’s glance is a rat, prominently placed on the temple’s steps and vividly indicating the plague of rodents, which are also present in other parts of the picture. Finally, the sunrise in the distance may have been intended as an indication of the time of day when the catastrophe began, since according to the Bible, Dagon was found toppled over in the morning hours. One can perceive in the canvas a critical stage in the development of Poussin’s narrative technique, which he was to hone a few years later in The Gathering of the Manna (1637[?]–1639, Paris, Louvre).41 Another Roman painter who had recently endeavored to indicate the passage of time in depicting one temporal moment in a single composition was Domenichino, in his painting Diana with Nymphs at Play (1616–17, Rome, Galleria Borghese).42 According to Bellori, Poussin had frequented Domenichino’s Roman workshop in order to study the nude body.43 Poussin’s painting in general, together with The Plague at Ashdod, nevertheless, seems to take a rather individual stance vis-à-vis the mounting concerns regarding the proper organization of a composition in history painting. These concerns found a famous expression in Ferrante Carlo’s description of Lanfranco’s

40 Dowley, “Thoughts on Poussin,” 333. Unglaub’s recent study also confirms such a view of Poussin’s narrative in the early 1630s; see Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 166. Though in The Plague at Ashdod the “unity of time” is clearly maintained, Thuillier judges the different reactions of the men in front of the temple as being in contrast with this principle as well as that of “unity of action”; see Thuillier, “Temps et tableau,” 197; and Bonfait, “La peste d’Azoth,” 168–69. 41See Thuillier, “Temps et tableau,” 197; and, more recently, Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 172–73. 42 See Kliemann, “Kunst als Bogenschießen,“ 279–86. 43 Bellori, Le vite, 427.

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fresco in the cupola of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome; it culminated in the debate that took place in 1636—several years after the completion of the The Plague at Ashdod—in the Roman Accademia di San Luca between Pietro da Cortona and Andrea Sacchi: in this debate, one party championed epic poetry as a model, while the other championed drama as was traditionally (in reception of Aristotle) exemplified in tragedy.44 According to Aristotle’s theory (as it influenced Torquato Tasso, whose own theoretical writings served as basis for this debate), epic poetry could describe a greater number of episodes happening at the same time, while tragedy was based upon unified action within a limited time span. It seems consequent that epic poetry could involve more persons than could be contained within a drama. Indeed, The Plague at Ashdod presents a rather large number of figures, and its multiple episodes seem to demonstrate Poussin’s preference for an epic approach as opposed to the tragic one. Yet, at the same time, these episodes are shown closely connected to each other in both a spatial and temporal sense. This also distinguishes the painting especially from the epic cupola frescoes by Lanfranco described by Ferrante Carlo.45 Further, explicit tragic elements can be found in the picture, too. These tragic elements in Poussin’s history painting become evident when the painting is compared to a famous artistic model, which Poussin certainly knew through prints (like fig. 7.3): Raphael’s The Fire in the Borgo (1514, Vatican, Stanza dell’Incendio). Poussin’s composition resembles this fresco in a number of places, and he doubtless reflected consciously upon this work while attempting to develop his own form of history painting. Kurt Badt has convincingly interpreted The Fire in the Borgo in relation to the elements of an Aristotelian tragedy, and Raphael might indeed have encountered such principles through reading Castelvetro’s commentary of Aristotle’s Poetics.46 If one compares The Plague at Ashdod with Raphael’s fresco in the light of Badt’s thesis, the dramatic structure of Poussin’s picture becomes obvious.47 At the same time, though, it is clear that the elements of tragedy could not be applied to Poussin’s painting in exactly the same way they were applied to Raphael’s composition. It is equally clear that, in certain aspects, Poussin seems to be even closer to Aristotle’s concept of tragedy 44 See Oy-Marra, “Poussins ‘Mannalese,’” 205–6; Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 163–85, 250–76 (for a discussion of the other problems raised in this section as well); and Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 185–97. 45 For the cupola, embodying “the episodic richness and variety of epic, and its latitude to encompass diverse times and places,” see Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 186. 46 Badt, “Raphael’s ‘Incendio del Borgo,’” 45–48; see also Preimesberger, “Tragische Motive,” 111–12. 47Françoise Siguret’s attempt to find dramatic elements in The Plague at Ashdod and other paintings by Poussin is also based on Badt; see Siguret, L’œil surpris, 161, 170. The Plague at Ashdod and The Fire in the Borgo have been directly compared by Oberhuber, Poussin, 241; and Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression contrôlée,” 338. The idea that Poussin’s The Plague follows the example of Raphael’s The Fire in the Borgo has been developed in a more extensive way independently by both Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 169–78, and by Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 158–65.

Fig. 7.3. Attributed to Marco Dente (after Raphael), The Fire in the Borgo, mid-16th century. Engraving, Gabinetto Disegni e stampe, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome, Italy. Photo reproduced by permission from Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

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than Raphael was. In particular, it should be stressed that the peripeteia (the reversal of one’s lot in the course of a play) called for by Aristotle has led, in Poussin’s painting, to misfortune for the Philistines. In Raphael’s painting, in contrast, one can see instead a turn towards more auspicious fortune for the people depicted: it shows the moment in which the fire suddenly stops (though flames are still visible and people are running about, attempting to extinguish them). In this way, Raphael illustrates the pope’s miracle, but does not seem to follow Aristotle as clearly as Poussin, since Aristotle demanded the unhappy ending of a tragedy, not a happy one. Despite the fact that Poussin does not depict peripeteia actually taking place as Raphael had (by showing the end of a fire and thus a turn towards more auspicious fortune), it is, nevertheless, manifest in the dire results of the Philistines’ actions against the Israelites. Furthermore, one could associate the triumph of the ark with a turn towards good fortune, too, if viewed in the context of the history of salvation, namely, as another memorable moment in the successful survival and progress of the Israelite religion, leading, as Christians believed, ultimately to the coming of the Messiah.48 The group of the men near the temple represents the tragic element of recognition (anagorisis) described by Aristotle as closely allied with the phenomenon of peripeteia. Besides their dramatic structure, Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod and Raphael’s The Fire in the Borgo also hold in common their catastrophic subjects and the compositional arrangement of component episodes, with the cause of the miracles located in the middle ground, and the impressive examples of the results (the calamity and the termination of the fire, respectively) in the foreground.49 Poussin’s painting additionally shares with Raphael’s fresco a clear and vivid visualization of past events, an approach that has been interpreted in terms of the ancient rhetorical device of enargeia (or evidentia) to explain the type of mimesis found in Raphael’s art.50 Another noteworthy aspect of The Fire in the Borgo is its indirect reference to an ancient historical parallel, the burning of Troy: this is evoked especially by the group of the son carrying his father and leading his son. Thus, this socalled “Aeneas and Anchises group“ alludes to another temporal and hermeneutical level.51 A similar situation is portrayed in The Plague at Ashdod: the Philistines’ suffering and its cause are visualized with narrative clarity, while a 48 Concerning peripeteia (reversal) and anagorisis (recognition), its companion phenomenon also relevant to Poussin’s composition, see Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Halliwell, 42–43. For the structure of Aristotelian tragedy in Poussin’s Plague, see also Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 669 (a slightly different approach, without reference to Badt or Raphael). 49 See Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression contrôlée,” 338. 50Rosen, “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes,” 192–94. In the sense of vividness, “enargeia” has already been applied to The Plague at Ashdod by Bonfait, “La peste d’Azoth,” 170. 51Brassat, “Credas—cernas,” 15; see also Brassat, Das Historienbild, 35. The “Aeneas and Anchises” group, itself a vivid image, helps to make temporal and causal relations evident to the viewer; therefore, it seems appropriate to interpret it also in relation to “enargeia/evidentia.” (Brassat does so in relation to another concept mentioned by Quintilian in his chapters on enargeia, the speaker’s “visio” [vision].)

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number of borrowed motifs seem to function as allusions linking the scenes with allegorical or associative themes, thus furnishing the viewer, on the hermeneutical level, with a more refined and precise understanding of the depicted events. One example of this is the representation of the god Dagon in the relief on the front of the temple, taken from an emblem in Alciato’s Emblemata in the Lyon edition of 1551, as Henry Keazor first pointed out.52 This emblem shows a creature that is half-snake and half-man (obviously the mythical first king of Athens, Cecrops, mentioned in the accompanying epigram), while in the background, similar creatures are worshipping an idol. The emblem refers to the vanity of human wisdom in its motto: “Sapientia humana, stultitia est apud Deum” (In the eyes of God, human wisdom is but foolishness). Since early modern biblical commentaries describe Dagon as a composite creature, half-human and half-fish, it seems clear that the relief in Poussin’s painting represents the Philistines worshipping their god. At the same time, the relief draws attention to their vice of idolatry; by recalling the Alciato emblem and alluding to its significance, it also alludes to a deeper comprehension of this vice. In this light, Poussin’s detail of the relief might accord with an interpretation of the Ashdod story found in contemporary Bible commentaries, namely that the citizens of that town were punished not only for the simple act of seizing the ark from the Israelites, but also for the larger, collective reason of their vice-ridden way of living.53 This way of living was, above all, marked by a folly or unreasonableness (dementia) that made them irrationally blind to the existence of the true God and to their error of worshipping a false idol.54 Corroborating this deeper reading of the events at Ashdod is Poussin’s detail of the man crouching in the foreground. This figure was apparently taken from one of Rosso Fiorentino’s frescoes for the gallery of François I in Fontainebleau, Ignorance Expelled (1533–39; fig. 7.4). In Fiorentino’s scene, a man in similar posture—probably a personification of despair—is found among the blindfolded personifications of ignorance and her children, the vices who lament their remediable blindness. 55 Continuing the discussion of the details of Poussin’s painting that appear to be endowed with allegorical or otherwise associative themes, another example of this is seen in the figure of the dead mother who can be understood as a “dead” variant of the traditional and popular artistic

52 See Alciato, Emblemata (1550); the emblem is reprinted in Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, Sp. 1607; and Keazor, “A propos,” 66. For the problems of borrowed motifs in Plague at Ashdod, see Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 97–142. 53See, for example, Cordova, Catena proonima versionum, 237; Lapide, Commentarius, 241; Marianus, Scholia, 135–36; Mendoza, Commentarium, 273; and Sanctius, In quattuor libros Regum, 111–12. Dagon’s fishlike shape is also discussed by Keazor, “A propos,” 65; and Bonfait, “La peste d’Azoth,” 167. 54 See, for example, Mendoza, Commentarium, 273. 55 For the interpretation of the figures in the fresco’s foreground, see Panofsky, “Iconography,” 119–20.

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 7.4. Rosso Fiorentino, Ignorance Expelled, ca. 1533–39. Fresco, Château de Fontainebleau. Photo reproduced by permission from Photo RMN/Copyright Peter Willi.

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allegory of Charity. Indeed, this interpretation makes sense in the light of literary traditions that could have inspired Poussin: there is also a similar linking of a figural group with a mother of several children, first living, then dead, with a visual artwork representing Charity in the literary treatment of the Massacre of the Innocents by the Renaissance poet Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) and in the seventeenth-century treatment of the same subject in a famous poem by Giambattista Marino (1569–1625).56 Furthermore, the middle ground of Poussin’s painting shows two works of mercy: two men carry away a dead body, while another man gives alms to a beggar seated on some steps.57 This fact—an example of “living charity”—only seemingly stands in contradiction to the interpretation of the mother as “dead charity,” as will be shown later. The middle ground scene of two men carrying a dead body is a further good example of a pictorial element that integrates several layers of meaning. Perfectly suited to a scene of plague as well as a characteristic work of mercy, it evokes the iconography of Raphael’s Baglioni Altarpiece (1507, Rome, Galleria Borghese), in which the artist includes a representation of the carrying of the dead Christ to his tomb.58 By alluding to Christ’s redemption of humankind, this visual motif—the carrying of the dead body—thus seems to inscribe this Old Testament scene within the whole Christian history of salvation. Borrowed motifs serve yet other functions in The Plague at Ashdod. Following a cinquecento pictorial tradition, Poussin adapted for his architectural setting the tragic scene described by Vitruvius and Serlio. This citation further legitimizes the interpretation of The Plague’s dramatic structure as that of classical tragedy. Furthermore, Vitruvius’s design of a forum provided Poussin with a historically appropriate setting for the representation of an event that had occurred in antiquity.59 In devising his setting, Poussin was respecting the demands of historical decorum that he later described in his letter to Fréart de Chambray with two French terms, costume (meaning “the customary” or “the custom”) and décoré (meaning “decorum” in the sense of what is in general “appropriate”).60 In using Serlio’s tragic scene for a scene of suffering, Poussin was also following Gian Paolo 56 See Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, S. 271. Charity is also mentioned in a description of Poussin’s painting by Siguret, L’oeil surpris, 168. It should be remembered here that Marino supported Poussin during the artist’s early years. 57 Not all authors conclude that the scene on the steps really depicts almsgiving; indeed one might debate this, inasmuch as the seated man does not stretch his hand out to the man walking towards him. Yet, there are two possible explanations for this missing gesture: on the one hand it may show his weakness, or on the other, it may indicate his status as one of the “shameful poor” who were often considered more deserving of charity than beggars (the second explanation is gratefully owed to Sheila Barker). 58See Wild, Nicolas Poussin, 1:39; and Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression contrôlée,” 338. 59 For the reception of the tragic scene, see Friedländer, Nicolas Poussin, 36; Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 94; and Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 668 (in relation to the painting’s tragic structure). Further developments of this fact are found in Bätschmann, “Three Problems,” 171. For the reference to Vitruvius, see Frommel, “Poussin e l’architettura,” 120–21. 60 Letter to Fréart de Chambray, 1 March 1665, in Poussin, Lettres et propos, 175.

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Lomazzo’s recommendation in his 1584 treatise on the art of painting to make the architectural setting of a painting agree with the depicted story, including in this recommendation an explicit reference to the three traditional Vitruvian stage designs.61 Similarly, for reasons of decorum as well as for additional reasons to be explained below, Poussin incorporated important “classical” models into his painting. The figure of the dead mother, for example, refers formally to the antique sculpture of a dying Amazon;62 the fleeing man on the left recalls Lot fleeing Sodom in Raphael’s Loggie (1516–19); the man on the right, striding into the picture and followed closely by a child, refers, in visually reversed fashion (as Poussin might have seen it in prints like fig. 7.3), to the figure of Aeneas in Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo. Moreover, the vignette of the carrying of the body could also reflect the sarcophagus of Meleager, which Raphael already referred to in the aforementioned group of the Baglioni Altarpiece.63 Certain figures relating to classical prototypes—such as the dead mother, derived from Raphael’s Morbetto—were traditionally associated with the power to provoke an emotional response in the viewer. Further figures seem to follow the rhetorical and later art historical principle that the imitation of emotions also stimulates emotions in the audience or viewer: with this objective in mind, Poussin might have included the man who melancholically supports his head on his hand as well as the horrified and astonished people near Dagon’s temple who express their emotions directly while also evoking older iconographic formulas and motifs.64 The people in flight, depicted by Poussin in the foreground, were recommended by Lomazzo explicitly for “composizioni di spaventi” (pictures of horrible subjects), and in particular for the depiction of the Egyptian smallpox plague.65 Given the latter specification by Lomazzo, the use of this motif here thus makes sense in connection with Poussin’s plague subject. Above all, of course, such motifs would have appealed to the learned viewer who would have recognized their origins. At the same time, however, the fact that these motifs, in their formal aspect, derive from classical sources reduces the potential of the painting’s theme to frighten the viewer and consequently reduces the danger of repulsion. This is so because the classical references contextualize the catastrophic motifs within a conventional framework of established, recognizable, and therefore less disturbing, 61

Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, 2:352. Emmerling, Antikenverwendung, 31. Cropper also refers to this statue: see Cropper, “Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Galleria,” 124. 63 For the reference to the sarcophagus of Meleager, see Emmerling, Antikenverwendung, 31. 64Poussin himself had recommended the imitation of the passions, referring to Agostino Mascardi’s or Quintilian’s remarks about rhetorical action, in his theoretical notes that Bellori entitled Osservazioni; see Poussin, Lettres et propos, 182. 65 Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, 2:324. 62

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formulas.66 In a sense, this might be true also of the motifs’ symbolic aspects, mentioned above, such as the allusions to charity, idolatry, and so on, since these aspects are partly based in literature and partly adopted from previous pictures by other masters. Together with the narrative and iconographic aspects, formal qualities including composition (and color, as should be added) also make evident that The Plague at Ashdod is a consciously conceived, intricately complex piece of art. All these qualities demonstrate, more specifically, that Poussin undertook the contemporary artistic challenge of attempting to create a vivid and beautiful representation of a “horrible” subject, a concept that is closely linked with the painting’s intended effect.

THE INTENDED EFFECT OF A “HORRIBLE” PICTURE All of Poussin’s theoretical writings (expressed exclusively in letters and notes, and never in any extended formal treatise) postdate the period in which the artist was working on The Plague at Ashdod. In addition, most of the concepts they contain and, indeed, often the very phrasing itself derive from the writings of other authors.67 Nevertheless, such texts provide a useful means of understanding the intended effect of Poussin’s picture, as well as testifying to the artist’s knowledge of the theoretical literature concerning his profession, knowledge that he must have begun cultivating even before the conception of The Plague at Ashdod.68 According to the artist himself (writing to Fréart de Chambray on 1 March 1665), the principal goal of his art is to provide the viewer with pleasure and delight (délectation). This is an old topos that can be found in the poetics of Poussin’s time as well as in rhetorical treatises and in art theory.69 In Poussin’s Observations—the theoretical notes published by Bellori—the French master repeats the older concept that the forms of things correspond to the emotions they excite.70 A similar concept is reflected in the idea of the “modes,” which Poussin explains in his famous letter to Chantelou in 1647, based on ancient music theory in general and a music treatise of Gioseffo Zarlino (1558) in particular.71 This theory of the “modes” shall be considered here, although the passages that explain it in the 1647 letter first and foremost have to be seen as a reaction to certain jealous reproaches by Poussin’s client Chantelou and not as an autonomous philosophical explanation. Nevertheless, it can be deduced

66 See also Ebert-Schifferer’s interpretation of the motifs’ effect in Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression contrôlée,” 340, 344. 67 See, for example, Raben, “‘Oracle of Painting,’” 47; an older work fundamental for this issue has been Blunt, “Poussin’s Notes,” 344–51. 68 For the problems treated in this section, see also Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 205–50. 69For this concept in the field of rhetoric, see Ueding and Steinbrink, Grundriß der Rhetorik, 277–78. 70 Bellori, Le vite, 481. According to Blunt, this topos might have medieval roots; see his comment in Poussin, Lettres et propos, 185. 71 Poussin, Lettres et propos, 133–37. For Zarlino as source, see Paul Alfassa, “L’origine.”

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from the arguments presented there that a picture’s visual effects should be determined in accordance with its subject, just as the effects of literary works are often designed to correspond with their subject’s nature. Poussin compares visual effects to the ancient categories of musical keys (“modes”) that were differentiated on the basis of their effects on the human psyche. Applied to art, this means that a painting executed in a certain “mode” aims to produce in the viewer the specific emotional state that is best suited to its subject.72 In The Plague at Ashdod, the above-mentioned motifs involving the expression of emotions (as well as the painting’s subdued palette) help to establish a specific mood appropriate to the represented scene. At the same time, Poussin’s definition of the mode as a tempered “middle measure” conveys the idea of a general “moderation”— this is Poussin’s term—which he also might have intended to apply to the painting’s expression. In other words, this “moderation” could be interpreted as a precaution against provoking a reaction of extreme or otherwise disordered emotion.73 An additional means of understanding the intended effect of Poussin’s plague picture is to consider the early recorded reactions to it. Some of these reactions are described in a session of the French Royal Academy held on 1 March 1670: on that occasion Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne asserted that viewers experience the “horror” (horreur) of the biblical plague at their first sight of the picture. However, at the same session, Charles Le Brun spoke of the “harmonious proportion” (proportion harmonique)—apparently with reference to the theory of the modes—that enabled Poussin’s picture to inspire sadness (tristesse) in his audience.74 At first sight, the two artists seem to describe different effects: one a rather fierce one (horreur) and the other a more moderate one (tristesse). Upon closer examination, Champaigne’s description seems to reflect his understanding of Poussin’s use of traditional pictorial expressive motifs in order to communicate clearly to the viewer the Philistines’ suffering and the horror of the biblical plague. Indeed, Champaigne is, in essence, describing the vividness of the figures’ expression; he takes most interest in this aspect (before turning to the way in which Poussin depicted his figures), paying little attention to the intended intensity of the picture’s effect. Consequently, Champaigne’s word “horror,” primarily shows that he understood that Poussin painted a horrible subject in a vivid manner. Moreover, his use of the word does not necessarily mean that he was overwhelmed by horror upon seeing it.

72 For the modes see, for example, Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 226; Oskar Bätschmann, Dialektik der Malerei, 49; and Montagu, “Theory of the Musical Modes,” 238. 73 Poussin, Lettres et propos, 135. 74 Fontaine, ed., Conférences inédites, 112, 117. The source was also mentioned, for example, by Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression contrôlée,” 330; and Barker, “Poussin, Plague” 666.

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The kind and also the intensity of the picture’s effect are, on the other hand, of primary interest to Charles Le Brun. Le Brun pays careful attention to the relationship governing the subject of a painting, its artistic representation, and the appropriate effect—in other words, the same relationship to which Poussin referred in his theory of the modes. Consequently, Le Brun’s determination that the picture’s effect on the viewer is “sadness” might be judged a more correct one, since it is grounded in his deeper insight into Poussin’s theory of painting. Indeed, since Poussin’s theory indicates that the mood produced by a “terrible” picture should respond “moderately” to the awful subject it depicts, Poussin was probably aiming towards a more moderate reaction on the part of the viewer rather than the more intense state of fright. The statements of Champaigne and Le Brun are not contradictory in every respect. Both are interested in the representation of a horrible subject, even though they emphasize different artistic concerns (vividness versus moderation). Furthermore, the two emotions they mention, horror and sadness, are practically identical with the emotions of fear and compassion that Aristotle named as the intended products of tragedy. This coincidence suggests that Champaigne and Le Brun both understood Poussin’s picture as a kind of tragedy. It appears probable in light of the evidence of these two early reactions that Poussin intended the painting’s effect to be a moderate emotion that would not completely overwhelm the viewer. “Moderate horror” might sound like an oxymoron, but it seems that, indeed, moderate horror combined with sadness was what he intended. In short, Poussin aimed at a moderate tragic effect. Given that the picture’s aesthetic qualities were designed to arouse the emotions, it seems somewhat contradictory that Poussin, as is known from his writings, also presumed a decisive role for reason (raison) in the contemplation of a picture. The artist believed that the faculty of rational judgment was important not only in the making of a painting, but also in its viewing. The presence of reason as a condition for good judgment is also emphasized in Poussin’s letter to Chantelou on the modes.75 Moreover, a viewer capable of reason and judgment is predicated by Poussin’s differentiation between the form of viewing that culminates in intellectual comprehension, which Poussin calls “prospect,” and the simplistic, uncomprehending form of perception, which he labels “aspect.” (These two categories of viewing had been taken by Poussin from a treatise by Daniele Barbaro [1513– 70] on perspective.)76 75 Poussin, Lettres et propos, 175 (letter to Fréart de Chambray, 1 March 1665), 135 (letter to Chantelou, 24 November 1647). 76 Poussin, Lettres et propos, 72–73 (letter to Sublet de Noyers, without date; first printed by Félibien). For the source see Goldstein, “Meaning of Poussin’s Letter,” 234n8; Puttfarken, “Poussin’s thoughts on painting,” 68.

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One may, however, question the compatibility of the role of reason in the viewing process with the intended goal of an immediate emotional reaction. One might also further ask: how could the stated goal of affording delight to the viewer be possibly achieved when the “horrible” subject of Plague at Ashdod is at the same time supposed to convey a sad, that is, emotionally unpleasant impression, upon the viewer? Investigating the latter question first, the contemporary theory of tragedy provides some illumination upon the seeming contradiction: in this body of dramatic theory, the problem also had arisen of how to connect the Horatian demands for delectare et prodesse (“delighting and being useful for life”) with the goal of emotional catharsis (meaning purification) mentioned by Aristotle in his Poetics. In the early modern period, catharsis was understood either as a self-defensive hardening of the spirit against the depicted horror by visual and emotional habituation or else as a complete cleansing of sinful passions by deterrence from the represented evil, cruel actions of harmful persons, and by encouragement in the form of positive representations of the good actions of virtuous heroes who could be admired. Furthermore, it should be noted that the early modern Christian interpreters of Aristotle often opposed a complete cleansing of the passions of pity and fear, emotions which, even if limited to a moderate quantity and controlled by reason in the branch of theory first named here, were considered essential components of Christian life.77 In the early modern understanding, catharsis was not necessarily followed or accompanied by any specific tragic pleasure, as Aristotle had indicated when describing the phenomenon of catharsis in his Politics with respect to music.78 Regarding the delight mentioned by Horace and the pleasure indicated by Aristotle, most early modern commentators reasoned that this state of mind was provoked by the moral usefulness of a drama, based on their assumption that learning produces pleasure. Alternatively, the commentators explained this pleasure as the result of the quality of the imitation and the technical skill therein demonstrated, which was the source for the pleasure, drawing from a classic passage in Aristotle’s Poetics.79 Here, the Greek philosopher indeed stresses that, in general, everyone derives pleasure from the artful imitation of real things, even repulsive ones, “for we take pleasure in contemplating the most precise images of things whose sight in itself causes us pain—such as the appearance of the basest animals, or of corpses.”80 77

See Zelle, “Angenehmes Grauen,” 6–8. for example, Zelle, “Angenehmes Grauen,” 6–7, 9. For the understanding of catharsis in Italian poetics of the sixteenth century, see Hathaway, Age of Criticism, 205–300; and Zelle, “Das Schreckliche,” 125. 79 Rotermund, “Der Affekt als literarischer Gegenstand,“ 249. Also Zelle, “Angenehmes Grauen,” 10–13. 80 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Halliwell, 34. 78See,

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Thus, in this chain of baroque poetics, the immediate fear and compassion that the tragedy causes within the spectator are presented beside a pleasure that is the consequence of every good mimetic representation, tragic or otherwise. Only a few authors in the early modern period had begun to assert that relief accompanied the purgation of the passions. The relief to which they referred was thought to be experienced as delight, and thus was not so far at all from the present-day scholarly understanding of Aristotelian catharsis.81 Certain remarks in Poussin’s letters speak for the fact that the artist also meant by the term “pleasing” the delight derived from a successful representation,82 which could also surely encompass the viewer’s discovery of borrowed motifs and hidden learned allusions, thus granting the faculty of reason a definite role in the process. In the case of “terrible” subjects painted beautifully, Poussin was, thus, also in accord with the sentiments expressed in the aforementioned passage by Aristotle. 83 In fact, it was already a commonplace in Italian art literature of the late sixteenth century that horrible things beautifully represented could generate pleasure, and in virtually all instances in this literature, the same classic Aristotelian text was probably the authoritative basis for such a belief. 84 A reflection of these problems is also found in the treatise on painting by Poussin’s first biographer, Giulio Mancini (1558–1630). Partly summarizing older artistic theories that were still current in early baroque Rome, the treatise was initially composed between 1617 and 1621 but reworked until 1628; though not published until the twentieth century, the manuscript had probably circulated early in learned Roman circles. In these Considerazioni sulla pittura, Mancini states that beauty could even be found in representations of old people’s faces or in the head of a corpse; shortly afterwards he states again that horrible things (cose horribili) could be represented beautifully (given that the artist first recognizes their distinctive qualities) and a little later again cites the classic Aristotelian statement on imitation.85 In the early 1620s, around the time when Mancini already had finished a first version of his manuscript, the issue of the difficulty of combining a pleasurable representation with the immediate effect of horror or sadness was also raised by Giambattista Marino (1569–1625) in his poetry, although his Strage degli Innocenti, a poem in which this question was especially in evidence, was only

81 See Hathaway, Age of Criticism, 254–58 (referring to Lorenzo Giacomini). For a similar modern opinion, see Höffe, Aristoteles, 70. 82 See, for example, Poussin, Lettres et propos, 169 (letter to Chantelou, 25 November 1658). Poussin here explains the meaning of an Egyptian procession in the background of his painting of The Holy Family in Egypt (St. Petersburg, Hermitage), pointing out that he used such motifs not only to indicate Egypt as setting, but also to delight his viewer. 83Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 668–71, also discusses the cathartic effect of Poussin’s painting on the basis of early modern poetics, but reaching a different conclusion in the end. 84 See, for example, Hendrix, “Repulsive Body,” 82–89. 85 Mancini, Considerazioni, 121, 123.

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published posthumously in 1632. Moreover, Guido Reni’s painting dedicated to the same New Testament subject, The Massacre of the Innocents (1611–12, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale), had already given an exemplary solution to the problem, being an aesthetically beautiful representation of a scene of horrible cruelty. This very painting was treated by Marino in another poem published in 1619 in his book entitled La Galeria, pointing out the aforementioned quality of the painting (that is, as a visually beautiful depiction of the cruel and the horror-inspiring).86 Around 1630, Poussin himself took up the challenge of depicting the same Massacre; apparently, he too felt obliged to deal with the problem.87 The focus turns now to the other previously posed question regarding the paradoxes inherent in baroque art theory in general, yet particularly salient in Poussin’s thought: how can the role of reason be compatible with the otherwise emotionally defined process of artistic reception? It has already been affirmed that Poussin’s art aimed at a kind of intellectual pleasure. It shall be here argued that the effects of horror and pleasure can be brought together with reason to bear upon the process of reception, if a more complex understanding of this process is conceded, as, for example, in the interpretation that art historian Felix Thürlemann developed for Poussin’s The Gathering of the Manna (1637[?]–39).88 Since The Plague at Ashdod anticipates certain artistic solutions of the later Gathering of the Manna, especially those concerning the pictorial narrative, it is conceivable that the process of viewer response proposed by Thürlemann for this later picture might shed light on the way the viewer was intended to respond to The Plague at Ashdod. For The Gathering of the Manna, Thürlemann develops, primarily on the basis of an analysis of the painting itself and certain Cartesian concepts, the idea of a process of reception inherent in the painting. He maintains that the viewer was meant to experience first the emotion of astonishment upon seeing, in The Gathering of the Manna, a woman who is giving her breast to another, older woman, evoking the traditional motif of Caritas Romana; in this reaction, the viewer should follow the example of a male figure accompanying the group of the two women, evincing astonishment while looking at them.89 This emotion of astonishment is understood by Thürlemann in terms of the French concept of l’admiration as developed by René Descartes (1596–1650) and defined as

86 For the relationship between Marino’s poetry and Poussin, see Cropper and Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin, 261–63, 276–77. 87The date of Poussin’s The Massacre of the Innocents (Musée de Chantilly), painted for Vincenzo Giustiniani, is debated; while, for example, Denis Mahon (“Gli esordi,” 28) assumes the years 1628–29, Cropper and Dempsey (Nicolas Poussin, 256) suggest a date after 1632. For the relationship between the paintings by Poussin and Guido Reni, see also Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression contrôlée,” 341. 88 Thürlemann, “Nicolas Poussin.” 89 See Thürlemann, “Nicolas Poussin,” 115.

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an emotion that results from the first encounter with a new, unusual object.90 (Thürlemann also supports his interpretation by indicating that the same word, l’admiration, had been used by Charles Le Brun in his famous conférence on the The Gathering of the Manna in the French Royal Academy in 1667, regarding the figure contemplating the group of the two women). This “rational passion”91 of astonishment then leads, according to Thürlemann, to the visual contemplation and examination of the whole painting, which in turn culminates in a deeper, intellectual understanding of the picture’s theological meaning. It might be considered problematic to link Poussin too closely with Cartesian ideas—especially with regard to a painting as early as The Plague at Ashdod, made long before Descartes’ most important writings were published. Even so, Thürlemann’s model remains useful for this study of The Plague at Ashdod insofar as it introduces the theory that the viewing of Poussin’s paintings could have been intended as a multistage process into which reason and intellect are, at the end, integrated. Certainly, Thürlemann’s model cannot simply be transferred from The Gathering of the Manna to The Plague at Ashdod. However, in this earlier painting Poussin was also working with figures and motifs laden with meaning and highly expressive of distinct emotions—all of which would have been readily recognizable to the learned viewer. Furthermore, certain figures, like the man in the blue cloak in the left foreground or the men in front of the temple, draw the viewer’s attention to other meaningful pictorial elements, such as the relief on the temple socle or the broken statue of Dagon. Such motifs and figures stimulate an intellectual consideration of The Plague at Ashdod, inducing in this way a “reading” of the picture, as Poussin himself called the model of reception that he recommended to his client Fréart de Chantelou for The Gathering of the Manna.92 However, Thürlemann’s model is somewhat problematic for our purposes since the scholar omits the concept of the “modes” from his discussion, and this concept is undeniably pertinent to a complete understanding of the intended effect of The Plague at Ashdod. Moreover, the first emotion the viewer feels upon looking at The Plague at Ashdod is not astonishment, but rather a moderate emotional response corresponding to the painting’s “horrible” subject. Finally, the state of “intellectual pleasure” surely sought after by Poussin plays no obvious role in Thürlemann’s model (although

90Descartes, Die Leidenschaften der Seele, 94–95. See Thürlemann, “Nicolas Poussin,” 119–20, 130. For the concept of admiration and its meaning for the theory of painting in the seventeenth century, see Weber, Der Lobtopos des “lebenden” Bildes, 231–42. 91 Cassirer, Descartes, 117. 92 See Poussin, Lettres et propos, 45 (letter to Chantelou, 28 April 1639): “Lisez l’histoire et le tableau.…”

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the Cartesian concept of admiration can be interpreted in analogy to Descartes’ concept of délectation).93 Perhaps the most effective way of understanding the process of viewer response intended by The Plague of Ashdod would be to take a more eclectic approach resembling Poussin’s own tendency to synthesize diverse theoretical topoi—namely, by combining some of Thürlemann’s insights with the aforementioned ideas found in early modern poetics and with the reception theory inherent in Poussin’s earlier described application of the musical “modes” to visual art. According to the latter, the “mode” of a picture produced a moderate emotional reaction in the viewer. This state is understood as occurring immediately upon the first sight of the picture. It thus serves merely as the initial phase of what is, in fact, a more complex process of effect. This initial emotional reaction is mild enough so as not to hamper the functioning of reason and judgment. This being the case, the effect provoked within the viewer would gradually adjust itself: the response process would begin with a mood consonant with the subject and visual characteristics of the pictorial representation, which would then be followed by an intellectual consideration of individual pictorial motifs (perhaps after an intervening transitional state of admiration as described by Thürlemann). With the exercise of reason and judgment, the viewer would proceed subsequently to a state of intellectual pleasure and thus to a kind of intellectually defined catharsis. That state comprises the pleasure experienced in response to a successful artistic solution and also, no doubt, the pleasure that stems from grasping the picture’s deeper meaning. Such a process can be also described—as Thürlemann already did in regard to The Gathering of the Manna—as the evolution from aspect to prospect, that is (the terms have already been defined) the move from a simplistic, uncomprehending form of mere perception to a form of viewing that culminates in true intellectual comprehension.94 To sum up briefly, The Plague at Ashdod could be seen as an attempt by Poussin to show a terrifying subject in a moderate manner, which at first provokes a mild, dejected emotion within the viewer, but which in the end results in intellectual pleasure. This hypothesis finds confirmation as well as a deeper resonance in an examination of the historical circumstances of the plague epidemic that began its furious rage in Italy in 1629 and continued while Poussin was painting his plague picture.

93See Mildner-Flesch, Das Decorum, 141–42. In her book, Mildner-Flesch developed, independently of Thürlemann and on the basis of Poussin’s writings, a model of effect for Poussin’s paintings, for which she also used Cartesian concepts. Her intellectual model considers an effect of Poussin’s paintings that is founded exclusively upon admiration, leading to délectation, in analogy with Corneille’s drama. 94 See also Thürlemann, “Nicolas Poussin,” 121–22.

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THE PAINTING IN A TIME OF PLAGUE When Poussin was painting The Plague at Ashdod, the plague had already entered the Papal States. Surrounded on all sides by plague and knowing how insecure available means of self-protection were, Rome felt itself continuously under threat by the epidemic throughout its duration. However the city, through a stroke of great fortune, emerged unscathed in the end. Many of the measures taken to protect the city are recorded in the regulations and edicts of the Congregazione della Sanità, the board of health founded at the pope’s behest on 27 November 1629.95 Even the most superficial consideration of these plague-time measures makes it obvious that Poussin himself would have been personally affected by them, his daily routines not a little disturbed, so that it would have been impossible for him to ignore the reality of the plague even though technically it never penetrated the city. For instance, the decrees and other public notices often specifically reported the list of towns affected by the epidemic, including, in April 1630, Paris, where Poussin had once lived.96 Some of the artist’s clients were, moreover, members of the Congregazione:97 among these was Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), the director of the Congregazione, for whom Poussin had (according to Denis Mahon) already painted the first version of The Sack and Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem by Titus (1626, Jerusalem, The Israel Museum) and the Death of Germanicus (1628, Minneapolis, Institute of Arts). Also serving as member of the Congregazione was Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657), who had been in the employment of Francesco Barberini since 1623. Cassiano was probably Poussin’s most important social contact, as well as being the patron of many of his paintings, including the famous first series of the Seven Sacraments (Granthan, Belvoir Castle; Rome, private collection; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art), completed in between 1636 and 1642. Another member of the Congregazione was a personage who has already been encountered in this discussion of Poussin’s plague painting: the Sienese art expert and author Giulio Mancini, who also served as the personal physician of the pope. With him, too, Poussin might have had ties. In 1627/28 Mancini had added a short biography of Poussin to his Considerazioni, the above-mentioned manuscript survey of the history and theory of 95

Nussdorfer, Civic Politics, 145–61; and Barker, Art in a Time of Danger, 190–210. Giovanni Battista Spada (ed.), Bandi stampati dal 1629 al 1634 relativi alla Congregazione di Sanità formata per preservare Roma e lo Stato Ecclesiastico dalla Peste che afflisse l’alta Italia: Raccolti da Gio: Battista Spada Segretario di Consulta e della Congregazione medesima, e dedicati al Card: Francesco Barberini Prefetto specialmente deputato, BAV, Ms. Barb. Lat. 5629, fol. 2r, fol. 4r. 97See Giovanni Battista Spada’s other collection of Lettere, Istruzioni, Bandi ed altre Scritture del 1629 e 1630 relative alla Congregazione della Sanità formata per preservare Roma e lo Stato Ecclesiastico dalla peste che afflisse l’alta Italia: Raccolte da Gio: Battista Spada Segretario di Consulta, e della Congregazione medesima, e dedicate al Card. Francesco Barberini Prefetto specialmente deputato della med.a Congregazione, BAV, Ms. Barb. Lat. 5626, fol. 4r. See also Nussdorfer, Civic Politics, 146n2; Harper, Barberini Tapestries, 343n747; and Barker, Art in a Time of Danger, 191n48. See also Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 662.; and Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 302. 96

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painting: therein, Poussin is praised as a learned artist capable of painting any subject that a client might desire.98 Mancini was, like Cassiano dal Pozzo and Francesco Barberini, a collector of art (with an apparent predilection for the Bolognese school of painting), but he also sold pictures. Mancini knew Annibale Carracci personally, and it seems probable that, as a doctor, he would have treated Caravaggio, whose biography was also included in Mancini’s Considerazioni.99 An early biography (1646) of this physician-connoisseur by Gian Vittorio Rossi suggests that Mancini might have at times been given paintings by his (mostly wealthy) patients in return for his medical services.100 On the topic of medical services, it might also be mentioned that Mancini treated, among other things, venereal disease, some variety of which Poussin may have recently recovered from at the time he painted The Plague at Ashdod.101 In view of these circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude either that Poussin began his plague canvas for one of the members of the Congregazione, or alternately, that he began his work without a specific commission but had this particular circle of potential buyers in mind. Regarding the former thesis, it is reasonable to suspect that Poussin’s initial commission in this case could have indeed come from Mancini himself.102 Mancini died in July 1630, but this does not invalidate the theory because, according to Denis Mahon, there are grounds for believing that Poussin had begun the painting in the first half of the year.103 If Mancini was in fact the original patron or at least the intended recipient of The Plague at Ashdod, then this would explain why Poussin did not immediately finish the painting, which Valguarnera found in an incomplete state at the artist’s studio towards the end of 1630: perhaps, then, the unfinished work had been set aside by Poussin specifically as a result of Mancini’s death. It is also possible that Mancini ordered the painting from Poussin with the intention of selling or giving it to another person, such as, for instance, Francesco Barberini. 104 Without new documentary evidence, such considerations are, of course, hypothetical. However, given the painting’s unusual subject and its highly learned approach to both visual and iconographical aspects, it remains

98

Mancini, Considerazioni, 261. See Maccherini, “Caravaggio nel carteggio,” 71, 73; and Maccherini, “Ritratto di Giulio Mancini.” 100 [Rossi], Pinacotheca altera imaginum illustrium, 81; see also Haskell, Maler und Auftraggeber, 180. 101 When exactly Poussin experienced his illness is not clear. See Wilberding (“Poussin’s illness in 1629”) for the opinion that Poussin still was ill in 1629. But this was a year in which Poussin was quite active as a painter. For the opinion that the most acute phase of Poussin’s illness had to have been earlier, see Thuillier, Nicolas Poussin, 105. For Mancini’s treatment of venereal disease, see Olson, “Caravaggio’s Coroner,” 91. 102 See Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 291–95, 304–5. 103See Mahon, “Gli esordi,” 28. For the date of Mancini’s death, see, for example, Maccherini, “Giulio Mancini,” 399. 104 For Mancini’s fear of being obliged to give paintings to powerful dignitaries, see Maccherini, “Giulio Mancini,” 394. 99

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entirely reasonable to assume that The Plague at Ashdod was conceived for some private collector. When seeking to determine how Poussin’s canvas may have functioned specifically in a time of plague, comparison with other pictorial representations of plague or works of art standing in some functional connection with plague epidemics does not lead very far at first. The reason for this is that the majority of such pictures were religious in nature and made explicitly for ecclesiastical contexts.105 Instead, it is in the plague literature of the time where one finds clues about the function that Poussin’s picture might have served in plague-time. Plague literature of early modern Europe, specifically that in treatise form, falls into two categories: medical and moral. The latter moralizing plague literature, in turn, can be further subdivided into two classes: theological and philosophical.106 In plague literature of the moralizing type, it is generally presumed to be beyond question that plague is sent by God and that disease’s purpose is to punish and to educate humanity. This is the case in two highly pertinent examples of such literature, both of which have French origins but nonetheless circulated in Italy. The first is the book Medicina filosofica contra la peste (Philosophical Medicine Against the Plague), published in 1581 by Lorenzo Condio, a copy of which treatise, significantly, was in Francesco Barberini’s library.107 Although written in Italian, Medicina filosofica was published in Lyon and probably composed when the author was living in France. The other is Remèdes souverains contre la peste et la mort soudaine (Unsurpassed Remedies Against the Plague and Sudden Death) by the Jesuit Etienne Binet, first published in French in 1628 but later translated into Italian.108 Both treatises aim to offer consolation to the reader in time of medical calamity. Binet does so with the rhetorical tools that were part of his clerical training; Condio, though asserting a philosophical approach, partly employs a similar rhetoric and designs his consolation for the benefit of a Christian readership. Thus, both Binet and Condio lay out their arguments along a Christian framework, while at the same time referring to ancient Greek and Roman sources. Furthermore, despite the differences between their approaches, both seem to rely—if only indirectly—upon the tradition of the late antique work De mortalitate by

105

This is demonstrated more fully in Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 312–29. For a differentiation between philosophical and theological approaches to plague, see Parolini, Trattato della peste, 11–12. For a discussion of further plague treatises, including medical ones, see Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 329–44. 107 See Index Bibliothecae, 295. 108Binet, Remèdes souverains (an Italian edition, Sovrani et efficaci rimedi contro la peste e morte subitanea, was published in Rome in 1656; references are to this French edition unless otherwise indicated; Condio, Medicina filosofica. Concerning Binet, see also Thomas Worcester’s essay in this volume and his earlier essay, “Saint Roch,” 164–65. 106

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Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, which was of great importance to nearly all moralizing plague literature of consolation in the Christian tradition. 109 Lorenzo Condio was librarian at the court of King Henry III of France (reg. 1574–89); the scanty extant biographical sources praise him as a scholar with competence in both philosophy and theology.110 As for philosophy, Condio notes in the preface of his book that vera filosofia (true philosophy) is a means of overcoming the fear of plague.111 With the use of this term, he was probably positioning himself within the Christian humanist tradition of moralizing philosophy, largely indebted to the Italian scholar-poet Petrarch (1304–74), who had also used the term “vera filosofia.”112 Indeed, the subject of plague itself is intimately connected with Petrarch, who lived through the horrendous outbreak between 1348 and 1350, bequeathing to posterity stirring accounts of that experience. Whereas Petrarch’s Remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul) includes, among other dialogues, a short dialogue discussing in a broader sense fear of the plague, Condio’s book, instead, is a long, expository text. And while Petrarch discusses fear of the plague as merely one form of the overall fear of death,113 Condio devotes lengthier passages specifically to fear of that epidemic, maintaining that it was, above all, death by plague that usually was feared.114 Condio fills ten chapters with argumentation directed against this fear while at the same time addressing the relationship between humankind and the epidemic from various points of view. The book closes with an eleventh chapter describing some universal plague remedies. Among the plague remedies described by Condio in his eleventh book are the traditional and most popular solution to flee (merits of which are debated in his treatise and endorsed only when charity is not sacrificed); drugs in moderation; and, above all, any activity that fosters peace of mind and a sense of serenity, such as the reading of proper books, engagement in polite conversation, and listening to music, as well as a general program of moderation in eating and drinking.115 In contrast, on the same subject of plague remedies, Binet instead ends his treatise with a chapter about appropriate devotional practices. Offering a selection of efficacious prayers in time of plague, the Jesuit recommends such religious practices as the best means of dealing with the epidemic.116 109

For Cyprianus, see Grimm, Darstellung der Pest, 91; and Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 26. See Vecchietti, Biblioteca picena, 289. 111 Condio, Medicina filosofica, fol. 3v. 112 See Schröder, “Philosophie III,” 657. 113 [Petrarch], Petrarch’s Remedies, no. 92, trans. Rawski, 221. 114 Condio, Medicina filosofica, fols. 88v, 97v. 115Condio, Medicina filosofica, fols. 189v–190r, 202r, 203v, 208r, 208v. 116Binet, Remèdes souverains, fols. 89–102; for the selection of prayers (omitted from the modern French edition cited here) see Binet, Sovrani et efficaci rimedi, 125–43. While Condio ends his treatise with allusions to “rimedi umani,” Binet ends with allusions to “rimedi spirituali” (for difference between the two types of rimedi, see Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 2. Somewhat regrettably for the object of this XXXXX 110

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Condio’s treatise is about achieving a well-balanced mental repose, which serves as a defense against contagion. Like Binet, but with a different emphasis, Condio, too, seeks to provide his readership with moralizing insight into the deeper meaning of plague epidemics, which for him also entails an understanding of the plague’s role in the normal course of nature.117 Both authors describe plague epidemics as corrective chastisements employed by a loving God upon humankind.118 Condio calls this wellplanned course of the world a “lovely play” (vaga commedia).119 However, from a more immediate perspective on events, human suffering appears tragic. Condio and Binet both use verbal imagery to convey the dimensions and the horror of plague, with Condio explicitly referring to its impact in the cities as a “solemn tragedy” (solenne tragedia).120 According to Binet, the plague “separates the father from his son and the mother from the infant at her breast; and, even before killing people, it first kills charity and friendship.”121 Condio paints a similarly horrifying picture for his readers of a father, holding a little dead son in his arm, while another son is struck with convulsions at his feet, and a third one is wailing, and his wife is stretched out on the ground; and he, being more dead than alive, cannot move at all to help them except with his eyes, looking from one to the other; verily all charity, all humanity, all piety being utterly lost….122 The parallels between these literary passages and The Plague at Ashdod are undeniable. The fact that the mother in the foreground of Poussin’s painting resembles a dead allegory of charity, as argued earlier, now takes on new resonance. The imagery at the origin of these descriptions is rooted in old traditions, of course. Empty houses and the death of families had already been evoked in a sermon attributed to Gregory the Great, while the destruction of families was a topos familiar to Boccaccio (1304–74) who 117

research, neither book takes images into consideration. Instead, one contemporary theological plague treatise that considers images clearly echoes Tridentine precepts in their condemnation of the viewing of “lascivious” pictures as one specific reason why God sends the plague. See, for example, [Possevino], Cause et rimedii, 29; and Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 18. Thus, there is in the early modern plague treatises at least a general recognition that pictures could have an effect upon the health of individuals during plague-time. Given the virtually unanimous belief in the special power of images widely held in the post-Tridentine Church, this should not be surprising. 117 Condio, Medicina filosofica, fols. 85r, 114r. 118 Condio, Medicina filosofica, fol. 167v; and Binet, Remèdes souverains, 37. 119 Condio, Medicina filosofica, fol. 158v. 120 Condio, Medicina filosofica, fol. 179v. 121Binet, Remèdes souverains, 16: “Elle sépare le père de son fils, la mère de son enfant qui lui pend à la mamelle, et devant que de tuer les hommes, elle tue toute la charité et amitié….” 122Condio, Medicina filosofica, fol. 178v: “[il vedersi] il padre in braccia morto un figliuolino, l’altro alli piedi giacere palpitando, il terzo gridare aita, la moglie stare distesa in terra, & lui più morto che vivo non potere a niuno soccorrere, fuora che con gli occhi, girandosi hor verso questi, hor verso quelli; l’essere all’hora persissima ogni carità, ogni humanità, ogni pietà….”

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refers to it in the introduction to his Decameron, as do plague dramas of the seventeenth century.123 The topos of the demise of charity during plaguetime can be found as early as in the fourteenth century in a text by the doctor Guy de Chauliac (d. 1368).124 To some degree and not surprisingly, these literary plague descriptions harken back to the same sources from which plague imagery in the visual arts was derived.125 The topoi of plague literature were already used in other plaguethemed paintings before Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod, though not widely, and only seldom did the topoi play a comparably significant role in the composition. This is illustrated by the example of Camillo Procaccini’s Saint Roch Curing the Plague Stricken, formerly in the Dresden picture gallery (fig. 7.5) and originally commissioned in 1585 by the confraternity of San Rocco in Reggio Emilia.126 It is compositionally quite similar to Poussin’s painting, partly due to the fact that Procaccini’s painting, like Poussin’s, closely follows the composition of Raphael’s The Fire in the Borgo. Clearly, its imagery of the dead mother and the families torn apart by the epidemic in the poignant figure groups in the foreground evokes the aforementioned literary descriptions. But in contrast to Poussin’s painting, Procaccini’s picture represents a scene of healing in the middle ground, which, placed in the composition’s center, provides a resting place for the eye and therefore acquires special importance. It is accentuated by the representation of an angel with a sword in the clouds above. The figures of the lamenting father and the man carrying away a dead body only have flanking positions with regard to the composition’s central scene of healing. Poussin, in contrast, uses the whole foreground for such scenes that vividly show the plague’s effects. The scenes in the middle ground of The Plague at Ashdod (which are also important for the story therein depicted and contribute to the painting’s pictorial narrative) are not nearly as dominant in the overall balance of the composition. In addition, the theatrical metaphors used by Condio (“lovely play” and “solemn tragedy”) are suggested in Poussin’s painting by the visual motifs derived from Serlio’s tragic scene as well as by the spectators watching the events from their elevated balcony on the right. Undeniably, then, Poussin’s plague painting most closely resembles the rhetorical descriptions in the moralizing plague literature (particularly Condio’s work)—perhaps 123 See the citation from Gregory’s “Oratio ad plebem de mortalitate” in Grimm, Darstellung der Pest, 94. Regarding Boccaccio see, for example, Paulsen and Schulze, “Das Motiv der Pest,” 341–42. For dramas treating the subject of the plague, see Grimm, Darstellung der Pest, 181–92 (regarding Benedetto Cinquanta); and Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 355–60 (discussing Cinquanta and Girolamo Bartolommei Smeducci). 124 See Wollasch, “Hoffnungen der Menschen,” 24. 125For example, in his account of the effects of the Milanese plague of 1630, Cardinal Federigo Borromeo (1564–1631) refers to Pliny’s description of the picture by Aristides, which, as noted above, served as Raphael’s source for Il Morbetto; see Borromeo, La peste di Milano, 80. 126 See Benati, “L’oratorio di San Rocco,” 51–52. The painting was destroyed during World War II.

Fig. 7.5. Camillo Procaccini, Saint Roch Curing the Plague Stricken, ca. 1585. Oil on canvas, formerly Dresden, Gemäldegalerie (destroyed in World War II). Photo reproduced by permission from the photoarchives of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

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even more than it recalls other plague paintings. Indeed, in contrast even to Procaccini’s partly analogous painting, the disaster, including the grief it provoked, is the dominant aspect of The Plague at Ashdod: no imminent redemption is indicated for the suffering Philistines. One could thus imagine that The Plague at Ashdod’s function in plague-time was analogous to that of the verbal pictures in the plague treatises. This function is best understood in terms of the rhetorical device of enargeia (evidentia), which, according to Quintilian, “makes us seem not so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual scene, while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence.”127 Ansgar Kemmann describes evidentia as a general term for the “means which lead in a nondiscursive manner, namely in the way of illustration, to insight.”128 As observed earlier, in order to approach methodologically Raphael’s The Fire of the Borgo, scholars have repeatedly described its imagery in terms of evidentia. This was not by chance: Quintilian himself had explained evidentia with the example of a description of a captured, burning town.129 In the context of the moralizing plague literature, a much more direct connection can now be seen between such rhetorical devices and The Plague at Ashdod. The specific effect and function of the verbal pictures in moralizing plague literature can be summarized as follows: with their moving descriptions of the plights of these strangers, they demonstrate the plague’s consequences, especially its destruction of a society. The reader experiences emotions of fright, fear and compassion. He must withstand them in order to reach the stage of cognition and insight facilitated by other parts of the text, such as those passages where Binet and Condio—in treating the issue of theodicy—stress that the plague is God’s will and is to be understood as being just, since it arises from God’s concern and love for humankind. One purpose of moralizing plague literature and its rhetorical devices is to assist the reader in accepting a gruesome reality, trusting that, at least from the divine perspective, there is some sense to it. Binet’s vivid descriptions of the plague’s atrocity are positioned at the beginning of his book in a chapter dealing with the question of whether plague causes more negative results or positive ones; yet, the terror that these initial pages produce is conquered in the subsequent pages through the arguments proving the plague to be an essential aspect of part of the divine plan. Nevertheless, the Jesuit now and then uses further negative rhetorical plague pictures in the successive chapters, but only to emphasize his arguments.130 Condio verbally evokes more than once the same negative picture; the gloomy passage

127Quintilian,

Institutio Oratoria, trans. Butler, 6.2.32. Kemmann, “Evidentia,” 39–40. 129 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 8.3. 130 Binet, Remèdes souverains, for example, 37, 41, 50, 66. 128

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quoted above (“a father, holding a little dead son in his arm…”) was, in fact, taken from a section striving to convey a positive message, in which the author, using the metaphor of a “tournament” taken up by the “Christian knights” (cavallieri christiani), insists that plagues offer humankind a precious opportunity of proving themselves good Christians.131 As the effect of the argumentation and, perhaps even more so, of the rhetoric of these treatises, the insight attained in the course of reading such works produces several results in the reader: this insight provides him with the serenity needed to continue pleasing God with morally correct living; it directs him to prayer and other penitential activities (emphasized by Binet) and to the performance of social duties (emphasized by Condio); in general, it encourages him to cultivate Christian virtues, especially charity. 132 Of course, the emotion produced at first by the vividly gruesome descriptions contained in these works contradicts contemporary medical advice, which cautioned against fright and horrifying thoughts during plague-time and advised, above all, the maintenance of a calm demeanor and emotional state.133 In his chapter on remedies against the plague, Condio instructs his reader to avoid imagining terrible things (including, explicitly, plague epidemics),134 in apparent contradiction of what he himself does by including in this same book the various horrible descriptions discussed earlier. This contradiction might dissolve as soon as one understands that Condio’s text aims primarily at enabling its readership to overcome fear during times of the threat of plague—such as the situation experienced by Poussin in Rome. But, as his preface suggests, Condio also wants to console those currently experiencing an outbreak of plague in their immediate environment and living in fear of death while trapped within their houses: hence, in the latter case, the contradiction inherent within Condio’s text certainly remains.135 This very issue—that the consoling treatises also might frighten the reader and thus be harmful if read under the wrong circumstances—is raised indirectly in the Italian edition of Binet’s treatise in the admonitory preface to the reader (Avviso al lettore), which indicates that the book should be read with a peaceful mind; such a manner of reception is indicated (but not explicitly mandated) in Condio’s preface, too.136 131 Condio, Medicina filosofica, fol. 178r. The same knight metaphor had been used famously by the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 or 1469–1536), a further indication of the tradition in which Condio must be seen. Erasmus uses the metaphor especially in his Enchiridion militis Christiani (1503). 132 Binet, Remèdes souverains, esp. 53–54, 76–88; Condio, Medicinia filosofica, for example, fols. 168r, 180r–182r. 133 Binet, Remèdes souverains, 56; Condio, Medicina filosofica, fol. 202r; see also Binet, as cited in Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 661. 134Condio, Medicina filosofica, fols. 202v–203r. 135 Condio, Medicina filosfica, fol. 4r. 136 Binet, Sovrani et efficaci rimedi (Avviso al lettore); Condio, Medicina filosofica, fol. 3v. Binet himself develops the idea that in general it can be beneficial to maintain a good “divine fear,” which does not XXXXX

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The cathartic effect of The Plague at Ashdod, which has been here deduced in the context of art theory and early modern poetics, though more moderate, nevertheless presents certain parallels to the literary situation that has been seen in the discussion of the Condio and Binet treatises. The state of quiet delight and pleasure attained through the viewing of the picture could provide the basis for further consideration of the details depicted therein. The scenes of the carrying of the body and the almsgiving in the middle ground might bring to mind the obligation of fulfilling one’s social and Christian duties, while the dead mother as an allegory of “dead charity“ reminds the viewer of the danger of disregarding charity; thus, the implications of these figures are not actually in contradiction. In this sense, Poussin’s work bears a certain resemblance to Procaccini’s painting of St. Roch, which would have served as a model of charitable activity for the members of the confraternity for which it was made. Yet, it should be pointed out that the effect of Poussin’s picture does not correspond entirely to that of Binet’s and Condio’s treatises. The painting is more complex, and its objective is not exclusively moral. It is at the same time an end in itself, as a work of art, and it entertains the viewer with all its facets, formal or otherwise. However, the delight that is released by the completion of the viewing process can also be seen as a kind of therapy that protects the viewer against the menace of plague by placing his mind in a state of balanced serenity.137 One can, therefore, plausibly ascribe to Poussin’s painting a function directly related to the plague and intended for the benefit of a learned person; this theory would be even more persuasive if the picture was intended for someone who was at the same time a member of the Congregazione della Sanità. Such a person could have appreciated its formal aspects and its motifs; this kind of client could have also understood these motifs in their special relation to the topoi of literary plague descriptions and applied its moral dimension to his own responsibility for the defense of Rome against the plague. To return to Condio’s Medicina filosofica, the theatrical metaphors more frequently used by the author to represent the plague and its consequences somewhat resemble Stoic metaphors—close in spirit and terminology to Michel de Montaigne—that appear in some of Poussin’s later letters. 138 137

cause “storms” in the soul, but is instead accompanied by deep tranquillity; see Binet, Remèdes souverains, 82. 137 In a different yet related sense, Sheila Barker has explored extensively the painting’s possible function as a form of medicine; though she puts more emphasis on the psychosomatic interaction and understands the cathartic effect of the painting not so much as an intellectual one, Barker’s reading and the interpretation sketched here fundamentally support each other; see Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 672, 682–85. 138 For example, see Poussin, Lettres et propos, 96 (letter to Chantelou, 21 December 1643), 146 (letter to Chantelou, 17 January 1649). See also, for example, Bonfait, “La peste d’Azoth,” 168.

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Similar metaphors are also found in a letter regarding the plague of 1630 by Agostino Mascardi (1590–1640), a teacher of rhetoric who likewise argued that “true philosophy” (verace filosofia) can overcome the fear of death.139 (Condio especially emphasized the importance of fulfilling one’s civic responsibility during time of plague; this, too, would be relevant to the situation of a client entrusted with the protection of public welfare throughout a period of danger.) It is interesting to consider whether especially Condio’s frequent evocation of horrible verbal pictures reflects the late Stoic precept that the imaginary anticipation of calamities could be an effective remedy against fear—an idea found also in baroque poetics.140 Obviously, both Stoic and Christian ideas are present in Condio’s treatise, and this would accord with the “Stoicism” often ascribed to Poussin by modern art historians.141 But Binet, too, quotes Seneca the Younger, and he, similar to Condio, labels one historical epidemic a “horrible spectacle.”142 These parallels indicate that, although there seems to be a special, subtle affinity between Poussin’s painting (and the artist’s personality as it emerges from his later letters) and Condio’s text, in the end, The Plague at Ashdod ought to be seen in relation to the more general category of moralizing plague literature as represented here by Binet’s and Condio’s works. Both Binet’s and Condio’s works were meant to serve as books of consolation and have in common certain motifs and devices that were apparently in wide currency at this time and, therefore, certainly known by Poussin. The function suggested here for Poussin’s painting and its moralizing subject would also explain why the Philistines have been designed to arouse pity, similar to the dying victims in representations of the Old Testament Deluge, a subject that was much more widely depicted than historical plague scenes. Though Poussin’s painting does not present the Philistines as a countertype to the “chosen people,” it nevertheless encourages reflection about humankind’s relationship to an angry God. In addition, the victory of the ark of the covenant also invokes the hope for redemption, since the biblical story can be interpreted allegorically as an allusion to Christ’s triumph over evil.143 In this respect, the painting could be seen as a stimulus to meditation on the providential course of history. The picture, furthermore, could especially have appealed to Giulio Mancini for medical reasons as well. Olson discovered that Mancini believed that pictures have the power to prevent diseases, particularly venereal disease: thus, according to Olson, Mancini advocated the use of a picture 139

See Achillini, Carteggio, 198. Grimm, “Affekt,” 21. 141 On Stoicism and Poussin see, for example, Blunt, Nicolas Poussin, 157–76; and McTighe, Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories, 19–20. 142 For example, see Binet, Remèdes souverains, 18, 60–61, 66. On Stoicism in Binet’s writings, see d’Angers, “Le stoïcisme,” 240–42. 143 This seems to be suggested by Mendoza, Commentarium, 288. 140See

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depicting a man whose nose was deformed by syphilis as a prophylactic tool, in that it was meant to serve as a deterrent to sexual immorality.144 As a doctor, Mancini would have also appreciated the sheer representation of the Philistines’ illness; so, for that matter, would have Fabrizio Valguarnera, who eventually bought the picture, since he apparently had a dilettante’s interest in medicine.145

REASONS FOR THE CHOICE OF THE SUBJECT It appears that Poussin sought a subject suitable for an unusual history painting showing a “historical” plague and its results. As sources for later canvases—but also for at least one earlier picture—the artist made use of Flavius Josephus’s writings. In so doing, he may very well have come across the story of Ashdod in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, as was argued above. As an original subject, this episode met the necessary criterion of novelty (nouveauté) mentioned several times by Poussin,146 and was thus a suitable basis for the creation of a history painting that treated a “terrible” subject in an elevated style. However, there are further reasons why this subject was both interesting to Poussin and suitable to his purposes. According to a moral interpretation of the Dagon story by John Chrysostom, the ark’s victory over Dagon stands for the triumph of virtue over vice in the soul of the converted man.147 Thus, the subject would have seemed especially adapted for a moralizing plague picture in times of plague. Indeed, as shown above, the painting contains allusions both to the vices of the Philistines as well as to the virtue of charity. It had been argued in early modern biblical commentary that the Philistines were punished not only for the theft of the ark, but also for their practice of idolatry. Poussin’s subject can therefore be understood in the context of the theology of images. The ark, a work made through human artifice in response to a “commission” from God and decorated with artistic figures of cherubim, finally emerges victorious over a cultic idol. In this respect, the subject could be interpreted as the victory of art that is condoned by the true God over a piece of art venerated falsely and sinfully as a god itself, and, in an allegorical sense, as the triumph of true Christian art over pagan art.148 There seems to be the recapitulation of a traditional argument against iconoclasm and in favor of the use of images in churches

144

See Olson, Caravaggio’s Coroner, 97. Costello calls him an “amateur of medicine”; see Costello, “Twelve Pictures,” 258. 146 See, for example, Poussin, Lettres et propos, 169 (letter to Chantelou, 25 November 1658). 147For the literal citation, see Lapide, Commentarius in Josue, 242. A related interpretation can be found in Filippo Picinello’s Mundus Symbolicus, which was published several decades after the execution of The Plague at Ashdod (and thus is itself a testimony to the prolonged life span of these widely disseminated ideas); see Picinello, Mundus Symbolicus, 199. 148 For older artistic examples showing such confrontations see, for example, Buddensieg, “Gregory the Great,” 62–63. 145

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here: indeed, the seraphim of the ark had often been offered as demonstration of the fact that the Old Testament ban on religious images was not without exception.149 This argument, for example, is commonly found in theological treatises of the Counter-Reformation in defense of religious imagery.150 In this respect, the theme of the competition between the ark and the god Dagon could be interpreted as a confirmation of the Church’s official cultural policy, current during Poussin’s time in Rome and exemplified by the efforts of Pope Urban VIII (reg. 1623–44) to continue to press the observance of the Tridentine criteria with regard to religious art. 151 Also relevant to this issue is the fact that Urban VIII, an accomplished poet himself, was promoting a programmatic Christian revival of antiquity with particular emphasis on Cicero for the purpose of establishing a Christian literary art firmly rooted in a purified and authoritative classical style. As is well known, he had rejected parts of Giambattista Marino’s poetic work, especially his celebrated Adone, which was put on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1627 after being condemned as “lascivious.”152 This opposition between the two “styles” of literature could be compared to the opposition found in Poussin’s picture between the two kinds of art. Of course, such an interpretation of the painting would only be tenable if the canvas were originally intended for a client somehow connected with the pope or his immediate circle. But a picture alluding to art itself certainly would have appealed to someone with a special expertise in art such as Giulio Mancini, whose own piety, however, is less clearly understood than that of the pope.153 Thus, in the hypothetical reconstruction of the genesis of The Plague at Ashdod, it is conceivable that Poussin first encountered the biblical episode while reading Josephus (afterwards, he might have discussed the subject with an expert in theology who could explain its exegetical implications), and that he initiated the painting for a member of the Congregazione della Sanità, perhaps Mancini, either on commission or in the hope of soon obtaining such a patron or favorable client in future. At that point, he may have sketched out the composition focusing on a historically appropriate representation of an Old Testament epidemic that was cast as a “learned,” unusual plague picture with the potential patron or intended recipient in mind. At the same time, however, the picture may also reflect the artist’s response to 149

Thümmel, “Bilder V.1. Mittelalter,” 534. For the use of the argument see, for example, Ghini, Dell’immagini sacre dialoghi, 31; and Hecht, Katholische Bildertheologie, 95–99. 151 See, for example, the reforms of the statutes of the Accademia di San Luca in 1627 as approved by Urban VIII, in Missirini, Memorie per servire, 92 (especially point 9). Admittedly, however, these efforts by Urban might not have been the most important items in his cultural political campaigns. 152See especially Fumaroli, L’école du silence, 128–31, 132–35; see also the same author’s “Cicero pontifex romanus,” 821–23; and Ebert-Schifferer, “L’expression contrôlée,” 342–43. 153 For Gabriel Naudé’s opinion that Mancini was already a “libertin,” see Pintard, Le libertinage érudit, 261–62. For a critical view of this source, see Maccherini, “Ritratto di Giulio Mancini,” 54n2. 150

Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod 217

his own personal fears and his recent venereal illness (in regard to this latter circumstance it is significant that the Philistines’ illness in biblical commentaries was sometimes described as a venereal disease).154 However, the painting clearly aims at an entire, complex process of perception that well transcends Poussin’s own personal experiences and private emotions.155 As such, The Plague at Ashdod aimed not only at addressing the conditions created by the epidemic but also at withstanding the test of time as a profound work of art. Indeed, it was soon recognized as such and served as a source of motifs for artists; it was copied, reproduced in prints, and subsequently discussed by literati, its fame persisting through the centuries. The canvas has revealed its impact not only as an exemplary representation of the plague but also as an exemplary history painting that displays a range of figures expressing and, to a certain degree, provoking human emotions, and as such has it been referred to in art theoretical discourses. In addition, in the eighteenth century, it served as an example for Winckelmann, Herder, Goethe, and other authors in their own aesthetic arguments dealing with the representability of the horrible, the ugly, and allegory.156 The history of the work’s later impact thus justifies the claim here made that Poussin’s elaborate painting deliberately sought to produce in the viewer a complex array of effects involving both reason and the emotions, and drawing on theories of art, philosophy, religion, theater, and even medicine.

154 For a more detailed consideration of a personal motivation of Poussin’s painting, see Barker, “Poussin, Plague,” 675–76, who examines the Plague at Ashdod more specifically as a response to the melancholy from which Poussin, according to certain sources, seems to have suffered during his venereal illness. 155It is likely that on the same level Poussin understood his painting, The Realm of Flora (1631, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) as a thematic counterpart to his The Plague at Ashdod and probably as an example of a different “mode”; see Winner, “Flora, Mater Florum,” 387–96. 156 See Hipp, Nicolas Poussin, 390–99.

218 Elisabeth Hipp

ABBREVIATION BAV

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

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CHAPTER

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Plague as Spiritual Medicine and Medicine as Spiritual Metaphor THREE TREATISES BY ETIENNE BINET, S.J. (1569–1639)

Thomas Worcester

THERE WAS NO SHORTAGE OF PLAGUES and other disease in France. In their excellent work, The Medical World of Early Modern France, Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones include a thorough examination of the frequency of epidemic disease from 1500 to 1800. They show how plague especially was very widespread and recurrent in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but then largely disappeared after the Marseilles outbreak of the early 1720s.1 Brockliss and Jones focus on medical aspects: how what was perceived as “plague” was dealt with as a medical problem to be prevented or cured. In a book on Jesuit accounts of plague in sixteenth-century Europe, A. Lynn Martin takes a somewhat different approach. He sheds light on how members of an important Catholic religious order wrote about plague: how they described it, explained it, and sometimes designated remedies—physical and spiritual—for it.2 This essay looks at how Etienne Binet, a French Jesuit writing in the century after that examined by Martin, presented plague and other diseases less as afflictions than as

1 Brockliss and Jones, Medical World. See also Hildesheimer, La terreur et la pitié; Images de la maladie; and Lucenet, Les grandes pestes en France. On plague as metaphor, see Jones, “Plague and Its Metaphors.” 2 Martin, Plague?

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valuable spiritual opportunities, and how Binet relied heavily on medical analogies in talking about spiritual things. Etienne Binet, S.J., was a writer, preacher, and administrator. While his years of formation in the Society of Jesus were spent in Italy, as a priest he returned to his native France to take up a series of posts in several cities, including Paris. He published some fifty books in his lifetime, many of which went through multiple editions or were translated into various languages.3 At least two were concerned with care and consolation of plague victims or other persons suffering from illness: his Consolation et réjouissance des malades, first published in 1617, and his Remèdes souverains contre la peste et la mort soudaine, first published in 1628.4 In 1636 he published a treatise on governance (especially but not exclusively of religious orders), in which he argued that the best type of government was a gentle one in which superiors act like physicians. The work on consolation of the sick, Consolation et réjouissance des malades, is structured as a dialogue between a sick person and one who consoles him: Le Malade and Le Consolateur. The Consolateur wastes no time in responding to questions about why God permits good people to suffer illness. The Consolateur asserts that God strikes his servants and best friends with illness because he loves them and wants to have them exercise their virtue.5 While the world loves as mothers do, nourishing their children with milk at their breasts, God loves as a father, with a “virile love” and with austerity. Illness draws vagabond and scattered souls back to God; God conducts them to paradise through the purgatory of illness. Paradise is well worth the little that one suffers, for it would be a bargain even at the price of all the illnesses in the world.6 The God who cures the “ulcers of our souls” is like the physicians and surgeons who cure the infirmities of our bodies. They cut with razors and remove large pieces of flesh, they open veins and bleed us, and yet we much thank them for cutting us to pieces. 7 Yet, having presented God as an austere father and surgeon, Binet goes on to describe him as tenderly holding the sick person in his arms. “Do not doubt,” he says, “that God is seated at your bedside and that he is there to gather up your tears and sighs, to heal your wounds, to fortify your heart,” to “hold you tenderly in his arms,” and to “deliver you” and “enrich you with his glory.”8 But such tenderness is not extended to all. Alluding to 3

See Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 1: 1488–1505. For a discussion of Binet’s Remèdes souverains contre la peste in relation to Poussin’s plague masterpiece, The Plague at Ashdod (Rome, 1630–31), see Elisabeth Hipp’s essay in the present volume. On Binet and plague, see also Worcester, “Saint Roch vs. Plague,” 164–65; and Barker, “Plague Art in Early Modern Rome,” 57. 5 Binet, Consolation et réjouissance, 24. Citations are from the most recent (1995) edition. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of this and other works are the author’s. 6 Binet, Consolation, 25–26. 7 Binet, Consolation, 28. 8 Binet, Consolation, 35. 4

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the biblical story of Lazarus and the rich man, the Consolateur points out that the poor beggar Lazarus was carried to paradise by angels, while the “rich glutton was engulfed by hell.” In his cruelty, the glutton had refused all humanity to Lazarus, though he fattened up his dogs and his own delicate flesh. As the glutton had a heart of iron for Lazarus, God would have no paradise for the glutton.9 To the Malade who says, “I am very ill,” the Consolateur replies with several answers. He points out that Pliny, “who knew everything,” said that with but two or three exceptions, he knew of no one who had not suffered some illness. So why would you want to be exempt from this?10 “Illness is the mistress of virtues and the purgatory of our sins,” while good health is “the purgatory of virtues and the mistress of vices.” When you are in good health, you are too busy to think of God or to talk to him; when you are sick and in bed, give yourself the patience to listen to the divine word. Good health “tickles your body and assaults your virtues”; the lancet and cauterization, passing through your skin, will reach even to your conscience and will drain the putrefaction. Your sweat will evaporate your vanities. 11 “Awkwardly do health and holiness fraternize together” (malaisément la santé et la sainteté fraternisent ensemble).12 In the words of the Consolateur consoling the Malade, Binet appeals for confidence in divine Providence. Illnesses, however they come about, are the “ordinary couriers” of heaven’s favors. God himself will then sit down at your bedside and he will “embrace you tenderly, dry your tears and sweats”; he will give you a place among the princes of his court.13 The spiritual advantages of specific illnesses and bodily infirmities Binet details at length. To the blind person or to those fearing that they are becoming blind, the Consolateur insists that the blinding of the body aids the innocence of the soul. Eve, Samson, David, and Solomon were all defeated by their eyes. To one person, eyes show adultery, to another, incest; they show a house to covet, money to steal, vanities to follow. All the evils of the world use “the eyes as a passport” through which to attack us; “through this window,” pleasures and debaucheries spread revolt among our passions and “shake the fidelity of the higher powers” of our soul. It is not for nothing that our Savior said it was much better to pluck out a dangerous eye and enter paradise without it than to go to a thousand devils with beautiful eyes. The one with eyes closed but with an open heart sees God and virtue face to face, and understands the secrets of the books of

9

Binet, Consolation, 37–39. Binet, Consolation, 43. 11 Binet, Consolation, 43–44. 12 Binet, Consolation , 47. 13 Binet, Consolation, 50–51. 10

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paradise that are closed to the eyes of the curious.14 Saint Paul was blinded for three days, but it was then that the glory of heaven began to dispel the “thick darkness of his soul.” A bolt from heaven struck his eye and his heart; one closed to the earth, while the other opened to heaven. A lion was changed into a lamb, a thief into an apostle.15 According to Binet, deafness also has spiritual advantages. The world is “lost by the tongue and by the ear.” If you are deaf, when you pray to God you will have fewer distractions; the enemy will have no entrance into the “castle of your soul.” To hear the holy word of God, it is not necessary to open the ear, but only the heart; receive the Eucharist frequently and you will hear all the airs of paradise and the eloquence of the angels. “Millions of saints” made themselves hermits, hiding themselves; if you are deaf, you can be a hermit in your own house and a solitary in the midst of crowds. God blocked your hearing so that the “mortally gentle” voices of voluptuousness and vice would not lead you to a dissolute life. If God made you deaf, it was in order to save you.16 Binet emphasizes the importance of seeing the example of the saints in consoling the sick person. To dispel the sadness and melancholy that may afflict the ill, the sick should fill their room with beautiful paintings of the saints. (Binet does not seem concerned that the blind person may find these remarks anything but comforting.) Thus the Consolateur declares: look at the virtues of the saints painted on canvas, speak to the saints from your heart, listen to what they say to you, be with them; their “holy company” will dissolve the knots that bind your heart. Do as Charlemagne did, he advises; he had the gallery where he took his meals painted with all the marvels of the world. In dining, he had gained “learned thoughts” from these rare paintings.17 The sick person should have hung in his room paintings excellent in beauty and in representation of some beautiful story: a beautiful crucifix, a Notre-Dame looking at you with a favorable eye, a Saint Stephen under a hailstorm of stones, or a Saint Sebastian shot with arrows.18 “Speak to them without saying a word”; engage in a dialogue with them, not tongue to tongue, but “eye to eye” for there is no better company than the dead who speak through a book, yet they speak even more easily through painting. “By sight” their patience will enter your heart, and their torments will revive your courage. Yet take care to change from time to time the paintings, for the same one, after a time, could bore you and no longer attract your attention.19 14

Binet, Consolation, 71–74. Binet, Consolation, 80–81. 16 Binet, Consolation, 81–84. 17 Binet, Consolation, 179. 18 On Sebastian, one of the most popular of early modern plague saints, see Sheila Barker’s essay in this volume. 19 Binet, Consolation, 271–73. Binet here offers an excellent example of the baroque belief in the XXXXX 15

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Binet continues at some length on what he calls “the power of painting and the imagination.” Caesar Augustus, he recounts, was melancholy after the death of a young grandson whom he loved. But when his wife had a small image made of this little boy, Augustus would erase his melancholy by looking at the image. So too the sick may be helped by an image of the young John the Baptist playing with a lamb or of the little Jesus hanging on the “virginal breast” of his mother. “If you had a beautiful image of the mother of God or of Saint Catherine in majesty,” you would not believe how the sight of them will rejoice your heart.20 Though he has less to say about music than about images as consoling, Binet does also recommend music to the sick. This method he says is “gay and full of gentleness; take pleasure in someone playing the lute or the harpsichord,” or singing “some gentle song full of harmony.” While listening, take the occasion to raise your heart to God and say, happy are you, souls who “now enjoy in heaven the holy music of the angels.”21 Binet adds that the most knowledgeable of physicians have said that to cure sciatica there is nothing better than the playing of a gentle flute; the harmony of our bodies accompanies other harmonies.22 Besides mentioning briefly various saints whose images may help to console and strengthen the ill, Binet also includes biographies of various saints he proposes as good examples to follow. Saint Louis (1214–70) is one of these. Though king of France (as Louis IX, reigned 1226–70), Saint Louis considered it more important to be a “good servant of God than a powerful king of men.” Saint Louis was often sick, but he said that never did God send him some ill without also sending a gift to rejoice his heart. Spending five years in the Orient, he buried “with his own royal hands the stinking cadavers of Catholic soldiers massacred for the faith.” In France, he went to the sick on his knees, bringing some morsel to the mouths of the hideous and the rotting. When Saint Louis was in Africa, animated by zeal to plant the faith, a contagion of plague afflicted the country and his army. He himself was struck down by it; on his deathbed he smiled, consoled everyone, and ordered that the blessed sacrament be brought to him. Everyone present wept and melted in tears.23 In his treatise on plague and sudden death, Remèdes souverains contre la peste et la mort soudaine, Binet also held up the example of Saint Louis. Binet asks his readers, “Do you think that this holy king was afraid or complained to God, pointing out that he was after all making war for him?” Rather, “this

20

power of images. On this belief, see Saints and Sinners. 20 Binet, Consolation, 273–74. 21 Binet, Consolation, 275. 22 Binet, Consolation, 278. 23 Binet, Consolation, 52–54.

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holy monarch of France so thanked the divine goodness and spoke such tender words at his death” that he could melt the hearts of his entire army.24 Binet exhorts his readers to learn from the glorious Saint Louis. This king, “the glory of kings, seeing himself struck down with plague and with death on his lips and a tear in his eye,” prayed for the grace to despise the vanity of this world and to never fear the adversities of this miserable life. Binet adds that one should pray the prayer Saint Louis learned from his mother, Queen Blanche, which was imprinted on his heart: “My God, my creator, may I die thousands of times rather than knowingly commit a mortal sin.”25 The very title of Binet’s plague treatise closely associates the plague and sudden death. Among the circumstances of sudden death mentioned by Binet is the case of a healthy young man who retires after dinner to what turns out to be his deathbed. Such suddenness, Binet explains, is frightful, but he quickly adds that the fear of sudden death may be a very salutary fear. Such fear makes one think of the salvation of one’s soul, helps one put good order in one’s conscience, helps one to prepare a general confession in writing and to confess often, and to not wait until death to put oneself in God’s hands, but rather to live every day as if it were one’s last.26 The full title of a 1629 edition of Binet’s plague treatise makes clear that consolation is his purpose: Sovereign remedies against the plague and sudden death: whence devout souls may draw a very gentle consolation, and spiritual recreation, both during the contagion, and in any other affliction or illness .27 Binet argues that, without the plague, there would be less devotion and fewer saints. Indeed, Binet begins this treatise with the question of “whether the plague brings more ill than good.” Acknowledging that his answer offers a paradox, Binet admits that plague "with a single breath" massacres everyone it encounters, be they potentates and popes, the people rich and poor, and the innocent; “it separates father from son, mother from the child hanging on her breast.”28 Yet, Binet insists that God, who is goodness itself, would not permit such ills if the good to come from them were not greater. Will the one who fears death and plague amuse himself with the “follies of this perishable life”? People are never as wise as when plague runs through the streets; then they keep themselves from debauchery. There are so many vows, alms, devotions that would never have been without plague; prayers,

24

Binet, Remèdes, 64. Unless otherwise indicated, citations are from the most recent (1998) edition. Binet, Remèdes, 91. On the history of the cult of Saint Louis in the late Middle Ages, see especially Le Goff, Saint Louis. Scholars have thus far given less attention to seventeenth-century devotion to Saint Louis, even though that was a period of great interest in him. 26 Binet, Remèdes, 19. 27 Binet, Remèdes, 1629 edition. 28 Binet, Remèdes, 1998 edition, 15–16. The image of the child attempting to nurse at its dead mother’s breast is a topos of plague painting, as seen in Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod and Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, two works discussed in this volume. 25

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masses, and communions.29 Using wordplays that do not work in English, Binet states that “all people are holy” (tout le monde est saint) when they are “not in good health” (on n’est pas sain) or when they fear not being in good health for long.30 Anticipating an objection regarding the sacraments and plague, Binet both acknowledges that many die of plague without going to confession, and insists that plague is a kind of preaching that succeeds in a call to repentance. Seeing the repentant hearts and dispositions of those afflicted with plague, God saves them even without their confessions. Binet asserts that people are never better prepared for salvation than during a plague; never has a preacher preached true penitence more efficaciously than has the plague. Plague is thus a “happy necessity” that forces people to become saints and to throw themselves “upon the paternal bosom of God.” 31 The plague is a “happy ill, cause of eternal happiness.”32 Binet compares God to a fisherman. Just as there is a fish that will not allow itself to be caught except in the midst of an ocean storm, there are souls whom God seems unable to catch except by raising some storm and by throwing them into fear of a cruel plague or of a bloody war, “for it is then that they give themselves to God.”33 Binet argues that in a time of plague people turn not only to God, but they also turn to their neighbors in order to help them. The time of plague, he declares, is also one of martyrs. Those who die from aiding plague victims are true martyrs if they act out of the love of God. The time of plague is a time of salvation, “blessed by God” for making saints and martyrs of paradise.34 Attempting to refute any notion of a contradiction between God’s goodness and his sending of the plague, Binet declares that he is not surprised that God sends the plague from time to time, but he rather is surprised that God does not do so every day, seeing what human lives are like. Should it not be a continuous fever, Binet asks, “since we continually offend his holy goodness, and we pierce his heart with the darts of our enormous crimes?”35 If God wished to send “thunder and plague” every time we acted against heaven, the universe would long ago have become “a cemetery of the plague-ridden and of rotting carcasses.”36 While it is our “perfidies” that “force” God to send us the plague, our faults are thus punished in this world rather than in hell. It is thus the “clemency” of God’s justice that sends the 29

Binet, Remèdes, 18–20. Binet, Remèdes, 20. 31Binet, Remèdes, 26–27. 32 Binet, Remèdes, 29. 33Binet, Remèdes, 32. 34 Binet, Remèdes, 33. 35 Binet, Remèdes, 35–36. 36 Binet, Remèdes, 36. 30

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plague.37 Yet plague not only substitutes a lesser punishment for the eternal punishment of hell; it also calls people to do their duty and to embrace virtue; it makes them good and wise. Thus, for Binet, plague is an oxymoron; it is the “gentle rigor of divine goodness.”38 Given all the positive things Binet has to say about plague, one may wonder whether his title—Sovereign remedies against plague and sudden death— is appropriate. Yet Père Binet does, in fact, take up the question of remedies and preventive measures. “Medically speaking,” he asserts, “nothing keeps the plague away better than living joyously: true joy comes from true contentment, and perfect contentment is found but in purity of conscience.” 39 Binet explains that he will apply to the soul the recipes prescribed by physicians for the body. Thus while “those gentlemen” prescribe myrrh, aloes, and saffron, Binet prescribes meditation on the Passion of Christ in which one may savor the myrrh, aloes, and bitterness of death. The physicians swear that one or two good bleedings will prevent one from getting the plague; whosoever removes bad humors from his heart by well-made frequent confession and by the giving of alms, will either avoid the plague, or if he gets it will not harm him, or if it does “massacre” him, it will be for the sake of his gaining eternal life.40 While the physicians of Paris prescribe things such as lemons or perfumes or sponges soaked in powerful vinegar, there are better recipes than these, for as the plague comes from heaven, so the antidote must as well. Thus, the act of true contrition is a unique remedy against sudden death. One should also have daily devotion to the Mother of God, who crushes the head of the dragon with her heel. One should make a complete confession of one’s entire life, tearing out sinful humors that spoil the heart; and one should savor often the nails, absinth, and strong vinegar of the Passion of Christ.41 Plague finds a place in Alain Corbin’s study of the history of smell and the olfactory imagination.42 Binet could well have been included. Well aware that air was thought to bring the plague, Binet points out that the physicians recommend avoidance of the stench of a dunghill, dirty water, and sewers. They also say that pure air chases the plague away. To this, Binet replies by affirming that the best air is the air of paradise. The one who opens his mouth, heart, and the depth of his soul to God breathes this air; in humility, one finds the odor of a perfect perfume; in charity one keeps fear from entering, for “true charity excommunicates fear” and makes it

37Binet,

Remèdes, 35–36. Binet, Remèdes, 40. 39Binet, Remèdes, 46–47. 40 Binet, Remèdes, 47–48. 41 Binet, Remèdes, 52–53. 42 Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 63–66. 38

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die. Indeed, “love is stronger than death, than plague, even than all of hell.”43 Near the end of his life, Binet published (in 1636) his work on gentle and rigorous manners of governance, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement?44 Both in the seventeenth century and beyond, it appeared in various French editions as well as in translations to several foreign languages.45 In his literary history of religious sentiment in France, Henri Bremond ranked Binet among the most important disciples of Francis de Sales and singled out his 1636 work on governance as the most “human” and “genuine” of all Père Binet’s writings.46At the age of sixty-seven, after many years as a superior, Binet presented the advantages and disadvantages of gentleness and rigor. In so doing, he relied very heavily on medicinal analogies, and especially on the notion of the superior as analogous to the physician. In his introductory chapter, Binet asserts that everyone acknowledges the most perfect government to be one where rigor and gentleness serve each other, a government where, when the one who governs becomes angry, his anger is that of a dove and a lamb and does not harm anyone. 47 Binet’s presuppositions about gender difference manifest themselves in his statement that the one who governs ought to have the sentiments of a father when he is angry, but also the tenderness of a mother.48 In arguing for the priority of gentleness over rigor, Binet is quick to turn to concrete examples. Asserting that the three greatest men in the history of the world are Moses, Jesus Christ, and Saint Peter, Binet states that they all favored gentleness. While Moses was the most gentle person of his time, Jesus set examples of humility and gentleness. As for Saint Peter, he wept more than he commanded, and when it was a matter of giving him the government of the church, he was told only to love.49 Among founders of religious orders, Binet finds abundant gentleness. Binet cites Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, as one who advocated two things for a superior: that he be “efficaciously gentle and gently efficacious.” Francis of Assisi gave maxims to the guardians of his order such as “be a physician, not an executioner,” for the perfection of government consists in watching, loving, caring, pardoning, and feeding.50 Binet’s Jesus, whether an infant or child, or in his earthly ministry, or reigning in heaven, is a model of gentleness. Merry Wiesner has argued that the early modern cult of the holy family presented Joseph no longer as 43

Binet, Remèdes, 75–77. Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 6. Citations are to the 1842 edition. 45 See Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 1:1502–3. 46 Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux, 1:146. 47 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 6. 48 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 6. 49 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 12–13. 50 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 27–29. 44

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an old man in the background—as he had been in many medieval depictions—but as “strong and vigorous,” and “dominant,” with a young Mary (and Jesus) under his protection.51 Binet, however, presents a rather different image by responding to his own questions of how the “holy and sacred family” was governed and who commanded. He concludes that Jesus did not command, for he came to earth to obey. Our Lady did not command, for she submitted to God and to her husband. And Joseph commanded “even less,” for he did not command his Sovereign or the Queen of the Angels. They all “prayed more than they commanded,” and they acted rather than commanded, for “example is always the most powerful command.”52 In the interaction of Jesus with sinners, Binet finds abundant examples of gentleness. In receiving Mary Magdalene, Jesus received her “lovingly” and treated her not as a severe judge would, but as her “charitable advocate.” With the most “tender affection” he hid her in the “bowels of his mercy,” and acted like the father of the prodigal son.53 Responding to those who might cite Jesus cleansing the temple with a whip as evidence for a rigorous Jesus, Binet argues that while Jesus seemed about to exterminate those who profaned the temple, he actually injured no one; he is not seen in the Gospel actually using the whip he prepared.54 Binet adds that Jesus succeeded in winning more hearts and in converting more souls by his goodness and gentleness than by “his most zealous preaching.” 55 In Christ ascended into heaven, Binet also finds gentleness. In the Lamb governing paradise (chapter 21 of the Apocalypse of Saint John), Binet sees proof of the strength of gentle government. In what spirit, asks Binet, did God accord this vision to Saint John if not to teach him that just as the Lamb, the “figure of gentleness,” governs paradise, so man should not raise up any other virtue in earthly governance?56 Binet follows up comparison of Jesus and the father of the prodigal son with more extensive consideration of that father. While the prodigal child engaged in debauchery, his father prayed for him; at the first sign of his son’s return, the father opened his “paternal heart” to receive his son and forgot all that had happened. While the son intended to fully confess his sins, the father runs to embrace him; a good superior does likewise, only half hearing confession of faults by his subjects, so eager is he to extend mercy to them.57 Commenting further on the merciful qualities of a good superior, Binet states that such a superior knows well human infirmities and

51

Wiesner, Women and Gender, 238. Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 75–76. 53 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 50. 54 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 52. 55 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 52–53. 56 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 45. 57 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 92–93. 52

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acts as a “good physician” and corrects faults by pouring oil and balm on wounds so that the sick may be healed.58 Care of the sick—specifically those suffering from plague—is at the heart of what Binet finds praiseworthy in Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), archbishop of Milan. Referring to the Milanese plague of 1576, Binet lauds the charitable example set by this “tender prelate.”59 Binet credits this cardinal and saint (Borromeo was canonized in 161060) with finding the way to inspire his priests to help the sick in time of a cruel plague. He did this not by commanding his clergy, but by himself serving the sick, and setting a good example to be followed. Borromeo entered the houses of plague victims and surprised death itself. Clerics following this charitable example were not the least reason why God withdrew “the vengeful arm” he had extended over that poor people.61 But the favorite example of a gentle superior and prelate was Francis de Sales (1567–1622), who had lived and died not too long before, and to whom Binet devoted his greatest attention in Quel est le meilleur gouvernement? Indeed, Binet makes references to him throughout the book, and the entire last chapter is on this bishop of Geneva.62 Binet himself was born in 1569, just two years after Francis de Sales, and thus they were contemporaries. In the decades following his death in 1622, de Sales was the object of a canonization campaign, one that would eventually succeed with beatification in 1661 and canonization in 1665.63 Binet highlights the work of Francis de Sales in seeking to bring Protestants back to the Catholic Church. When some responded favorably, he received them as “prodigal children” and embraced them with tears in his eyes, like the father of the prodigal son, and with the tenderness of a mother. For the bishop of Geneva, the tenderness of a good superior consisted above all in a tender heart, always inclined to pardon and to excuse the weakness and fragility of others. 64 But on occasions when Francis de Sales did feel within the heat of passion and anger, he would hold his tongue in silence until the anger had passed. 65 Binet’s Francis de Sales not only acted with gentleness as a superior, but he also advised other superiors to do likewise, including women superiors. When female superiors complained to him of the imperfections of their

58

Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 97–98. Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 80–81. 60 On Saint Charles, see San Carlo Borromeo. 61 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 80–81. 62 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 152–75. 63 Jean-Pierre Camus (1584–1652), the bishop of Belley, played a major role in this effort to promote the sanctity of Francis de Sales. See Camus, L’Esprit du Bienheureux François de Sales. On Camus as a disciple of de Sales, see Worcester, Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse, 19–21, 31–33, 218–20. 64 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernment, 161–62. 65 Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernment, 158. On Francis de Sales as skilled in promoting peace and reconciliation, see Stopp, A Man to Heal Differences. 59

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charges, the bishop of Geneva smiled and asked them if they themselves had no faults and told them that if they did not, it was due to a special grace of God. Francis de Sales would tell them that religious life is not composed of “perfect persons” but of those who seek perfection; one does not arrive at such a state in a week—look at yourselves. As for me, he would say, I prefer to “suffer with the infirm and to bring them along slowly, rather than to hurry them and to injure patience and charity.”66 Binet recounts that the bishop of Geneva would tell the superiors of the Order of the Visitation (a religious community for women that Francis had founded with Jane de Chantal) that they should love the imperfect “more tenderly” than the perfect, for it is the sick who need a physician. It is better to go to excesses in goodness than in “false zeal,” for the latter is often nothing but impatience.67 How Père Etienne Binet actually functioned as a superior may be another matter. But in his treatise Quel est le meilleur gouvernement? he persistently praises gentleness and compassion; he returns regularly to a number of analogies in making this point, the analogy between a physician and a superior ranking highly among them. The “medicine” the superior is to apply to his “ill” subjects is a gentle one, not one of razors and bleedings or of violent purges. Thus, physicians and medicine as spiritual metaphors are central to how Binet imagines God and God’s dealings with humanity; they are also at the heart of how Binet envisions ministry and holiness. With specific respect to the plague, Etienne Binet presents it both as a kind of opportunity for spiritual growth and as something that may be conquered by spiritual remedies. His positive manner of talking about what for many has to have been an almost unbearable horror may seem very foreign to modern people, but he conveys a confidence in the ultimate triumph of life and love over death that few in any age would want to discard. Père Binet’s widely disseminated essays are, for cultural historians, very important primary sources for understanding devout attitudes in time of plague in early modern Europe.

66 67

Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 155–57. Binet, Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 171–72.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barker, Sheila. “Plague Art in Early Modern Rome: Divine Directives and Temporal Remedies.” In Hope and Healing, 45–64. Binet, Etienne. Consolation et réjouissance des maladies et personnes affligées (1617). Edited by Claude Louis-Combet. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995. ———. Quel est le meilleur gouvernement: Le rigoureux ou le doux? (1636) Avignon: Seguin Aîné, 1842. ———. Remèdes souverains contre la peste et la mort soudaine (1629). Edited by Claude LouisCombet. Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1998. Bremond, Henri. Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France. 11 vols. Paris: Colin, 1967. Brockliss, Laurence, and Colin Jones. The Medical World of Early Modern France. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Camus, Jean-Pierre. L’Esprit du Bienheureux François de Sales. 6 vols. Paris: Alliot, 1639–41. Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant. Translated by M. Koshan. London: Picador, 1994. Hildesheimer, Françoise. La terreur et la pitié: L’Ancien Régime à l’épreuve de la peste. Paris: Publisud, 1990. Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague 1500–1800. Edited by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Pamela M. Jones, Franco Mormando, Thomas W. Worcester. Exhibition catalogue. Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum, 2005. Distributed by University of Chicago Press. Images de la peste dans l’histoire. Paris: Histoire au présent, 1990. Jones, Colin. “Plague and Its Metaphors in Early Modern France.” Representations 53 (1996): 97–127. Le Goff, Jacques. Saint Louis. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Lucenet, Monique. Les grandes pestes en France. Paris: Aubier, 1985. A Man to Heal Differences: Essays and Talks on Francis de Sales. Edited by Elisabeth Stopp. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 1997. Martin, A. Lynn. Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the 16th Century. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1996. Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image. Edited by Franco Mormando. Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, 1999. Distributed by University of Chicago Press. San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Edited by John Headley and John Tomaro. Washington DC: Folger Books, 1988. Sommervogel, Carlos. Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus. 10 vols. Brussels: Schepens; Paris: Picard, 1890–1909. Stopp, Elisabeth. A Man to Heal Differences: Essays and Talks on St. Francis de Sales. Phildelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 1997. Wiesner, Merry. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Worcester, Thomas. “Saint Roch vs. Plague, Famine, and Fear.” In Hope and Healing, 153–76. ———. Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997.

CHAPTER

9

Pestilence, Apostasy, and Heresy in Seventeenth-Century Rome DECIPHERING MICHAEL SWEERTS’S PLAGUE IN AN ANCIENT CITY

Franco Mormando

THE ENIGMA OF SWEERTS’S SUBJECT One of the most enigmatic paintings to come out of baroque Rome is assuredly Plague in an Ancient City (fig. 9.1) by Michael Sweerts (1618–64), the Flemish master who resided in Rome from at least 1646 to circa 1652 and who is finally receiving the attention he deserves, thanks to an international monographic exhibition recently dedicated to him.1 Sweerts’s canvas is just one of several seventeenth-century paintings devoted to the theme of the plague in an ancient setting, of which Nicolas Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod (1630, Louvre) is undoubtedly the most famous. As Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée observes, the popularity of this artistic subject has its origins not

1 For the most current research and complete bibliography on Sweerts, see Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts. For Plague in an Ancient City, see ibid., 113–17, cat. 13. For Sweerts’s biography, including a discussion of the dates of his Roman period, see Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” which provides significant additions to and corrections of previous scholarship. I am grateful for the most helpful, generous feedback received from Sheila C. Barker, who read an earlier version of this essay, as well as for the extensive response received from the many scholars to whom I have presented the ideas of this essay in presentations at the Annual New England Renaissance Conference, “Piety and Plague in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe,” Holy Cross College, April 2005; the Fifteenth Biennial New College Conference on Medieval-Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, March 2006; the “Icons and Iconoclasts: 1603–1714” conference at the Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, July 2006; and the Renaissance Society of America, Annual Meeting, Miami, March 2007.

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Fig. 9.1. Michael Sweerts, Plague in an Ancient City, ca. 1652–54. Oil on canvas, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © 2006 Museum Associates/LACMA, Gift of the Ahmanson Foundation (1997.10.1).

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Pestilence, Apostasy, and Heresy in Seventeenth-Century Rome 239

only in the frequency of epidemic in early modern Europe, but also in Marcantonio Raimondi’s well-circulated engraving after Raphael, known as the Morbetto (ca. 1514), illustrating a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid. The Morbetto had a decisive influence on all subsequent treatments of this general theme, including, if only indirectly, Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, both in terms of overall composition and specific iconographic details (such as the infant child in the foreground attempting to nurse at its dead mother’s breasts).2 However, nothing is known of the provenance of Sweerts’s painting before its arrival in England in the early nineteenth century. Executed most likely in Rome in the early 1650s and the most ambitious canvas of the Flemish master’s entire production, the painting’s debt to Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod is clear and has been frequently discussed.3 Equally clear in Sweerts’s canvas is the artist’s attempt at proving his painterly virtù both in the depiction of a historical scene of monumental bearing that encompasses a broad range of emotional-psychological states (the affetti) and in the emulation of the grand classicizing style of his older French contemporary and fellow resident in Rome, Poussin (1594–1665). As a complex, large-scale historical scene, Plague in an Ancient City is simply unique within Sweerts’s oeuvre. Although not without its flaws, the canvas does not fail to exert great fascination upon the viewer, for both its haunting visual beauty and its equally haunting historical subject.4

2 For the popularity of this Morbetto-inspired theme in seventeenth-century art (featuring a dramatic array of plague victims and other protagonists placed within a theatrical architectural setting), see the exhibition catalogue, L’idea del bello, esp. 2:440–41, cat. 49 on François Perrier’s The Plague of Athens (Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts) by Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée. In addition to the plague scenes by Poussin (with its contemporary copy by Angelo Caroselli, now in the National Gallery, London) and Pierre Mignard (presumably his engraving, The Plague in Epirus) cited by Brejon de Lavergnée, from the same period come also the three canvases, Thomas Blanchet’s Plague Scene, also known as A Classical Architectural Capriccio with a Scene of the Plague, private collection (see Galactéros-de Boissier, Thomas Blanchet, 364, fig. 286; and Christie’s, Old Master Pictures, sale #6979, lot. 70); A Plague Scene by Guglielmo Cortese (Il Borgognone) in the Duke of Wellington’s collection (according to photographic record in the Artist File at the Frick Art Reference Library, New York); and Mattia Preti’s Scene of Pestilence, Rome, Accademia San Luca (see Spike, Mattia Preti, 248, cat. 176). For Raimondi’s Morbetto, see Hope and Healing, 186–87, esp. cat. 5. For Caroselli’s copy of Poussin, see ibid., 178–79, cat. 1. 3 Sweerts is believed to have executed Plague in an Ancient City towards the end of his residence in Rome. He arrived in the city in the mid-1640s and was there until at least 1652; by 19 July 1655 he had returned to Brussels (Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 25, 31). The earliest documented notice of the painting is news of its sale in 1804 at Christie’s London (Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 117; and Kultzen, Michael Sweerts, 106). For Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod as “Sweerts’ primary visual source,” see Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 113, citing Roberto Longhi (see note 15 below). For enlightening new research and analysis of Poussin’s plague masterpiece, see Elisabeth Hipp’s essay in this volume. 4Pierre Rosenberg recently paid special tribute to Sweerts’s canvas, including it in his Only in America: One Hundred Painings in American Museums Unmatched in European Collections, 104. Until Longhi’s 1934 essay (see note 15 below), the canvas had been attributed to the French artist himself. According to Longhi’s now generally accepted thesis, the architectural setting of the painting comes from the hand of Viviano Codazzi, a specialist in the genre (Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 116). For the flaws in Sweerts’s composition, see Kultzen, Michael Sweerts, 40, 41.

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Thucydides and The Plague of Athens But what is its subject? As mysterious as the origins and pre-nineteenthcentury whereabouts of Plague in an Ancient City is the specific episode here represented. In the nineteenth century and as late as 1984 when on the London art market, the painting was thought to depict the most famous description of epidemic from ancient times—Thucydides’ account of the fifth-century BC Athenian plague in book 2 of his Peloponnesian War. This ancient Greek text was well known in seventeenth-century Europe, in many translations and editions since Lorenzo Valla’s much-reprinted Latin version of 1452 commissioned by Pope Nicholas V.5 However, a careful comparison of text and canvas reveals that the similarities are, in the end, too few to make a convincing argument; at the same time, there is much taking place within Sweerts’s scene that the Greek text is simply incapable of explaining. To be sure, Sweerts may have borrowed certain isolated elements from Thucydides. The Greek historian refers (2.47, 51, 52) to the Athenians’ many earnest “supplications” to the gods for relief from their affliction, and to the crowds congregating outdoors in public spaces, especially the sacred precincts, and to the profound depression of those not yet stricken by the disease. All of these elements are represented in Sweerts’s canvas; the response of despair is prominently reflected in the melancholy elderly woman seated, hand to cheek, in the left foreground. However, in the end, the differences between text and painting outweigh the similarities: there are too many features—important ones—in Sweerts’s canvas not found in Thucycides’ account or indeed, in any of the other familiar classical or biblical accounts.6 In recent years, scholars have uncovered much new information about Sweerts’s life and work, filling many lacunae in the knowledge of his life and artistic production. Alas, none of it has brought scholars any closer to deciphering the enigma of this canvas’s subject and its intended message. All that commentators have been able to say with confidence about its subject is what the painting’s current title declares: it is a scene of a plague in an ancient city. Is an actual historical plague being here represented? If so, which one and to what purpose? Some have speculated that the artist may be using a generic classical scene to depict and comment upon a contemporary Italian plague. No epidemic explicitly labeled by contemporaries as 5

See Pade, “La fortuna della traduzione.” Many early modern treatises on the plague, whether medical or theological in nature, have extensive listings of or references to epidemics throughout history. Frequently, plague treatise writers will append chronological lists of all known plagues in recorded history (with primary sources specified). For examples, see Bumaldi, Il pestifugo esculapio, 28–32; Andrea Gratiolo (Grazioli), Discorso di peste, 97– 132; Kircher, Scrutinium medico-physicum, 132–48; and Rondinelli, Relazione del contagio, 219–30. For detailed statistical compilations and abundant bibliographical references to the ancient sources, see Corradi, Annali delle epidemie; and Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence. 6

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“bubonic plague” or “the plague” struck Rome during Sweerts’s stay in the capital. However, epidemics of bubonic plague and other acute, massively fatal diseases were tragically common occurrences in this century, especially in Italy: one notable example is the great mortality in Rome in the spring and summer of 1649 caused by a quickly spreading “evil fever” reported by contemporary diarist, Giacinto Gigli.7 That Sweerts would be commenting on contemporary experience in indirect fashion would not be surprising given that artists of the time routinely used the cloak of ancient history to reflect on contemporary events and moral issues, as well as the perennial, universal features of the human condition.8 With specific respect to plagues and other epidemics, painters “often mitigated contemporary reality by depicting contagions either long past…or far away.”9 Other scholars are of the opinion that Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City is not “in any way a documentary work: rather a meditation on the disease’s effects on mankind assuaging its horrors through art.”10 Although reasonable, these assumptions do not help to illuminate the meaning of the various specific and puzzling details Sweerts has chosen to include in his scene—the behavior of certain of the human figures, the different architectural elements and their 7 For the febbre maligna that struck Rome, see Gigli, Diario di Roma, 2:558–59. Corradi (Annali delle epidemie, 1:658) lists no occurrence of bubonic plague or even “plague” during or shortly before Sweerts’ stay in Rome; however, he does include discussions and contemporary descriptions of the same “evil fever” that hit Rome and other parts of the peninsula in 1648/49; ibid., 2:166–76, 4:767. This mortality is reported in an avviso sent from Rome to the Medici court in 1649 (ASF, Vol. Mediceo del Principato 4027a, c. 190r–191v): “In Rome, since last November all the way through the month of June have died— as attested to me by those in charge of parishes—22,000 people.…” (In Roma dal mese di Novembre passato fino tutto il mese di Giugno sono morti, e così mi attestano quelli che han’ cura delle Parrochie, ventidui mila Persone…[190v]; my thanks to Sheila Barker for bringing this document to my attention). The great pandemic of bubonic plague of 1630 to 1633 that worked its way across most of Italy spared Rome in the end, although the city lived in acute terror for more than a year while watching her neighbors on the peninsula succumb to the apocalyptically destructive disease. Rome was not as fortunate during the next pandemic of plague in 1656/57, which struck, however, after Sweerts’s departure from the city. For the plague in Rome, see Corradi as cited above; and especially Barker, “Art in a Time of Danger.” For the 1656/57 plague in Rome, see the indispensable documentation (with abundant illustrations) compiled by Geronimo Gastaldi, the commissioner of health of the city of Rome during the epidemic, in Tractatus de avertenda et profligandis peste politico-legalis. 8 Two examples of such paintings are Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (1638, Louvre) and Dance to the Music of Time (ca. 1640, Wallace Collection, London); see Fumaroli, Nicolas Poussin, 8–10. For the opinion that in his Plague canvas, Sweerts “was clothing in antique garb reference to the contemporary plague that raged in Rome from 1649 to 1650,” see Dutch and Flemish Paintings, cat. 49. 9 Puglisi, “Guido Reni’s Pallione del Voto,” 403. 10 Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 116. In the brief commentary on James Fittler’s engraving of Sweerts’s painting Edward Forster (British Gallery of Engravings, cat. #31) had already advanced the same thesis that “perhaps…it was the intention of the artist merely to give a general idea of the horror of pestilence, without confining himself to historical record,” recognizing that the composition “has little, or rather no, resemblance to the celebrated description of that event [the plague of Athens] as related by Thucydides.” He further adds that the “buildings are more characteristic of ancient Rome, but the figures are not dressed like the inhabitants of that city, nor can it be traced with any appearance of truth to Egypt or Judea.” Although acknowledging the drawing and composition not to be of Poussin’s usual quality, Forster, like all of his contemporaries, still attributed Sweerts’s work to the French master, and entitled it simply, The Plague. At the time Forster was writing, the painting was in the possession of the famous English art collector, Henry Hope.

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function or historical referents, and the division of the canvas into two contrasting zones with distinct emotional atmospheres and human activities. It is the thesis of this essay that in view of these highly specified features, Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City is neither a generic “meditation on the disease’s effects,” nor a representation of a contemporary Roman plague disguised in classical garb, nor an artistic exercise “simply painted to demonstrate his [technical] capabilities.”11 Instead Sweerts is here depicting a specific historical plague of ancient Roman, or more precisely, early Christian, times, which, although not among the most famous outbreaks in history and probably apocryphal, is nonetheless one that had been noted by ecclesiastical historians. It is also an outbreak that would have had much significance for the artist’s original seventeenth-century viewers. However, at the same time, the canvas was not intended for a general audience of ordinary lay viewers. Replete with much historical, religious, artistic, and archeological allusion, it was conceived as a highly erudite puzzle destined for a small group of cultural elite who delighted in such painted puzzles. (Seventeenth-century painters in Rome—most famously Poussin—produced many of these pictorial puzzles.) Only the cultural elite would have had access to the kind of rarified information required to unlock the enigma of this historical scene and understand its ultimate moral message for contemporary viewers. What Charles Dempsey has remarked about one of Poussin’s intellectually taxing historical scenes applies fully to Plague in an Ancient City: “Much is…demanded of the viewer.”12 But in meeting such demands, the viewer proved his intellectual virtù and confirmed his status as a member of the privileged cultural elite. Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City is, in short, “the consummate insider’s work.”13

THE VISUAL EVIDENCE The Architectural and Geographical Setting of the Scene The setting of Plague in an Ancient City is a broad, deep piazza, framed with a dark, cavernous, shadowy structure on the left and stately classical architecture on the remaining two sides (right and center). The classical architecture on the upper right-hand edge of the canvas includes portions of the façade and front steps of what apparently is a large, white, Roman templelike building. In the center of the canvas on the side of the piazza directly

11

Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 114. “Nicolas Poussin between Italy and France,” 322. Although containing no reference to Sweerts, a useful discussion of history painting conveying a moral message in seventeenth-century Italy is Warwick, “Poussin and the Arts of History.” For general hermeneutical insights on deciphering the enigmatic, didactic canvases of “painter philosopher” Poussin, of much relevance to Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, see Stanic, “Le mode énigmatique.” 13 Pamela M. Jones, University of Massachusetts, Boston, personal communication, April 2005. 12Dempsey,

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opposite the viewer, is an elegant, two-storied, open-arched palazzo. In front of this palazzo stands a prominent obelisk aligned with the central arch of the building. The obelisk is copiously adorned with hieroglyphs; its summit, however, is cut off by the top of the canvas, perhaps to thus suggest a structure of great height. The hilly landscape behind the central palazzo gives the impression that the piazza sits on a high and relatively narrow hill—much like the Capitoline of Rome—while the architectural style of the buildings on the square would also tend to call to mind, if not imperial Rome itself, then a location somewhere in the Roman Empire. The presence of the obelisk in front of the central background palazzo might cause some viewers to think first of an Egyptian city, such as Alexandria, the thriving, celebrated capital of Graeco-Roman Egypt, which was struck by plague in the third and sixth centuries. Alexandria, however, is a port-city, as Sweerts and his contemporaries well knew, and there is no sign of a port or any body of water in Plague in an Ancient City.14 Moreover, several famous obelisks were brought to Rome from Egypt at various junctures in ancient times, and remain there to this day. There is nothing in this canvas that excludes either Rome or Alexandria as the setting. At the same time, however, there is nothing that incontestably identifies them or any other imperial city as the artist’s intended city, even though the names of both Rome and Alexandria come up most often in the plague sources. Sweerts may here wish to represent merely a “generic city” of Roman antiquity. The Plague Victims and Their Sources in Ancient Sculpture In the foreground the viewer is confronted by a wide array of dramatically rendered human figures in various poses and states of dress and undress, most of them dead or dying victims of the plague, attended by grief- and horror-stricken family members, friends, or compatriots. Among them are the “Gladiators, Niobes, Vestals, Gauls” and other familiar figures from ancient sculpture used as models by Sweerts, as Roberto Longhi first pointed out.15 Spanning the ages of life from childhood to old age, these various individuals express different emotional responses to the calamity that has 14 Whenever the third-century plague of Alexandria is mentioned or discussed in early modern Christian sources (for example, Roscio, Icones operum misericordiae, 41; Marchini, Belli divini, 268–70; and Kircher, Scrutinium physico-medicum, 241), it is always with specific reference to the heroic charity of the Christians of that community who tended the sick and buried the dead with no concern for their own safety. There is no evidence of such charitable activity in Sweerts’s canvas. Nor do the same sources contain any discussion of the sixth-century Alexandrian plague (part of the wider Justinianic Plague that began in 541 and did not end until the eighth century). Three of the figures in the right half of the scene (as is clearer in Fittler’s engraving) are dressed in clothing made of rather ornate, striped fabric not typical of Roman garb and evocative, instead, of exotic Eastern realms. This was not necessarily the artist’s way of situating the scene geographically in a non-Roman setting; Rome, as he would have known, was a cosmopolitan city. 15 Longhi, “Per Michiel Sweerts,” 179.

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befallen them and their city: grief, despair, anger, confusion, and silent, motionless shock. Some hold their hands to their noses as a reminder of the repulsive stench accompanying the scene and of plague-causing miasma, a visual topos appearing with regularity in plague paintings and engravings. A raking light from the left illuminates the melancholy old woman, whose source in ancient Roman statuary was identified by Longhi as the Vecchia Capitolina.16 The pose of Sweerts’s vecchietta, however, was most likely inspired by the well-known ancient Roman relief depicting the conquered barbarian province, Dacia Weeping. Now housed in the Capitoline Museum, Dacia was rediscovered in Rome in the 1530s and on display for years thereafter in the famed Cesi sculpture garden—it is recorded there, for example, in Jean Jacques Boissard’s Romanae urbis topographia et antiquitates (1:1).17 Just to the right of the despondent vecchietta, the same intense light draws attention to the pathetic grief of what seems to be a family group gathered around a dead mother stretched on a straw mattress, with her tiny child peering uncomprehending into her expressionless, lifeless face. The latter detail represents Sweerts’s version of an oft-reproduced plague topos popularized by Raimondi’s Morbetto, which has its ultimate origins in a brief but influential description of an ancient painting by Apelles’ contemporary, Aristeides of Thebes, found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (35.36.98). Three Gesturing “Guides” and the “White Temple” Also in the foreground, positioned prominently just to the right of the center of the canvas, is a mature, brown-bearded male figure in a brilliant blue toga and stately headdress. Flanking this distinguished and well-illuminated gentleman are two female cadavers; lying supine on the ground, they serve as a visual frame for him from below, thus heightening the attention drawn to him. Standing robustly erect and of great intellectual and moral stature, the “Blue Prophet”—as he will be called for convenience—is in earnest conversation with a bare-breasted blond woman.18 This woman pays close,

16 The reference to the Vecchia Capitolina (Longhi, “Per Michiel Sweerts,” 179) calls for some comment. Longhi is presumably referring to the Roman copy of an original Hellenistic head seen in two of Sweerts’s Roman paintings (Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, cat. 7, fig. 7–1, and cat. 15). The head was at some later point attached to a standing statue, currently located in the Capitoline Museum, Salone, Primo Piano, Braccio Nuovo, and bearing the simple identification “Vaticano #20. Da Anzio, Età Adriana.” For this statue, see Jones, Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures: Sculptures of the Museo Capitolino, 1:288–89, cat. 22; 2:pl. 70. However, as this catalogue points out, there is yet another Vecchia Capitolina with similar facial features, that of the famous seated Drunken Old Woman (Anus Ebria), rediscovered in 1620 during the restoration of Sant’Agnese on the Via Nomentana; ibid., 89–90, cat. 8, pl. 18. 17 For the Dacia sculpture, see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 193–94, cat. 28, fig. 100; and Jones, Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures: Sculptures of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, 1:17–18, cat. 6; 2:pl. 8. For its symbolic value for the early modern Roman chuch, see Aikin, “Romae de Dacia Triumphantis, esp. 589. For the Cesi collection, see Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 472. 18 Among the ancient statuary in Rome at the time, Sweerts may have found his model for the Blue Prophet in one of the two red porphyry and white marble Barbarian Captives (specifically, the older, bearded one of the pair), then in the Scipione Borghese collection and now at the Louvre (Collection XXXXXX

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respectful attention to the words of her male interlocutor who is pointing downward with his left hand to one of the dead women at his feet. At the same time, his right hand points off to the viewer’s right, as if to make a connection between the dead woman’s fate and the faraway object of his gesturing, something else present in the scene, located behind him and to our right. Following the direction of his gesture—as well as the strong diagonal line of the overall composition moving from the lower left of the canvas to the upper right—the viewer is led to the templelike building on the right edge of the canvas. Of this temple are visible only five marble steps and one outermost fluted column with its capital, Roman Doric in style. For convenience, this structure will be called the “White Temple.” The White Temple is fairly well illuminated (as opposed to the structure just opposite on the left side of the canvas) and apparently in reasonably good state of repair. On the temple steps stands another solemn male figure—the “White Prophet”—shrouded, head and all, in a voluminous, radiant white garment. The White Prophet repeats the same pointing gesture (and towards the same direction) as does the Blue Prophet standing front and center. This same attention-directing gesture is repeated by yet another figure, located farther in the background (just left of center and closer to the obelisk), possibly a female, dressed in white, with covered head, only sketchily rendered but intentionally singled out by the light. These three figures are all, it is reasonable to conclude, summoning the viewer’s attention to the White Temple and what it contains or represents. Although little is visible of its physical structure, the White Temple is clearly a house of worship: surrounding the building, on its steps and in its immediate vicinity, is a host of human figures, depicted in an array of reverential poses, including the distinctive early Christian orans position characterized by raised, outstretched arms. The demeanor of these figures around the temple clearly suggests devout prayer and worship. A reasonable, preliminary conclusion would be that the three gesturing figures are, in fact, beckoning their compatriots— and the viewers—to join in this activity. The Left Half of the Canvas: The “Black Hall” The left side of the painting, behind the foreground chorus of figures, presents a far different and deliberately contrasted scene. To begin with, this portion of the painting, representing a considerable amount of canvas space and crowded with wraithlike figures, is cast in deep, gloomy shadow. 18

Borghèse, inv. MR 331); whereas his model for the bare-breasted blond woman may have been the wellknown statue known as Vetturia (also called Thusnelda, Germania, or Medea) now in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, but then at the Villa Medici, Rome, having been formerly in the Della Valle collection. For Vetturia, see Avon, “Su alcuni esempi di scultura,” 115, fig. 7; and Montague, Roman Baroque Sculpture, 169, fig. 233. (My thanks to Sheila Barker for pointing out the Vetturia similarity.)

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This obscuring darkness has been deepened by oxidation over the centuries, but it seems clear that even in its original state, this tenebrous zone was meant by the artist to stand in chromatic contrast to the opposite side of the piazza. Unfortunately, these dark colors make it impossible to achieve a fully legible photographic reproduction of this portion of the canvas, even with recourse to the most technically sophisticated means available today. Fortunately, however, in the early nineteenth century, an engraving was made of Sweerts’s complete composition (by British artist James Fittler) when the canvas was in a far better state of conservation. Revealing the now obfuscated details of its oxidized upper left quadrant (figs. 9.2 and 9.3), Fittler’s engraving is helpful in describing the scene.19 The architectural center of focus of the canvas’s left sector is not a white temple with its simple, clean, straight lines and graceful, well-lit façade, but rather, a hulking, cavernous, rotunda-like structure, with massive open arches on at least three sides—the “Black Hall.” Although in obviously functional use, this rotund edifice appears to be in a worn, almost dilapidated state: the stones forming its arches are clearly decayed and chipped at their edges. In contrast to the White Temple, much of the actual structure of the Black Hall, including its internal activity, is visible through the open arches. At the same time, despite the visibility afforded by the artist, the impression conveyed by the overall obscurity that envelopes the Black Hall and the spectral figures who populate it is that the viewer is seeing, if not a secret, then certainly not a public, and most likely an “underground” venue, whether a place of burial, liturgical worship, or otherwise. It is as if the artist intends to suggest that, although the viewers have been granted privileged visual access to the internal activities of the Black Hall through a temporary cutaway of its walls, these are not normally witnessed by the general public and are perhaps taking place physically below ground or within a hill or cave. The Black Hall’s Sole Ornament: The Caryatid Although only a portion of its mass is shown, what is visible of this rotundalike Black Hall with its large arched apertures suggests a certain generic resemblance to an ancient Roman monument, the Temple of Minerva Medica, that is, Minerva the Healer (fig. 9.4).20 On the present-day Via

19 The commentary accompanying the engraving (Forster, British Gallery of Engravings, cat. 31) reports that the painting is in “perfect” condition. 20 For the temple, see Platner, Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, s.v. “Nymphaeum” (2). The Minerva Medica shows up in other seventeenth-century paintings in more recognizable fashion, as in, for example, Willem van Nieuwlandt the Younger’s Laban Searching for His Idols (1630, Worcester Museum of Art); see Welu, “Willem van Nieuwlandt the Younger.” Some readers of earlier versions of my essay suggested that Sweerts may have modeled his Black Hall after the Baths of Caracalla or the Basilica of Maxentius, but I do not find either of these two models more compelling than the Minerva Medica either in terms of their architectural configuration or their historical or symbolic associations.

Fig. 9.2. James Fittler, engraver. [Michael Sweerts], The Plague, 1807. Engraving #31 in Edward Forster, The British Gallery of Engravings, London (as Poussin). KN 65, Widener Library, Harvard College Library, Boston. Photo reproduced by permission from Widener Library, Harvard College Library, KN 65.

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Fig. 9.3. Fittler, The Plague, 1807. Detail of Figure 9.2. Engraving #31 in Edward Forster, The British Gallery of Engravings, London (as Poussin). KN 65, Widener Library, Harvard College Library, Boston. Photo reproduced by permission from Widener Library, Harvard College Library, KN 65.

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Fig. 9.4. The so-called Temple of Minerva Medica, Rome, Italy. Photo by author.

Giolitti just northwest of Porta Maggiore, this ten-sided structure is currently thought to be a nymphaeum from the Gardens of Licinius, but in Sweerts’s day it was believed to be a pagan place of worship, due to the putative rediscovery there of the famous Minerva Giustiniani (now in the Vatican), an ancient statue of the goddess in her healing aspect; she holds a snake in her hand, the same attribute as that of the ancient god of healing, Asclepius. 21 Interestingly, the association of this district of Rome with the pursuit of healing did not disappear with the waning of paganism and the triumph of Christianity: near the Temple of Minerva Medica stands the church of Santa Bibiana, honoring a young fourth-century Christian martyr whose cult, active since the fifth century, supplanted that of the pagan goddess as medical healer. As Tod Marder explains, associated with Bibiana’s cult were “curative herbs, which had probably been gathered in the vicinity of the temple of Minerva Medica since ancient times” and “a well with purifying waters,” 21 There were conflicting reports about the true site of the rediscovery of the Minerva Giustiniani; one tradition (which traces back to Pirro Ligorio) located the site of the statue’s rediscovery in the temple of Minerva Medica; according to the other and now generally accepted account, the statue was found during excavations near the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. See I Giustiniani e l’antico, 183; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 269–71, cat. 63; and L’idea del bello, 2:193–94, cat. 9.

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standard features of the saint’s traditional iconography.22 It may be no mere coincidence that Sweerts here, if only indirectly, recalls Bibiana’s memory. The connection between the Black Hall and pagan places of worship and healing becomes even more compelling when one notes the single and thus highly conspicuous decorative element on the edifice: a caryatid incorporated into the left arch. Yet another enduring invention of classical antiquity, the caryatid in early modern Italy was an architectural element that bore, above all, pagan connotations and was used principally (albeit not exclusively) in secular settings. Subject of a famous digression in Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture (1:1.5–6), duly glossed in by Daniele Barbaro (1514–70) in his widely studied edition of that ancient treatise, the caryatid had its prototype in ancient Greek architecture: the Erechteum (or Caryatid Portico) on the Athenian Acropolis. According to the etiological explanation supplied by Vitruvius, the Erechteum females represented the noble matrons, “weighted down forever by a burden of shame,” of the Peloponnesian city of Caryae that had sided against Athens in its war against Persia. The Romans incorporated this Greek element into their own architecture and it is their use of caryatids that gave this ornament a further specific association in seventeenth-century Rome: it was among the standard ornamental features of the classicizing gardens of Italian villas that became popular in the sixteenth century, especially the rustic fountain grottoes built in imitation of ancient Roman nymphaea. Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, the object of much archeological study in the sixteenth century (most notably by Pirro Ligorio [d. 1583]) boasted a series of these load-bearing female figures, which were likewise incorporated into the nymphaeum of the sumptuous Villa Giulia built (1550–55) by Pope Julius III.23 In ancient lore, nymphaea were originally and literally “gardens of the Nymphs,” dwelling places of the pagan female water deities. However, as Oratorian archeologist Antonio Bosio points out in his monumental work of 1632, Roma sotterranea, the term nymphaea (ninfei) in both ancient pagan and early Christian usage 22 Marder, Bernini and the Art of Architecture, 47–48. There was already a church dedicated to Bibiana on the same site by the fifth century. See also Fedini, Vita di Santa Bibiana, discussed below. The same suburban area of Rome surrounding the church of Saint Bibiana and the Minerva Medica was also used as burial ground by the ancient Romans, as was discovered during early modern excavations, including those undertaken during the pontificate of Urban VIII; see Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome, 400. For the relevance of Bibiana’s memory to Sweerts’s painting, see further discussion below, 262–63. 23 See Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Rowland, 22, and Howe’s commentary, ibid., 135– 37. For Barbaro’s commentary and illustrations, see Vitruvius, I dieci libri dell’architettura tradotti…Barbaro, 15–17. For the caryatid in antiquity and early modern Rome, see D’Evelyn, “Varietà and the Caryatid Portico,” 157–74, with abundant bibliographical references. For Hadrian’s Villa, see Macdonald and Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa and Its Legacy, esp. 139–44 (caryatids) and 205–28 (early modern explorations). For the rustic grottoes and nymphaea of early modern Italy, see Alvarez, “Renaissance Nymphaeum”; and Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome, esp. 28–57. For the nymphaeum at the Villa Giulia, see Coffin, Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, 163–65.

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already came to mean simply places where fountains, streams, and other sources of water were present.24 At the same time, as Andrea Palladio explains in his Four Books on Architecture, natural sites marked by the presence of freshwater sources were precisely the settings chosen by the ancients for the construction of temples dedicated to their gods of healing: “For Asclepius, Salus, and those gods of medicine by whom it was believed many were healed, [the ancients] built temples in locations which were particularly healthy and close to pure waters, so that the sick, coming from foul and contagious air to fresh and healthy air and drinking those waters, would recuperate more quickly.” 25 All of the preceding visual evidence and historical information—transmitted in well-known works readily available to Sweerts—might suggest that the artist is possibly alerting the viewer to the fact that (although no sign of water is discernible) this dark edifice is pagan, not Christian, and that it somehow relates to the pursuit of health and healing. Given the massive presence of disease and death at the very doorstep of the structure, this would hardly be surprising. However, as would have been also well known in the seventeenth century, the ancient temples associated with the official state religion were largely open-air structures, built to house the images of gods and goddesses; they were never entered except by priests, who performed their sacrifices outdoors, in front of, and not inside, the buildings. So one must conclude that, although pagan, Sweerts’s Black Hall is not likely to belong to the realm of traditional Roman religion. Moreover, it is “not an archeologically correct depiction” of any known ancient edifice and its “entire structure is unlike anything that ever existed” in antiquity.26 To what kind of religion, then, might it pertain? Might it instead be connected with the mystery religions of late imperial Rome, the appearance and contents of whose temples, unknown and unknowable in baroque Rome, Sweerts would have been obliged to invent for himself? This possibility will be entertained in greater detail, but first it is necessary to further examine the activity taking place within the Black Hall. 24

Bosio, Roma sotterranea, 414. Palladio, Four Books on Architecture, trans. Tavernor and Schofield, 215. 26 Fred S. Kleiner, Boston University, personal communication, March 2006, whom I thank for discussing with me the architecture and functioning of ancient Roman temples. The Black Hall cannot be Christian catacombs, for the physical appearance (structure and interior decoration) of the latter were extremely well known by the mid-seventeenth century, thanks to Antonio Bosio’s copiously illustrated Roma sotterranea. If Sweerts had wanted to identify this structure as the catacombs, presumably he would have chosen one or more unambiguous details from the visual evidence available in Bosio’s 1632 tome. Another factor contributing to the conclusion that the Black Hall is pagan in nature is what appears to be its rotund form: the latter tended in the early modern imagination to be associated with pagan, rather than Christian, places of worship. In his famous treatise on church design, Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae (1577), Cardinal Carlo Borromeo argues in favor of the cruciform plan as being far more appropriate for the design of a Catholic church, for, as he states at the opening of chapter 2, “as far as round edifices are concerned, this type of plan was used for pagan temples and is less customary among Christian people”; translation from Voelker, “Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricae, 51. 25

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Inside the Black Hall: Funeral of a Plague Victim or Some Other Pagan Ritual? Is it the pursuit of health and healing, evoked by the caryatid and its traditional associations, that is actually taking place within the Black Hall? The edifice could indeed be normally and principally devoted to that pursuit, but at first glance, it would seem that, in this moment, the very opposite is occurring; that is to say, the activity appears to be the burial rite of a plague victim, an appropriate enough activity to depict, given the epidemic raging in the vicinity. On a long, three-tiered interior ramp, a formal line of somber men and women processes through the various levels of the structure accompanying what is apparently the body of a deceased member of their family or community; covered in a white shroud and carried upon a litter, the body can be seen in the middle tier of the ramp. Included in the procession, on the lowest level, is a priestly figure vested in liturgical garb, with a miterlike headdress and book in hand. At the very top of the ramp, one figure carries a small, probably metal container, presumably for oil or perfume, while the woman next to him (or her) holds a handkerchief to her nose: is she crying or protecting herself against the odor or miasma of the underground locale? On the middle ramp, closest to the right-hand pier of the arch, a figure processes forward holding up some unidentifiable, slightly raised small object shrouded in a cloth, probably something needed for the ceremony in process. Others in the procession bear torches, while a young man a short distance in front of the priest visibly struggles to carry a large, well-filled, and presumably heavy sack. What is he carrying? As Jean Jacques Boissard reports in his Romanae urbis topographia et antiquitates,27 the ancients did have the custom of burying along with the deceased personal items belonging to or associated with him or her: is that what is depicted here? But, if that is the case, then why are these items stuffed and carried in rather undignified fashion, in just this one sizable, bulging, and unwieldy sack? The first impulse may be to read the human activity within the Black Hall as a burial rite; however, while this should not be excluded as the correct interpretation, it is important to note some obstacles in the way of such a reading of the scene. By the time Sweerts painted Plague in an Ancient City, much was known about ancient Roman and early Christian funeral and burial practices, and known in rather detailed fashion, from the closing of the eyes of the deceased on their deathbed to the burial of their remains. This was thanks to a series of works on the subject (most notably those by Palladio, Boissard, Giraldi, Guichard, Panvinio, and Kirchmann), published during the great antiquarian vogue of the sixteenth and

27 Boissard, “De funeribus et modo sepeliendi usitato apud antiquos,” preface to Romanae urbis topographia, 4:8 (volume titled IIII Pars Romanae urbis topographiae et antiquitatum sive II Tomus inscriptionum et monumentorum quae Romae in saxis et marmoribus visuntur).

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seventeenth centuries, and based upon an abundance of archeological and literary evidence.28 Sweerts’s scene does not correspond to any of the descriptions found in these contemporary treatises. No tombs, open graves, funerary monuments, decorations, or inscriptions are evident in the structure. Its sole decorative element, the caryatid, is not a feature normally associated with places of death and burial; there is no basis for such an association in any of the archeological evidence available to Sweerts. Moreover, if this is indeed a scene of burial, then the presence of the litter would lead to the conclusion that the deceased is being interred, body fully intact, and not cremated. Yet, there is no sign of a burial place, such as a sarcophagus, of which many ancient Roman examples abounded in Sweerts’s Rome. By late imperial times, as early modern sources report, the Romans were practicing both forms of burial, that is, interment of the whole untouched body (humatio) and cremation (combustio). Cremation— the “mos Romanus,” according to Tacitus—was far more common, with burial of the cremated remains occurring most typically in small, aboveground tombs or mausolea (to contain the crematory urns), along the sides of the extra-urban roads, as could still be easily seen by anyone living in seventeenth-century Rome.29 Giraldi’s De sepulchris mentions the underground burial crypts used by the Romans called conditoria (hypogea in Greek), which, he says, could be readily visited in Rome and throughout Lazio. (By the mid-seventeenth century, there had been several such structures uncovered in the area occupied by the Villa Pamphilj, the suburban home of the papal family who employed Sweerts during his Roman years.) But apart from the presence of the litter, there is no visual evidence in Sweerts’s Black Hall identifying it unambiguously as a conditorium. There is, furthermore, no reference in the early modern treatises to the funeral procession actually entering into the underground crypt, whose small dimensions and confining spaces would have not easily accommodated so many mourners, musicians, singers, and the host of burial accoutrements.30 28 Palladio, “De l’essequie antiche, e sue ceremonie,” in L’antichità di Roma, 28–29. For Boissard’s work on the subject, see note 27; see also Giraldi, De sepulchris; Guichard, Funerailles; Kirchmann, De funeribus romanorum; and Panvinio, De ritu sepeliendi. Panvinio says in De ritu sepeliendi (1) that he discusses pagan burial practices more fully in his LX libri antiquitatum romanarum, a work I have not been able to consult. There is also a summary discussion of ancient funerary practices in Panciroli, Raccolta di alcune cose, 1.4.20. 29 Kirchmann cites Pliny on cremation as the “mos Romanus” in De funeribus, 15. As Panvinio (De ritu sepeliendi, 13) explains, the early Christians, from the start, rejected cremation because it was associated with pagan praxis and was symbolically antithetical to their theological beliefs about the resurrection of the body. As Kirchmann (De funeribus, 1–15), Giraldi (De sepulchris, 21–22), Boissard (“De funeribus,” in Romanae urbis topographia, 4:7–8), and Guichard (Funerailles, 26–33) all report, in the earliest phase of their recorded history, the Romans practiced inhumation of the uncremated remains of the dead, but this very soon gave way, due to pressures of warfare, to cremation. Cremation, in turn, remained essentially the sole practice for centuries until the time of the Antonines in the second century AD (according to Giraldi, De sepulchris, 21–22) when there was a return by some to inhumation. Most of the examples of burial praxis in ancient Rome cited in our sources either refer directly to or imply cremation. 30 See Giraldi (De sepulchris, 5) for the conditoria, which, he specifies, are for the cremated remains of the deceased. Boissard (“De funeribus,” in Romanae urbis topographiae, 4:9) also mentions, with no further XXXX

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Just as importantly, given the acute fear of contagion, in actual practice, both ancient and early modern, plague victims were usually not given this sort of formal, ritualized burial. The highly infectious cadavers of the disease’s victims were not normally paraded around in public, especially in the presence of large gatherings of people, much less so in such close confined spaces as the interior of the Black Hall. Even if all fear and caution had somehow been miraculously overcome, in the midst of a virulent outbreak of deadly plague such as is seen outside the Black Hall, hundreds of men, women, and children died on a daily basis—why then is there only one litter here? Also raising doubt about an interpretation of this interior scene as the interment of a plague victim is the presence of many people who, although in the one same processional line, seem to have an air of complete psychological detachment from the burial ritual. In stark contrast to those impassioned foreground figures outside on the public square in the throes of their pain and despair, the participants in the procession show little sign of grief or any other emotion (the woman at the very top of the ramp seems to be shielding her nose from odor rather than weeping); there are no distraught faces, no discernible gestures of prayer or lamentation or grieffilled beseeching of the heavens. Calm and stiffly erect, are these processing figures here for another purpose, and not primarily to be part of a funeral service? The same question must be asked about the even calmer men and women lined up on the external ramp just outside the lower, right-hand arch of the Black Hall, awaiting entry and the beginning of their own ascent up the passageway. Furthermore, as can be seen in Fittler’s engraving, there is, seated placidly just below the caryatid and thus presumably also inside the Black Hall, an elderly man who seems to be looking down at something in his lap, paying no attention to the ritual that is being enacted: what role does the artist intend for this mysterious figure in the overall economy of his interior scene? Is this seated figure somehow a part of this funereal event, or just a detached nonspectator? As for that multi-leveled ramp or passageway, if one follows it all the way upward (towards the upper left), it appears to lead to an unseen room or some further section of the structure beyond the viewer’s sight, from which rays of bright light are shining. Is this another room, or is it merely a second entrance to or exit from the Black Hall? If it is just another door to/from the exterior, why are 30

explanatory detail, underground “temples and cemeteries” as burial places for the “bodies” of the deceased: “Crypta et hypogea sunt subterranea loca, in quibus corpora defunctorum sepeliuntur in templis vel coemiteriis….” My thanks to Prof. Scott Bradbury, Smith College, for discussing this aspect of Sweerts’ painting with me, in particular for his observation regarding the unlikelihood, in normal Roman custom, of a funeral procession descending into an underground crypt. For Sweerts’s relationship with the Pamphilj, see below note 44. For the ancient Roman burial sites on the Villa Pamphilj property, see Ambrogi, “Il territorio della Villa Doria Pamphilj.”

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some members of the congregation, somewhat solemnly, entering the temple from the ramp on the lower right? Is the distinction between these two portals significant? Heliolatry in the Square: The Obelisk and the Sun-Worshipping Men and Women Further speculation as to the exact nature of the activity occurring within the Black Hall must be postponed until Sweerts’s overall scene has been examined more and additional historical information has been brought to bear on its details. Returning once again to the open air, there is one final important element to note in Plague in an Ancient City—the references to heliolatry, or sun worship. These references are communicated not only by the presence of the tall obelisk in the center of the square, but also by the demeanor of many individuals scattered amidst the space. Just behind the “hall” on the same left-hand sector of the scene, a small crowd of people appears to be standing in rapt attention facing toward the sun. Seated and dispersed throughout the remaining area of the piazza are other similarly sun-gazing figures. The sun is not directly visible on the canvas, but it is clear that it is rather low in the sky. Contrary to the most recent description of this canvas—“an eerie twilight pervades the scene as the sun sets beneath a darkening sky”31—the sun is rising, not setting. Furthermore, the people on the piazza facing the sun are not merely gazing disinterestedly at that source of light, but rather, if not worshipping it, are at least reverencing it in deliberate, active fashion.

SWEERTS’S VISUAL CLUES: PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS Having taken careful stock of the painting’s most significant elements, one can draw some preliminary conclusions. On the basis of visual evidence alone, it is reasonable to assume that the artist is here contrasting two distinct forms of religion or worship in which the citizens of this plaguebesieged city are engaged in the midst of this horrendous outbreak of disease. The one is represented on the right by the White Temple; the other, on the left, by the Black Hall. A second, reasonable assumption is that Sweerts is at the same time telling the viewer, again in clear visual terms, that one is to be preferred over the other, namely, the religion represented by the White Temple. The latter visual clues come in various forms. The first is architectural, in the very depiction of the two buildings: the White Temple—elegant, illuminated, and firmly intact (as the many carefully depicted metal butterfly clips on the marble steps suggest)—is clearly portrayed as superior to the Black Hall, which is shrouded in gloom and in somewhat dilapidated and by

31 Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 113. For the question of the rising sun and sun-worshippers in Sweerts’s canvas, see the further discussion below, 284–86.

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no means manicured or stately condition. The geographical position of the two edifices affords a second clue: the White Temple has been placed on the right, more noble side of the canvas, as opposed to the Black Hall, which is on the left, the “sinister” side.32 Furthermore, the three figures are gesturing unmistakably towards the house of worship on the right. Finally, the general placement of all the figures in this canvas is such that a strong diagonal line is formed in the composition, leading the eye inexorably upward toward the White Temple. The same movement is reinforced by the progress in the canvas from darkness to light, from left to right, that is, away from Black Hall and towards White Temple, the focus of the attention of the three “guides.” Principal among the three guides is the centrally placed, visually striking, solemn Blue Prophet. With his strong, intelligent facial features and noble bearing, clothed in celestial blue and stately headdress identifying him as one of high social status, he is clearly the key figure in Sweerts’s composition. Drawing further attention to the Blue Prophet is his interlocutor, the bare-breasted, well-illuminated blond woman who listens intently to his speech, reminding the viewer to do likewise. But she is not the only one to do so; also attending to the discourse of this gentleman is another figure, somewhat in the shadows just to the left and behind the Blue Prophet, a young man with brown hair parted in the middle who bears a distinct resemblance to Michael Sweerts himself. Is this indeed a self-portrait? 33 Has Sweerts placed this portrait so close to the canvas’s main figure, the Blue Prophet, in order to somehow associate himself more personally with the message being imparted? To miss the message of the body language of the Blue Prophet and the other two related gesticulating figures is to miss the message of the entire painting: their role is crucial within the overall economy of the scene. By including such figures within his composition, Sweerts follows a time-honored pictorial custom deriving from the well-respected and much-heeded advice of Leon Battista Alberti: in book 2 of his De pictura (1435), Alberti discusses the role of gesturing characters within a historia (narrative composition) as an important vehicle of communication to the viewer about significant elements of the scene or indeed about its whole meaning. 34 In Poussin’s The Plague of Ashdod, the obvious point of departure for Sweerts in the conception of this canvas, this same Albertian element appears in the figure of the white-robed priest (reincarnated in Plague in an Ancient City as the White Prophet); with his raised right arm, the white priest calls the attention of the townspeople—and of the viewer—to the ill fortune of the 32 For an early modern discussion of the placement of the “nobler” figures or elements on the right side of pictorial composition, see, for example, Comanini, The Figino, trans. Doyle-Anderson and Maiorino, 74–76, where he cites Aristotle and Averroës as his authorities. 33 For the Sweerts self-portraits, see Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, cats. 30 and 31. 34 Alberti, On Painting, trans. Spencer, 78.

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Philistine idol, Dagon. Also calling the attention of the spectator is the young boy in the lower right who points to the foreground plague victims, who were punished for the profanation of the ark of the covenant. Sweerts himself makes use of this element in even more explicit fashion in another canvas, Clothing the Naked (ca. 1646–49, Rijksmuseum), from his “Seven Acts of Mercy” series. In that canvas, an elderly male figure to right of center is looking straight at the viewer while pointing to the scene behind him in which the relevant act of charity is being performed, thus reminding the viewers of their obligation to “go and do likewise.” Furthermore, yet another such pointing figure is found in Sweerts’s later Double Portrait, also known as Two Men in Oriental Costume (fig. 9.5). However, in Plague in an Ancient City, Sweerts has inserted three such figures, not just one, lest the viewer miss the point! On the Steps of the White Temple: The Orans Figures and Early Christian Prayer Given the clear historical context of both the painted scene—a city within the ancient Roman empire—and of the canvas itself—an art object produced in papal Rome of the seventeenth-century—it requires no great leap of imagination, nor represents any act of scholarly daring, to further conclude that these two opposing religions are, in fact, Christianity (represented by the White Temple) and paganism (the Black Hall). Evidence pointing to the pagan identity of the Black Hall has been discussed above. As for the White Temple, apart from its more attractive depiction and more favorable position within the composition, there is only one explicit cue to help identify its nature, but this one cue is significant: the orans (raised, extended hands) prayer pose of two of the figures on the steps of the Hall.35 In historically conscious baroque Rome, learned artists—and all serious artists were expected to be learned or have learned consultants 36—and 35 What little is seen of the actual fabric of the building includes a Doric column. In both antiquity and early modern Europe, each of the architectural orders had specific symbolic associations and meanings. Sweerts may have meant the Doric order to further communicate a sense of the virile, combative robustness and solidity of the Catholic Church, given what Serlio (1475–1554) states about that order: “The ancients dedicated this Doric work to Jupiter, Mars, Hercules and to a few other robust gods. However, after the incarnation of man’s salvation, we Christians must proceed in a different way. When we have to build a temple consecrated to Jesus Christ our Saviour, or to Saint Paul, Saint Peter, Saint George or other similar saints, since they not only professed to be soldiers, but were also manly and strong in leading out their lives in the faith of Christ, the Doric type is suitable for saints of this sort.” Serlio, On Architecture, trans. Hart and Hicks, 1:281. Palladio similarly writes (Four Books on Architecture, 216) of the association of Doric temples in antiquity with the patron deities of the soldier class such as Mars and Hercules. 36The expectation goes back to Alberti’s De pictura; Alberti, On Painting, 89, 90, 91. See also Hand, Viewer as Poet, 18, where he cites Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura (1558). One does not want to be accused of reading too much into a painting or text, but the existence of the tradition of the doctus artifex behooves us to be diligent in our investigation, especially since the early modern mind, as is well known, took great delight in both creating and deciphering complex, didactic compositions, be they artistic or literary. For the doctus artifex, see Bialostocki, “Doctus Artifex and the Library of the Artist.”

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 9.5. Michael Sweerts, Double Portrait, ca. 1660–61. Oil on canvas, 85.PB.348, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo reproduced by permission from The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

learned viewers were likely to have known that this, the orans form of prayer, was one of the characteristic features of early Christian worship. Even though the orans mode of prayer, as is now known, did not originate with the Christians nor was unique to them, in the seventeenth century it was understood as a defining trait of early Christian prayer. The “father of modern church history,” author of the monumental and vastly influential

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Annales ecclesiastici, Cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), devoted an entire section of his first volume (Annus Christi 58, cc. 109–11, “De ritu standi, genuflectendi, et procedendi”) to the orans pose and the other early Christian modes of prayer and worship with respect to the physical disposition of the body. In this discussion, Baronio cites as one of his sources the well-known treatise on prayer by third-century Christian apologist Tertullian, a seminal, enduring, and oft-quoted source of Christian identity and apology throughout the centuries.37 As Tertullian explains, the early Christians were known (and ridiculed) for their mode of prayer: “In our case, not only do we raise [our hands when praying], we even spread them out, and, imitating the Passion of our Lord, we confess as we pray.”38 Corroborating this textual proof was the abundant visual evidence produced from the highly decorated catacombs of Rome, which, beginning in the late sixteenth century, had been the subject of intense exploration and documentation, inspired by the dramatic and accidental discovery of new catacombs in 1578. This discovery led to the unearthing and widespread exploration of several other catacombs, producing an enormous wealth of archeological findings, published two decades before the painting of Sweerts’s canvas in a lavishly illustrated and meticulously prepared work, Antonio Bosio’s Roma sotterranea (1632), followed later by a greatly expanded and revised version, Roma subterranea novissima (1651) by Paolo Arringhi. Among the visual findings from the catacombs publicized and illustrated by Bosio and Arringhi were the many representations of the orans figure—the early Christian at prayer—similar to the one in Plague in an Ancient City before the White Temple.39 It is also worth noting that none of the abundant visual evidence publicized by these two texts (including the markedly different manner of burial illustrated prominently in their frontispieces), shows up in Sweerts’s Black Hall: this absence represents yet another argument in favor of the non-Christian nature of that building.

THE SUM OF THE PARTS: A FORGOTTEN PLAGUE AND A FORGOTTEN TEXT Julian the Apostate and the (Apocryphal) Plague of 361–63 AD Unless Sweerts decided to dispense completely with historical accuracy or verisimilitude—not likely in the case of a serious, ambitious artist working 37 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:497–98 (annus 58, cap. 111), citing Tertullian’s De oratione (Prayer), chaps. 14 and 17 (Baronio’s footnote mistakenly gives the chapters as 11 and 12). For the orans pose, see also Tertullian Apology 24:5; 30:4, 7; and New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., s.v. “Orans”; and Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, s.v. “Orant, orante.” 38 Tertullian, Prayer (De oratione), trans. Daly, 170. 39See Bosio, Roma sotterranea, 631–32; and Arringhi, Roma subterranea novissima, 2:139. For the 1578 discovery of the catacombs and subsequent explorations, see De Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, 1:9, 12–39. For Bosio and Christian archeology in early modern Rome, see also Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 13:257–59; Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini, e ortodossi, 77–80; and Ghilardi, “Le catacombe di Roma.”

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in lofty ecclesiastical circles—one must ask at what point in recorded history paganism and Christianity existed side by side, legally and freely practiced by their respective adherents. Paying close attention to the visual detail supplied by Sweerts, the question must be further refined to ask not only when the two religions coexisted, but also when Christianity enjoyed a greater state of well-being (recall the fine, intact White Temple), while paganism had lapsed into a state of decay (recall the dilapidated conditions of the Black Hall). But there is a further element to factor into the interrogation. When, under these two conditions, did a violent plague strike the Roman Empire? The only answer possible turns out to be in the first half of the fourth century AD, during the brief but memorable reign (361–63) of Emperor Julian, called the Apostate. That a deadly punishing plague struck during the reign of the apostate emperor Julian came as no surprise to Christian apologists of his century or later. Jesuit Antonio Possevino (d. 1611) gives voice to the common, enduring belief of premodern Christian doctrine in his widely disseminated spiritual treatise, Cause et rimedii della peste (Causes of and Remedies for the Plague) in stating that God frequently and by preference sends plague (of all sorts) to punish sinful peoples, sinful nations, or their sinful rulers. The most famous examples are those recounted in the Bible, the ten plagues of Egypt sent to punish Pharaoh (and all the Egyptians along with him) for his enslavement of the Hebrews (Exodus 7–11) and the plague sent by God as punishment upon the Israelites when their king, David, dared to contravene the divine will by undertaking a census of his people (1 Chronicles 21 and 2 Samuel 24). However, there are other egregious examples in postbiblical Christian history as well, such as the one that fell (along with other scourges) upon the Roman Empire during the reign of Julian. Possevino explains: Keep in mind that whenever evil has reached its peak or whenever God has wanted to fill Paradise with the souls of the poor and the patiently suffering, or else whenever governments had to be changed in the world or when the Catholic religion had to separate itself from people who had rendered themselves unworthy of her, either because of their sins or their embracing of false doctrines and heresies, or when in the governments of the Christian republic, there were those who commingled worldly judgment with the ways of God, it was then that certain emissaries arrived to announce a most horrifying war to be waged by God. Thus did it happen that before the infliction of that great ruin upon the Christian Church by Julian the Apostate, that honored ecclesiastical philosopher, by name of Dydimus, while in prayer in Alexandria, foresaw the earthquake and the flood that submerged almost all of Alexandria, the drought, the plague, the fam-

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ine, all of which followed, one upon the other, in order to wake up the world that was asleep and to bestow the crown of victory upon the good who persevered in their faith and love of God. 40 (emphasis added) As is evident in Possevino’s pages and in other texts of Christian apology, the Julianic plague—together with the emperor’s untimely, ignominious death (ordered by the Virgin Mary herself, according to some embellished versions of the legend)41—was seen by Christians as an express act of divine retribution and celebrated by them as a further sign of the special status of their faith as the “one true religion,” constantly protected and nurtured by heaven. In Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, the most significant visual components can be explained by means of this new information; the important details of Sweerts’s canvas—the pieces of his puzzle—find a ready, coherent explanation by means of this hypothesis, namely, that the historical, spiritual scenario depicted is, in fact, the Julianic plague, the punishment sent by God upon the Roman empire for the apostasy of Julian, for his abandonment of the true faith (White Temple), and for the resurgence, under his rule and guidance, of paganism (Black Hall). As was common knowledge in Sweerts’s Europe, in the late fourth century, despite the official political triumph of Christianity under Constantine the Great and his successors earlier in the same century, paganism, though languishing, had by no means died out; it continued to be practiced, the physical structures of its cult remaining intact, even if the state was no longer committed to

40 “Ricordisi che quando la iniquità è venuta al colmo, o quando Iddio ha poi voluto empire il Cielo de’ poveri et patienti, overo all’hora che si hanno havuto a cangiare governi nel mondo, o che la religione Cattolica ha havuto a dispartirsi da’ popoli, i quali se ne rendevano indegni, sì per i loro peccati, sì anco per abbracciare false dottrine, et heresie, o quando ne’ governi della Republica Christiana si ha voluto mescolar la prudenza terrena colle strade di Dio; all’hora sono venuti cotali araldi a denunciarci dalla parte di Dio una spaventolissima guerra. Così prima che seguisse quella gran ruina, la quale Giuliano Apostata procurò contra la Chiesa Christiana, quell’honorato Filosofo Ecclesiastico, chiamato Didimo, mentre faceva oratione in Alessandria, previde il Terremoto, e’l Diluvio, il quale sommerse quasi tutta Alessandria, la Siccità, la Peste, la Fame, le quali l’una all’altra seguirono per svegliare il mondo che dormiva, et per dar corona a’ buoni, i quali furono nella fede, et amor di Dio costanti.” Possevino, Cause et rimedii della peste, 6r–6v (author’s translation). For Dydimus, see Nicephorus [Nikephoros Kallistos], Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:35. Cause et rimedii was published anonymously; Possevino’s authorship has only been recently established; Martin, Plague? 89n1. For more on the treatise, see Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 18. It is clearer in Possevino’s source, Nicephorus’s Historica ecclesiastica, that only Alexandria experienced terrible flooding, while the other disasters (plague included) mentioned in the text struck the Roman Empire in multiple locations, not just the Egyptian port city. 41 For the Virgin’s role in Julian’s assassination, see, for example, Bozio, De signis ecclesiae, 368 (9.10, sig. 36). Bozio’s massive work is a classic of Catholic Counter-Reformation apology against Protestant challenges to the legitimacy of the Roman Church; Julian’s appearance in it is another indication of the revived importance of the Apostate’s memory in the religious polemics of early modern Rome. The same detail regarding the Virgin and Julian is reported in Andrea Vittorelli, Gloriose memorie della B.ma Vergine Madre di Dio; Gran parte delle quali sono accennate, con pitture, statue, ed altro nella maravigliosa Capella Borghesia dalla Santità di N.S. Paolo V. edificata nel Colle Esquilino (Rome, 1616), cited in Ostrow, Art and Spirituality, 229–30.

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their maintenance. Once the reins of power were firmly and solely in his hands, Julian (Constantine’s nephew) attempted to turn back the clock; through personal example and active encouragement, the emperor strove to overthrow the “one true faith” by various means (though never through actual physical harm) and to return the empire to the ancestral religion of its fathers. In Plague in an Ancient City, therefore, calling attention to the true faith and the true source of salvation from the calamity of plague is Sweerts’s Blue Prophet, who, together with his two other gesturing companions on the piazza, points emphatically to the White Temple, that is, the seat of worship of the one true God. On the opposite side of the canvas the pagans are engaged in the vain pursuits of their heathen liturgy, directed to their “false gods.” If the liturgy in question is indeed the funeral of a pagan, then according to Christian doctrine, no matter how many prayers were offered up on behalf of the deceased, he or she had no possibility of new life after death, for resurrection of the body and salvation of the soul were reserved exclusively for believers in Jesus Christ the Savior. Julian himself is not visually present in Sweerts’s canvas, since the artist is concerned with depicting the effects of the plague on a whole population, and not on one individual, the emperor. The emperor did not personally suffer any of the effects of the plague and, in any case, would have not acknowledged himself as its cause. Nonetheless, ranking with Judas Iscariot as one of the most notorious and perennially “favorite” and fascinating villains of Christian history, Julian would have been quite present to the minds and imaginations of the seventeenth-century viewers of this canvas. There was by 1650 a massive body of literature surrounding Julian, transmitted over the generations by multiple means of dissemination—through printed texts such as the Golden Legend, preached sermons of church orators, public performances of morality plays, Jesuit or otherwise, and, of course, art. In the wake of the enthusiastic paleo-Christian revival that took place in Rome beginning in the late sixteenth century (partly in response to the Protestant assault against the Roman Church), the memory of the neverforgotten Julian gained even further notoriety. This revival, manifest in printed word and painted or sculpted image, focused especially on the heroic testimony of the early Christian martyrs, who died for their faith at the hand of persecuting Roman emperors, including Julian. A prominent example of the renewed fame and polemical currency acquired by Julian in the seventeenth century is the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, built and decorated earlier in the century under the patronage of Pope Paul V Borghese and his family. The fresco cycle of that famed chapel is devoted in large part to the theme of the defeat of heresy—a theme dear to the heart of Counter-Reformation Rome—and dramatizes in one of its scenes the violent, humiliating death of the emperor Julian, ordered by the

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Virgin Mary herself.42 Another prominent vehicle for Julian’s enduring memory is the cult of Saint Bibiana, the fourth-century martyr who died during the Julianic persecution. In the mid-1620s, Bibiana’s small church on the road linking the main pilgrimage stations of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura and Santa Maria Maggiore, was rebuilt (by Bernini, who also sculpted the statue of the saint on the main altar) and redecorated with frescoes (by Pietro da Cortona and Agostino Ciampelli) illustrating scenes from her life and passio.43 During the refurbishment of her church, Bibiana’s body was rediscovered and to commemorate the rediscovery and the renovations, Domenico Fedini composed a popular life of the saint, Vita di Santa Bibiana vergine e martire romana, which includes many introductory pages on the life and character of Emperor Julian. Bibiana’s memory is relevant to the discussion of Sweerts’s canvas not only because of her connection to the emperor Julian, but also because of the long association of her cult with the pursuit of healing (as the curative plants inserted at the base of Bernini’s statue indicate). This would be a most appropriate allusion in a canvas involving a deliberate contrast between pagan and Christian responses to sickness and death. Furthermore and just as significantly, during Sweerts’s own lifetime, all of Julian’s extant works were republished in Paris in 1630 by a distinguished publishing house (the brothers Cramoisy), under the care of an equally distinguished Jesuit scholar, Denis Petau. In the Praefatio to this edition Petau supplies the reader with the conventional, Christian (that is to say, demonized) portrait of the emperor. Petau’s work is just part of a vast body of Julian-related material produced in this century, much of which is conveniently documented in L’Empereur Julien: De l’histoire à la légende (331–-1715), edited by René Braun and Jean Richer. What is important to note is Julian’s vividly enduring memory in the collective consciousness of early modern Europeans and, thus, of the original audience of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City. It is not difficult to imagine the great resonance of this piece of “history,” the Julianic plague (apocryphal, no doubt) of 631–33, within the hearts of seventeenth-century Roman Catholics. Not only were they assailed by continual visitations of deadly plague, they were also the constant target of incessant attack (military, editorial, or otherwise) by their Protestant enemies who, like the apostate emperor, had supposedly abandoned the “one true faith.” Before looking in greater detail at Julian and his plague, as well as at the meaning of the various details in Sweerts’s canvas in the context of this chapter of history and its relevance to seventeenth-century Christen42For

the fresco, see Ostrow, Art and Spirituality, 229–30. See Marder, Bernini and the Art of Architecture, 47–55. As the Martyrologium romanum (Antwerp, 1613, Dec. 2) reminds the faithful, “for the sake of Christ, the holy virgin Bibiana” was scourged under orders of “the sacrilegious emperor Julian, until she gave up her spirit.” 43

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dom, a further word is in order about the question of Sweerts’s own historical sources. Was Possevino’s Cause et rimedii the immediate source of this historical information for Sweerts or for the learned friend or consultant— such as his Roman patron, historian abbate Antonio degli Effetti, or erudite humanist librarian Lucas Holstenius44—who might have advised the painter about the subject and its details? This may well have been the case since that popular treatise was close enough to him in both time and place (most recent edition, Milan, 1630). Equally as important, it represents only one of three texts found to mention the Julianic plague at all.45 However, even if Sweerts or his advisor had read Cause et rimedii, Possevino’s one paragraph on Julian would not have sufficed to allow the painter to understand the fuller historical context of this episode of early Christian history and thus fill in the details needed to compose his complex, monumental canvas. For that they would have been obliged to consult, to begin with, Possevino’s own source, the Ecclesiastical History of Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulus (ca. 1256–ca. 1335).46 Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History Julian is the object of much attention in Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History, which describes the apostate emperor’s entire life from childhood to death in generous detail. At the conclusion of his account of the most inglorious and premature death of the thirty-one-year-old Julian in battle against the Persians, Nicephorus summarizes the evil fruits of the emperor’s reign: During the entire time of [Julian’s] reign, indeed, an angry God sent various calamities and innumerable evils upon the dominions

44 For Effetti, see Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 27, 28, 29; and Bonnefoit, “‘Amor omnia vincit,’” 30–32. For Holstenius, see Rietbergen, “Lucas Holste”; Del Pesco, “Luca Holstenio, ” 172–73; and Bignami Odier, La Bibliothèque Vaticane, 138–39. Sweerts was in the employ of the Pamphilj family, specifically Prince Camillo (1622–66), whose uncle, Pope Innocent X, bestowed upon the artist the title of Cavaliere di Cristo, as well as other honors; Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 30. An inventory, dated circa 1652, of the Pamphilj art collection includes three works by Sweerts, though none of them are historical scenes; see Capitelli, “Una testimonianza documentaria,” inv. nn. 13, 226, 316. 45 Neither Baronio nor any of the many early modern plague treatises (except for Possevino) I consulted mentions the Julian plague; neither does late fourth-century Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, principal Latin source for the life of Julian, nor Socrates Scholasticus (ca. 380–450), another eminent Greek historian who covers the Julian years. The only texts to mention it, as far as I have been able to determine, are the two Byzantine ecclesiastical histories of Nicephorus and of his own widely plagiarized source, the fifth-century Sozomen (Sozomenos). Although Sozomen’s text also went through many editions in sixteenth-century Europe, there is much greater ground for conjecturing that Nicephorus was the ultimate source of Sweerts’s historical information. For the early modern editions of Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History, see Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2:227–28. For Sozomen’s reference to the Julianic plague, see Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence, 196–97. 46 On the page quoted, Possevino does not cite any source for the Julian reference; however, on the following page (7r), just two short paragraphs later, still speaking about plagues in early Christian history as punishment for persecution of the church or of specific Christians, the Jesuit explicitly notes (in the margin) his source as “Niceforo lib. 12, cap. 36.” It is thus safe to assume that Nicephorus was also the origin of the preceding information about the Julian plague.

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of the Romans. Thus, the earth was convulsed by extraordinary quakes so that it was not safe for people to remain in their homes, nor could they safely find refuge even in the open air. During his reign, calamity befell that most celebrated city of Alexandria, which was struck by a violent flooding of the sea.… Intense drought also struck while he was in power, wiping out crops and bringing about pestilential air as well…. Plague itself followed this famine, which infested the body with a variety of maladies, from which multitudes of mortals died. (10:35)47 Although none of the more ancient and more venerable sources of early Christian history note this Julianic plague, seventeenth-century readers of Nicephorus would have had no trouble in accepting it as fact, inasmuch as it fit squarely into the firmly held conviction of early modern Catholics, as in Possevino, about the vengeful hand of God who punished (especially by means of plague) all those who opposed his people. Cardinal Baronio does not mention the Julianic plague in his Annales ecclesiastici, but does discuss, with an air of obvious satisfaction, the violent plague that struck the empire during the earlier reign of Maximinus, another instance of direct divine retaliation for imperial persecution of the Christians: “Such was the reward and recompense,” Baronio reports, quoting Eusebios of Kaisareia’s Ecclesiastical History, “of the arrogant Maximinus” for his decrees against God’s people.48

EXCURSUS: NICEPHORUS AND THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS BETWEEN CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS In addition to the seemingly unanimous belief in the plague-as-divinepunishment topos among Christians, another reason for the ready acceptance of Nicephorus’s account by early modern readers was the popularity and esteem enjoyed by his Ecclesiastical History in seventeenth-century Europe. The authority of that text in that age was such that Nicephorus’s word alone sufficed to establish historical fact as fact. This is the impression conveyed by the great encomia heaped upon the work by its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editors and publishers and by the frequency and unquestioning manner with which this Byzantine history is quoted by

47 “Toto sane imperii eius tempore iratus Deus, varias calamitates et innumera mala Romanorum immisit ditioni. Siquidem terra ingenti motu concussa effecit, ut neque in domibus tuto homines manerent, neque sub dio etiam recte versarentur. Sub ipsius quoque imperio decantatissima illa urbi Alexandrinae calamitas accidit, cum mare vehementi aestu concitum…. Siccitates etiam intensae eo imperante cum fruges exstinxerunt, tum aerem quoque pestiferum reddidere…. Famem vero istam pestilentia est consecuta, quae corpora infestavit, et varios progenuit morbos, unde plurimi mortales interiere.” As mentioned in note 40 above and as is clear from a careful reading of Nicephorus’s text, the plague struck all parts of the Roman Empire, not just Alexandria. 48 For Maximinus’s punishment, see Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 3:531–32 (an. 312, capp. 1–4), quote at 3:532. See also Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, trans. Deferrari, 9:8 (222–23).

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numerous early modern texts.49 Although nowadays Nicephorus is far from being a household name (even in academic households), in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries quite the opposite was true. Why this was so has to do not only with the state of that era’s knowledge of the origins and nature of the Byzantine text but also and equally as important with the religious environment of the European continent. This is the same environment in which Plague in an Ancient City was produced and which is reflected in that canvas. Hence, the story of the early modern reputation and vicissitudes of this text, Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History, has much direct bearing on understanding Sweerts’s painting, its meaning and its message.50 A member of the imperial court of Constantinople, the Byzantine priest Nicephorus was the author of several other fairly well-known and regularly consulted works of varying genre (liturgical, hymnological, exegetical, literary), although none enjoyed the reputation of his Ecclesiastical History. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, this work was, by any reckoning, a bestseller. In 1553, it was published in Basel for the first time as a separate volume with a competent Latin translation by distinguished German scholar-statesman Johann Lange (Johannes Langus, 1503–67). This 1553 edition, made possible by the avid patronage of “King of the Romans” and future Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand (“Sacratiss. Rom. Regis Ferdinandi liberalitate”), boasted in its very title of “the extraordinary value” of Nicephorus’s history “compared with all other ecclesiastical histories thus far published” (“eximia utilitas, prae ceteris Ecclesiasticorum scriptorum historijs hactenus editis”). Early modern Europeans, it would appear, were indeed convinced of Nicephorus’s “extraordinary value,” for the work, in the same translation and as a separate title unto itself, was reprinted several times in rapid succession: Antwerp, 1560; Basel, 1561; Paris, 1562, 1566, 1567 (in French), 1576, 1573; and Frankfurt, 1588 (and perhaps 1597 as well).51

49 See for example, the important role played by Nicephorus’s history in the clash (ca. 1582) between humanist historian Carlo Sigonio and the Roman ecclesiastical censors of his De occidentali imperio and De regno Italiae; McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio, 269–70. In his much-consulted handbook for preachers, Orator christianus (3.13, p. 122), Jesuit Carolus Regius (Carlo Reggio) includes Nicephorus among the most eminent ecclesiastical historians to be included in the preacher’s reference library. 50 For Nicephorus, his Historia Ecclesiastica, and other works, see the entries (s.v. “Nicephorus”) in Dictionnaire de spiritualité; Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed.; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium; New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed.; and New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. 51 For Lange and the destiny of his Nicephorus translation, see Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen, cat. GG415. For Lange, see also Nouvelle Biographie Générale, s.v. “Lange, Jean.” For the early modern editions of Nicephorus, see the relevant pages from Johann Albert Fabricius, Bibliotheca graeca (1707), reprinted by Migne as preface to his edition of Nicephorus’s history (PG, 145:549–52). I have supplemented Hieronymus’s and Fabricius’s lists with the results of my own search of library catalogues. The 1553 edition of Nicephorus declares it to be the first translation (“nuncque primum in lucem editi”), but in fact, the Byzantine historian’s work had previously been published in an anonymous Latin translation in the anthology, Autores Historiae Ecclesiasticae (Basel, 1535); Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen, cat. GG410.

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All of these sixteenth-century editions were eventually superceded by a new, bilingual (Greek-Latin) version in folio, printed in Paris in 1630, entirely revised and newly annotated by eminent Jesuit scholar and editor of ancient Byzantine Christian texts, Fronton Du Duc (Ducaeus). This handsome edition was dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, whose intervention had been necessary in order for the editor to gain access to the precious sole surviving manuscript housed in the Imperial Library in Vienna. 52 Interestingly enough, in the same city and year, and from the same publishers, the brothers Cramoisy, came the new, scholarly, and likewise bilingual (Greek and Latin) edition of the works of Emperor Julian himself, Juliani Imp. Opera, quae quidem reperiri potuerant omnia. Edited by another Jesuit scholar, Denis Petau (Dionysius Petavius, 1583–1652), the edition comprised all of the emperor’s known works, including some never before published. Petau’s copiously annotated edition came only fifty years after the Paris 1583 bilingual edition of Julian’s collected works edited by Pierre Martinez (d. 1594) and Charles de Chantecler (fl. 1577–1620). All but forgotten in the West since its original publication in the thirteenth century, why had Nicephorus’s history become once again popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The principal reason was the Protestant Reformation. The war between Protestants and Catholics was waged as much on scholarly-historical battlefields as on military and political ones, with each side brandishing venerable, authoritative texts and newly minted historiae ecclesiasticae to assert the legitimacy of their respective version of Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical polity.53 This type of warfare entailed the rediscovery and recirculation of rare and neglected texts, in new, more accessible editions and translations, which were necessary for the manufacture of the new church histories.54 The first monumental volley of polemical-apologist scholarship based on resurrected primary historical sources was launched by the Protestants in the form of Magdeburg Centuries, thirteen volumes covering the first thirteen centuries of church history, a

52 For the editorial history of the Nicephorus text, see the dedication (to Richelieu) of the 1630 Paris editions by its publishers, the Cramoisy brothers; and Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen, cat. GG415. Migne’s Patrologia graeca, vols.145–47, reproduces the Paris 1630 edition with all of its introductory material and notes and represents the last published edition of Nicephorus. For Fronton Du Duc, see the entries under his name in Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus; and Dictionnaire de biographie française. 53 The fate of the great Palatine Library during the Thirty Years’ War is here relevant. As Manfred P. Fleischer (“Melanchthon as Praeceptor,” 580n83) observes, “After the army of the Catholic League had conquered Heidelberg, the headquarters of the Protestant Union, Pope Gregory XV requested the Bibliotheca Palatina as prize of victory, and sent the Greek scholar Leone Allacci…to supervise the transportation involving fifty wagons (1623). This indicates the importance Rome attached to the battle of books with Reformation Germany.” The bookplate inserted in the Heidelberg books by the Vatican Library at the time proclaims openly the nature of this translatio: “I am from that library which Maximilian, duke of Bavaria, took as a prize of war from captured Heidelberg and sent as a trophy to Gregory XV”; Metzger, “Bibliotheca Palatina/Vatican Library,” 59. 54 See Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini, esp. 81.

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project conceived by Croat Matthias Flacius Ilyricus but executed (in 1559– 74) by a group of Lutheran scholars known collectively as the “Centuriators of Magdeburg.”55 The principal Catholic response eventually came in the form of the twelve-volume Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607) by Cesare Baronio. Enormously influential and even more monumental than the Magdeburg Centuries, Baronio’s Annales were likewise compiled from ancient and medieval primary sources, both sacred and profane; prominent among them, and cited explicitly in text and footnotes, was Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History.56 Both the Magdeburg Centuries and Baronio’s Annales, in turn, inspired further recovery of historical texts and further widespread publicizing of the facts of Christian history. Heightened public awareness of the facts of church history was at the same time being fed by the remarkable progress in ancient Christian archeology sparked by the accidental discovery on 31 May 1578 of new, extensive, long-forgotten Roman catacombs, rich with images of early Christian art, on the Via Salaria. This epoch-marking discovery eventually led to a vast systematic, scholarly exploration of many other catacombs (in fact, almost all of those known today) and the publication of the wealth of findings in Bosio’s Roma sotterranea and Arringhi’s Roma subterranea novissima. The discovery of the catacombs and their visual contents is of direct relevance to Sweerts’s plague painting, reflected in the presence of the orans figures in front of the White Temple. Nicephorus’s role in the battle of the books between Catholics and Protestants is explicit in the written documentation of the age. In his 1665– 79 history of the Imperial Library in Vienna, Peter Lambeck reproduces a January 1621 letter from Jesuit editor Fronton Du Duc to imperial librarian Sebastianus Tegnagelius in which he explains the urgency of a new, accurate Catholic edition of Nicephorus and hence the need for the loan of the sole “pretiosissimus codex.” Referring to Nicephorus’s history as “that outstanding monument of ecclesiastical antiquity,” Du Duc explains that a certain man, Philippus Mornaeus (Philippe de Mornay, seigneur du Plessis-Marly, 1549–1623), who one time claimed to be Catholic but has been condemned as a Lutheran by Cardinal Perronio (Jacques Davy Du Perron, 1556–1618), appears to be planning his own edition of the Byzantine historian.57 Even stronger echoes of the Catholic-Protestant struggle can be heard in the ear-

55 For the Magdeburg Centuries, see Diener, ” Magdeburg Centuries”; New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v., “Magdeburg Centuries”; and Oxford Dictionary of Christian Church, 3rd ed., s.v. “Centuriators of Magdeburg” and “Flacius, Matthias.” 56See Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini, 64–69; and Pullapilly, Caesar Baronius. 57 For material relating to the Nicephorus manuscript, see Lambeck, Commentatorium, 1:101–3, 108– 9, 152–65. For Du Duc’s letter, see ibid., 162. For the “pretiosissimus codex,” see ibid., 152. For the description, “eximium istud antiquitatis ecclesiasticae monumentum,” see ibid., 165. For Du Perron and Du Plessis-Mornay, see entries under their names in the Dictionnaire de biographie française. For other works describing the vicissitudes of the Nicephorus manuscript, see note 52 above.

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lier, French-language edition published in Paris in 1567 by Sebastien Nivelle. Replete with references to “heretics,” “schismatics,” and “enemies of the church,” the long dedicatory “Epistre” to Charles IX, king of France, by a certain “Jean Gillot, Champenois” claims that, after the Bible, Nicephorus was simply the most useful text for strengthening one’s Catholic faith; this is so, he explains, because the Byzantine historian communicates teachings that “console us” and “give us hope” while all around us we see “this poor Christian Republic so fiercely tossed by the winds of evil doctrine.” Gillot’s “Epistre” goes on to say that not only does Nicephorus present the material in much better and more useful form than do his predecessors, but his history also demonstrates the fact that, despite the great adversity experienced through the centuries by the church, despite the many assaults of her enemies, she managed not only to be born, but also to mature and to persevere, at all times victorious against those who opposed her. Although not in any technical sense a primary source, Nicephorus’s work possessed in the eyes of early modern Christians an aura of venerable authority, given its provenance in the court of the Byzantine emperor to which it had originally been dedicated. Moreover, the very circumstances of its survival, detailed in the 1630 dedication of the Parisian publishers, seemed to show the direct hand of divine providence at work preserving it for posterity. This would have only served to endow the work with an aura of even greater venerability, notoriety, and authority than imparted by its age, exotic origins, and imperial connections. “Heu quibus ille jactatus fatis!” (Alas, by what calamities has [this codex] been tossed about!), exclaim the Parisian publishers of the 1630 edition; stolen in Buda by a member of the invading Turkish army from the library of Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, it was taken to Constantinople where it was later ransomed by a Christian, eventually finding its way to the Imperial Library in Vienna. Furthermore, as the Parisian publishers relate, the 1630 reappearance of the Ecclesiastical History was a result of the direct intervention of none other than the prime minister of France himself, Cardinal Richelieu, a fact also reported by Lambeck who reprints some of the correspondence between Paris and Vienna regarding the publication of the Nicephorus manuscript. When the new Paris edition of the Ecclesiastical History was finally published, that fact was noted with pleasure in Rome, as seen in a 1630 letter to the librarian of the Imperial Library in Vienna from erudite bibliophile and future custodian of the Vatican Library, Lucas Holstenius, then residing in the Eternal City under the employment of the Barberini. 58

58For the letter, see Lambeck, Commentatorium, 1:103–4. For Holstenius, see note 44 above. Lambeck was Holstenius’s nephew, whereas Denis Petau, the Jesuit responsible for the 1630 Paris edition of Julian’s opera omnia, had been spiritual father to Holstenius at the time of his conversion to Catholicism in Paris in 1624; Rietbergen, “Lucas Holste,” 260, 292.

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Nicephorus as Widely Consulted Sourcebook for Artists The utility of Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History, however, was not confined to controversialists, apologists, and historians. Its contents were of vital interest to another group as well, the artists of Catholic Europe. When Gian Lorenzo Bernini, for example, was planning his equestrian statue of the great Christian hero Constantine for Saint Peter’s Basilica, that architectural expression of the triumphant baroque papacy, it was, as Wittkower relates, “Nicephorus’s much-used thirteenth-century Historia Ecclesiastica” that the artist consulted for what was then considered an authentic description of the emperor’s physical appearance.59 In fact, Nicephorus and Nicephorus alone offers what he claims are authentic descriptions of the “true likeness” of several New Testament figures, including that of Jesus Christ himself (1:40) and his mother Mary (2:23). These obviously would have been of great interest to artists and patrons alike. In the late sixteenth century, the Holy Shroud of Turin, purporting to preserve a “true likeness” of the dead Christ, began to receive great attention in the Christian world, so much so that in Rome its image was incorporated into the decorative program of the Chapel of the Pietà in the Chiesa Nuova, the chapel for which Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ had been commissioned. According to Sheldon Grossman, most likely responsible ultimately for the inclusion of this reproduction was the 1598 book (reprinted in 1599) on the Holy Shroud, Explicatione del lenzuolo, ove fu involto il Signore…, by Alfonso Paleotti. One of the sources of Paleotti’s work was, not surprisingly, Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History whose description of Jesus’ face is cited.60 Another New Testament figure for whom Nicephorus furnishes a physical description is Saint Peter, called “prince of the apostles” and “first pope.” Peter’s true likeness was the object of much attention on the part of the post-Tridentine papacy (and the artists in its service), which aggressively used “the power of images” to defend its legitimacy and sovereignty. Hence, in his very much pro-papal Annales, Baronio quotes verbatim Nicephorus’s description of the face of Peter.61 Also of great interest to Catholic artists

59 Rudolf Wittkower (Art and Architecture, 110) is referring to the handwritten extract about Constantine taken from Nicephorus’s Historia Ecclesiastica (8:55) included among the Bernini papers, now at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. While the extract seems to have served Bernini in some way in the preparation of his statue of Constantine, it was not copied out by Bernini himself, according to T. A. Marder (Bernini’s Scala Regia, 171). To cite another example of Nicephorus’s status among seventeenthcentury artists, his was one of only two works of ecclesiastical history in the inventory of the library of Louis Le Vau; Ballon, Louis Le Vau, 152. Nicephorus was also consulted by other French artists of the early modern period, as discovered from a survey of “Books on Religious Subjects in Artists’ Libraries,” compiled from inventories left by artists or their heirs in the period 1630 to 1715 and published in Il Dio Nascosto, 267–70, #117. For a discussion of early modern artists’ access to historical information and other forms of humanistic culture, see Bialostocki, “Doctus Artifex,” 150–65, 267–70. 60 Paleotti, Explicatione del lenzuolo, 3:18, 19; and Grossman, Caravaggio, 22. 61 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:599 (an. 69, chap. 14). For the question of Peter’s true likeness in Baroque art, see Mormando, “Teaching the Faithful to Fly,” 120–21.

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and their patrons, as well as to all those in the church concerned with the production and devotional use of sacred images, is another of Nicephorus’s reports: in book 6, section 16, the Byzantine historian relates that “many painted portraits” (coloribus adumbratas imagines plurimas) were made of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Peter, Paul, and other apostles during their lifetimes. Some of these portraits, he tells further, came from the hand of Luke the Evangelist and were still extant at the time of his writing, as were many personal objects belonging to or intimately connected with these persons, such as the Virgin Mary’s dress (15:24) and the throne of James, “the brother of the Lord…first bishop of Jerusalem” (6:16). Nicephorus also recounts (2:7) the story of the miraculous image of the face of Christ, the Mandelion of Edessa, much venerated in Saint Peter’s during the seventeenth century and beyond. For his testimony to the fact that Jesus, Mary, and the apostles allowed such images to be created, Nicephorus had an important role to play in the Catholic struggle against the Protestant iconoclasts.62

READING PLAGUE IN AN ANCIENT CITY THROUGH THE EYES OF NICEPHORUS AND OTHER APOLOGISTS The Demonization of Pagan Religion by Christian Apologists After this long but necessary excursus on Nicephorus’s text and the religious struggles of early modern Europe, it is time to look again at the painted scene with much new information in hand. Even though a great deal of the more immediate visual focus of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City is on the dramatic physical and emotional effects of the plague upon a disparate array of poignantly portrayed individuals in the foreground—the dead and dying, male and female, young and old—there is much else being depicted and communicated to the viewer. With the help of Nicephorus, as well as other works of Christian history and apology readily available to the artist and his contemporaries, it is possible to shed light on many of the other significant details Sweerts has purposefully included in his painting, especially those thus far left unexplained or only partially explained. Prominent among the latter is the Black Hall and the activity therein. After the crowd of compassion-stirring plague victims placed closest to the viewer in the foreground, the Black Hall represents the segment of the canvas that perhaps most claims the attention: not only does this area occupy a substantial portion of the canvas, but it also represents the most enigmatic element of Sweerts’s larger enigmatic composition and has, to my knowledge, no counterpart in the architectural settings of any other depiction of ancient plagues. One wonders what precisely is taking place within that building. Is it indeed a real temple, that is, a place of worship 62 Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., s.v. “Nicephorus Callistus”; and New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. “Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulos.”

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and other ritual, or is it merely a place of burial? Or both? The possibility that the rite occurring within the Black Hall is simply the funeral of a plague victim has been examined, but whether the funeral of a victim of the plague or any other cause, natural or unnatural, its inclusion in this canvas would have served to highlight the futility of pagan prayer and ritual as far as the eternal destiny of the soul of the deceased is concerned—only through the Christian religion can one expect resurrection of the body and salvation of the soul in the afterlife. However, as explained earlier, there are several factors militating against this interpretation, requiring consideration of alternative readings of the visual evidence. One thing that seems certain is that there is a body—presumably a dead body—being carried in procession in the lugubrious, probably underground structure that is the Black Hall, but what does it mean? If not a victim of the plague or some other natural cause, was the deceased the victim of some other unnatural cause, like homicide or ritual sacrifice? While these are real and significant questions, finding definitive answers is not essential to understanding the ultimate message of Sweerts’s canvas. Given the dark, baleful air that envelops the dilapidated hall and, just as important, given the universally negative and often demonized fashion in which Christians, from the birth of their faith through the seventeenth century, viewed pagan religion and its rituals, it is reasonable to conclude that Sweerts intends the viewer to understand that nothing good is occurring within this tenebrous pagan gathering place. In the eyes of the church, although pagan mythological personages and narratives could be used in art and literature as convenient, entertaining instruments for the purpose of moral instruction, ancient Greek and Roman religion, as a theological system and body of liturgical practices, was simply to be despised and rejected. Only Christianity—and for Roman Catholics, only Roman Catholicism—represented the one, true faith and secure path to salvation. This black-and-white dichotomy, permeating all of the religious literature of the Christian centuries, is painted in stark chiaroscuro fashion. Therefore, whatever precisely is being acted out in the Black Hall, it would have been considered by Sweerts’s original Roman viewers as, at best, a spiritually futile and misguided form of a superstitious and idolatrous religious cult, at worst, a sinister form of demonolatry and barbarism. In fact, most of the literature relating to Julian the Apostate tends to emphasize the latter, more contemptuous interpretation of pagan worship. Unfortunately, unless some new detailed contemporary description or other reliable documentation regarding Plague in an Ancient City is found, scholars will never be able to unravel completely the mystery of Sweerts’s Black Hall. However, in the meantime, from what Nicephorus and the early Christian apologists communicate about the nature of pagan religion and its liturgy, especially with respect to the emperor Julian, it is possible to be a

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little more specific in deciphering the contents of that dark edifice, and of the remainder of the canvas. By investigating the precise historical, religious, and political context in which Sweerts produced his canvas, one can also speculate with greater specificity about the canvas’s intended message (a warning to those who persecute the Church or stray from its teachings) and its intended targets. Secret Underground Sanctuaries: Julian, Mithraism, and the Mystery Religions of the Late Roman Empire In his account of the Julianic reign Nicephorus tells that the young Julian, although a baptized Christian, was strongly attracted to the paganism of the traditional Roman state religion and secretly trained in its doctrine and rituals. Especially during his years of peripatetic schooling in various parts of the empire, the future emperor was also equally drawn to the more exotic mystery religions then extremely popular throughout the empire. To make matters worse (in Christian eyes, that is), Julian had also become deeply fascinated with and actively participated in various forms of occult magic and other superstitious practices, such as divination.63 Once he became sole emperor, uncontested in his power, Julian ended his Christian masquerade and gave himself totally and publicly to paganism and the occult; undertaking in earnest the political and social repression of his former religion, he began to make life increasingly difficult for Christians.64 As far as the nature of Julian’s liturgical experiences is concerned, Nicephorus (10:3) writes that on one occasion, in the course of secret sacrificing to demons in some secret underground sanctuary (“cum celebre quoddam adytum divinationis gratia subiret”), “horrenda spectra” (horrifying ghosts) were conjured up, which so frightened the future emperor that, forgetting himself, he spontaneously made the Christian sign of the cross in order to chase away these evil spirits. Earlier in the tenth book of his Ecclesiastical History, Nicephorus relates that Julian had “washed away” the sacred mark of his Christian baptism “through certain sacrifices and abhorrent invocations of demons and the blood of victims,” a detail singled out and amplified by Baronio’s Annales, which give a meticulous description of this supposed ablutionary rite of Julian’s. Baronio’s lurid description is, in fact, borrowed verbatim from the early Christian Latin poet, Prudentius (348– after 405); in his long and well-known hymn, Peristephanon Liber (Crowns of Martyrdom), with no reference to Julian, Prudentius supplies an extensive account of the taurobolium, the initiation rite of the cult of the Great Mother

63Nicephorus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:1; Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5:2; and Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 4:490–91 (an. 351, capp. 8–14, “Julianus magicarum rerum studiosissimus”; 4:525 (an. 354, cap. 24, “Julianus Athenis”), and 4:617 (an. 358, cap. 29, “Julianus in Galliis magiae studet”). 64 Nicephorus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:2.

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goddess Cybele that entailed a shower of ox blood poured down over the individual undergoing this ablution.65 Although in Sweerts’s canvas, there is inside or outside the Black Hall no sign of ritualistic animal slaughter or of the conjuring of “horrenda spectra,” the two episodes recounted by Nicephorus are nonetheless relevant. First, they illustrate the association that Nicephorus and many other Christian sources66 constantly make between pagan ritual, especially the secret ritual of the mystery cults, and macabre demonolatry or sanguinary barbarism. Thanks to this consistent message, it is certain that even if the seventeenth-century viewers of Sweerts’s canvas were not able to understand all of what was taking place within the Black Hall, they would nonetheless have been taught to assume the worst—that what they were witnessing, by the mere fact of belonging to the realm of pagan ritual, was in its essence horror-inspiring and repulsive. If not explicitly present in the canvas—perhaps for reasons of early modern decorum—the demonic and the barbaric (viewers would have assumed) could not be far away. At the same time, it goes without saying that such rites were not only humanly repulsive but also, even more importantly, spiritually futile. Sweerts’s original audience would have understood that, even if the individuals occupying the Black Hall were not (at that moment) worshipping demons, they, by virtue of being pagans, had no hope of salvation through any ritual or prayer. They were all, to put it bluntly, going to hell after death, their prayers, sacrifices, and rites utterly rejected by the one true and Christian deity. The second relevant piece of information supplied by Nicephorus’s anecdotes about Julian’s ritual experiences is their subterranean location, a smaller but significant detail for the deciphering of Sweerts’s canvas. Nicephorus takes it for granted that the pagan rites in question were customarily performed in secret underground sanctuaries; this is hardly surprising given the fact they were understood to be part and parcel of some mystery religion. This geographical detail is relevant because it confirms that assumption about the location and hence the nature of the Black Hall: although visually on the same horizontal plane as the rest of the activity in

65 Nicephorus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:2: “Julianus porro imperio potius, tam impudenter et aperte dicitur religionem abjurasse, ut ipsum etiam pernegaverit Christum, et sacrificiis quibusdam daemonumque detestandis invocationibus et victimarum sanguine sacrum abluerit lavacrum, atque seipsum amysteriis Ecclesiae exauctoratum excluserit.” See Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 5:31–32 (an. 361, cap. 4), where he cites Prudentius’s Peristephanon Liber (Crowns of Martyrdom), 10, vv. 1011–50. As Rowland Smith (Julian’s Gods, 138) reports, “A passage in Gregory Nazianzen’s First Invective against Julian implies that he participated at a taurobolium.” It is known for certain that Julian was an initiate of the Cybele cult and dedicated one of his treatises to her, the Oration upon the Mother of the Gods, published with the rest of his opera omnia. For an English translation of the treatise, see King, Julian the Emperor, 254–80. 66Another such source is John Chrysostom’s Discourse on Blessed Babylas and Against the Greeks (in Saint John Chrysostom: Apologist, trans. Schatkin and Harkins, 120, 121–22), chaps. 76, 77, 79, cited by Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 5:43 (an. 362, capp. 18, 19), concerning Julian’s “turpitude” and his support of “magicians, sorcerers, soothsayers, augurs, mendicant priests, and entire workshops of the occult.”

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the square, the structure, in reality, pertains to a different—that is, secret underground—realm to which the viewers have been granted momentary privileged access by the artist. In the two passages regarding Julian’s secret rituals, however, Nicephorus does not supply the name of any specific cult. In this he reflects the customary disinterest on the part of Christian apologists and polemicists in the real distinctions between one pagan cult and another. Inasmuch as they were not antiquarians nor archeologists, the Christian apologists and apologetic historians like Nicephorus were simply not interested in providing and adhering to a careful taxonomy of pagan religious practice, even though they do supply abundant, specific reference to the various cults and the distinct activities and beliefs pertaining to them. Whatever the specifics and the distinctions, pagan religion was all equally damned in all of its multiple manifestations, and the apologists’ goal was primarily to condemn and demonize this enemy, while proving and defending the veracity of their own faith. Yet, in another episode included in Nicephorus’s account of the Julian years, the Byzantine historian does give name to a specific cult, and this specification bears even more direct relevance to Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City. In Ecclesiastical History 10:6, under the orders of their bishop George, the Christians of Alexandria demolished a pagan temple, explicitly identified as a mithraeum, the cavelike house of worship of Mithras, in order to build a temple of their own on the site. The demolition uncovered the contents of the underground mithraeum (“subterraneum antrum”), that is, various idols and other instruments used in their secret rites. Finding them both ludicrous and foul, the Christians placed the liturgical objects on public display in deliberate derision of pagan religion. The devout pagans of Alexandria were not amused and, provoked to wrath, rose up against the Christians, killing many of them, including unlucky Bishop George. At this point in the text, appended to Nicephorus’s account of this episode are two footnotes of great interest. Supplied by the Latin translator of the text, Johann Lange, they both relate to Mithras and Mithraism and are integral to the early modern understanding of Nicephorus’s text.67 Quoting the late tenth-century Greek lexicon, the Suidas, the first footnote begins: “The Persians believed Mithras to be the Sun, to whom they offered many sacrifices. Only those who had passed through various grades of torments and had declared themselves holy and experienced in suffering could be initiated into these rites.” After informing the reader that a mithraeum is a “temple of the Sun,” the same note goes on to repeat a statement from the short biography of Roman emperor Commodus (reg. 180–92 AD) by Aelius Lampridius (fl. 4th century) to the effect that “he [Commodus] had polluted the

67 I assume the footnotes were inserted by Lange and not by the editor of the 1630 edition, since they are present verbatim in the earlier 1567 French-language edition based upon the same Lange translation.

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rites of Mithras with homicide.”68 The second footnote reports that in the mithraea while “making sacrifice to Mithras, the Greeks used to slaughter humans,” citing the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus (ca. 380– 450) as the source of this information.69 Socrates Scholasticus in book 3, chapter 2, includes the following chilling detail about the homicidal nature of Mithraic ritual: There was a place in that city which had long been abandoned to neglect and filth, wherein the pagans had formerly celebrated their mysteries and sacrificed human beings to Mithras. This, being empty and otherwise useless, [Emperor] Constantius had granted to the church of the Alexandrians; and [Bishop] George, wishing to erect a church on the site of it, gave directions that the place should be cleansed. In the process of clearing it, an adytum [innermost sanctuary] of vast depth was discovered which unveiled the nature of their heathenish rites: for there were found there the skulls of many persons of all ages, who were said to have been immolated for the purpose of divination by the inspection of entrails, when the pagans were allowed to perform these and suchlike magic arts in order to enchant the souls of men. Like the Nicephorus text they gloss, the two Lange footnotes and their sources confirm the polemical Christian association of pagan ritual—here, specifically Mithraic ritual—with the horrendous and the repulsive, in this case, the shedding of human blood. Although there is no sign of active slaughter, animal or human, in Sweerts’s scene, one cannot help wonder about the body being carried in procession within Sweerts’s Black Hall. During catastrophic outbreaks of plague in both ancient and early modern times, the highly contagious cadavers of victims would never have been thus carried about in public, much less given a normal burial within the context of a traditional organized ritual. The fear of further spreading the disease simply precluded such behavior. Thus, the question becomes: if the individual in question did not die of the plague, what then was the cause of his or her death? Was it, one wonders, a result of the cultic initiation rites held 68 “Mithram Persae solem esse putant, cui hostias multas sacrificant. Hujus sacris non initiabatur, nisi qui per gradus quosdam tormentorum ad ea pervenisset, et sanctum se perpessionisque expertem esse declarasset. Suid. Mithrion, Solis templum: Mithrica, Solis sacra. Lamprid. de commodo: Sacra Mithriaca homicidio vero polluit.” Nicephorus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:6n1. “Suid.” is Suidas (also known as Suida or Souda), the name given both to the Greek lexicon of circa 1000 and its anonymous compiler; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Souda.” Gregorios of Nazianzos’s First Invective Against Julian the Emperor (in King, Julian the Emperor, 57) also makes passing reference to people “tortured in the rites of Mithras.” Lilio Gregorio Giraldi (De deis gentium, 320–21) repeats the same information, citing Suidas and Nazianzen. 69 In quo olim Graeci, Mithrae sacrificantes, homines mactabant (Soc. lib. III, cap. 2).” The following quotation from Socrates Ecclesiastical History 3:2 is taken from the anonymous London 1914 translation (p. 173).

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within the Black Hall? In this discreet, decorum-preserving fashion, does Sweerts mean to suggest some such foul homicidal activity, as recounted in the Nicephorus footnotes and in so many well-known texts of Christian apologetic literature? Though unprovable given the current lack of documentation about Sweerts’s painting, this remains, nonetheless, an intriguing possibility. Since the name of Mithraism has been raised in connection with Julian, a word is in order about that ancient mystery religion and, more specifically, about what Sweerts and his contemporaries would have known about it, beyond the meager references in Nicephorus. Associated with Zoroastrianism, Mithraism was an extremely popular cult of Persian origin centering on worship of the sun god Mithras, or Mithra, that flourished during the late Roman Empire.70 In the late imperial age, by the time of Constantine the Great, Mithraism had extended to all parts of the empire, as is known from many extant inscriptions, statues, sculpted reliefs, and mithraea uncovered over the centuries. Apart from the few notions and impressions supplied by Nicephorus and his annotators, informed Catholics of the seventeenth century would have been well aware of the existence of Mithraism and of certain of its general features—albeit in a distorted and fragmentary fashion— through numerous references in the classics of early Christian apologetic literature. Among these sources are the works of Tertullian, who seems to have been well acquainted with that cult and who naturally has nothing good to say of it, setting the tone and topoi for subsequent Christian polemic against the cult. “For a Christian writer such as Tertullian,” Manfred Clauss points out, “the [Mithraic] temples were…‘in truth strongholds of darkness.’” 71 Another early Christian apologist who has much to say about Mithraism in even stronger, more mocking terms is Firmicus Maternus, whose fiery polemical text of circa 350, The Error of the Pagan Religions, was rediscovered in the late sixteenth century by Lutheran scholar Matthias Flacius Ilyricus (dean of the Centuriators of Magdeburg), and much republished in various editions through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of the Persian sun god and his cult, Firmicus declares: “Him they call Mithra, and his cult they carry on in hidden caves, so that they may be forever plunged in the gloomy squalor of darkness and thus shun the grace of light resplendent and serene.” Elsewhere he taunts the adherents of Mithraism: “You will not be able…to adorn yourself with the splendor of heavenly light. You are flung forth into darkness and squalor. There reign filth, squalor, gloom, darkness, and the horror of perpetual night.”72 Tertullian and Firmicus 70 For Mithraism, see Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras; Geden, Mithraic Sources; and Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, 2nd ed., s.v. “Mithraism.” We now know that ritual human slaughter was not a feature of Mithraism, but was one of the many calumnies spread by the Christians. 71 Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 44. For Christian and non-Christian references to Mithraism in the literature of the early centuries AD, see Geden, Mithraic Sources. 72 The quotation from Tertullian is cited in Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 44. For the quotations XXXXX

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Maternus are, in fact, using a familiar topos of early Christian polemic against paganism: the same image of subterranean darkness is applied to all pagans by the third-century bishop of Carthage, Saint Cyprian, who at the conclusion of his apologetic treatise, An Address to Demetrianus, exhorts the proconsul of Africa and his coreligionists “to emerge from the abyss of darkling superstition into the bright light of true religion.”73 To learn about Mithraism, seventeenth-century Catholics would have also had at their disposal the rather detailed (if not entirely accurate) accounts in the well-circulated and continually republished handbooks of pagan mythology, which enjoyed great popularity among artists, such as Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’s De deis gentium and Vincenzo Cartari’s Le vere e nove imagini de gli dei delli antichi, two books “to be found in every cultivated man’s library” in early modern Europe. The latter is especially informative on the subject in the annotated, illustrated edition by Lorenzo Pignoria. 74 These accounts were based upon not only ancient written sources, but also archeological remains that Sweerts and his contemporaries would have had ample opportunity to examine in the various collections of antiquities in Rome.75 As far as archeological traces of Mithraism are concerned, these came, above all, in the form of the mostly iconographically uniform Mithraic relief showing the god in his distinctive Persian dress (most notably the Phrygian cap) and framed by two torchbearers and various creatures (among them the scorpion, raven, and lion), in the act of slaying a bull. Examples of such reliefs were plentiful in early modern Rome, to be found, inter alia, in the collections of Cardinal Pio da Carpi, the Borghese and the Giustiniani families, as well as on the Capitoline itself. Colloquially

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from Firmicus Maternus, see his Error of the Pagan Religions, trans. Forbes, 52 (5.2) and 84 (19.1). As Forbes explains in his introduction (38–39), the first two early modern editions of The Error of the Pagan Religions were published in 1562 and 1603 by, respectively, Matthias Flacius and another Protestant scholar, Ioannis a Wower; however, the text was also republished several times in the following century, included, for example, in the 1643, 1645, and 1652 editions of Marcus Minucius Felix’s Octavius. For Tertullian and Firmicus Maternus on Mithraism, see also Geden, Mithraic Sources, 42–44, 56–57. 73 Cyprian, Treatise V, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 5:465. Cyprian’s purpose in writing this address was to refute pagan slander against Christianity and prove that the cause of the wars, famine, and pestilence then ravaging the world was the idolatry and devil-worship of the pagans, not the Christian faith. 74 Giraldi, De deis gentium, Syntagma VII (concerning Apollo and associated deities), 319–21; and Cartari, Le vere e nove imagini, 505–6. The quotation about “every cultivated man’s library” comes from Seznec, “Myth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” 293. The third of the most consulted Italian Renaissance mythological compilations, the less scholarly Mythologiae by Natale Conti, does not mention Mithras. For these Renaissance handbooks, see Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods. 75 For early modern Roman collections of antiquities and, especially, their increasing accessibility to the public, see Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception.” For inventories and discussions of antiquities uncovered by Sweerts’s lifetime, see the relevant portions of Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique; and L’idea del bello. See also Barkan, Unearthing the Past; and Burke, “Images as Evidence.” In addition there were the popular contemporary guidebooks such as Ulisse Aldrovandi, Delle statue antiche che per tutta Roma in diversi luoghi e case si veggono (published in same volume with Lucio Mauro, Le antichità de la città di Roma, Venice, 1562) and Bartolomeo Marliani, Urbis Romae topographia (Venice, 1588).

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referred to as Lo Perso (The Persian), the sculpture from the Capitoline was the sole artifact remaining of a mithraeum located under the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. This mithraeum had been known (albeit not for what it truly represented) as early as the time of Cola di Rienzo in the fourteenth century. Surviving intact on that Roman hill until the late sixteenth century, it was destroyed in the early throes of the Counter-Reformation, with, unfortunately, no verbal or visual documentation preserved regarding its appearance.76 Where there were no images, there might be inscriptions containing the name of Mithras: hence, in the volume of his Romanae urbis topographia devoted to epitaphs and other memorial inscriptions (Antiquitatum seu inscriptionum et epitaphiorum quae in saxis et marmoribus visuntur), Jean Jacques Boissard includes in the annotated index of abbreviations, the item, “D.S. IN. MIT,” which, as he explains, stands for “Deo Soli Invicto Mithrae” (To the Invincible Sun God Mithras). Although Nicephorus’s own reference to Mithraism does not connect that cult directly to Julian, seventeenth-century Europeans knew from the emperor’s own writings that he himself was a devotee of the sun god. As, for example, Giraldi and Cartari report in their handbooks of mythology, the sun god was worshipped in antiquity under many different names, above all, that of Phoebus Apollo and Sol Invictus, but also that of Mithras. Among Julian’s extant works (published more than once by 1650) is a devout philosophical treatise on the subject of the sun god (Oratio in Regem Solem ad Salustiam); at the very beginning of this treatise, the emperor declares his personal devotion to the Deus Sol Invictus, while later making specific reference to the widespread Roman worship of Mithras.77 Hence, given all this 76 Boissard (Romanae urbis topographia, 47) lists in the “horti Cardinalis Carpensis,” a “tabula marmorea in qua sculptus est Mithras Deus Persarum mactans taurum”; see also Aldrovandi (Delle statue antiche, 301) for the same item in the Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi garden. For the Giustiniani Mithraic artifacts, see Whitehouse, Paper Museum of Cassiano Dal Pozzo, 284. For the Capitoline Mithras relief (now in the Louvre, #569) and mithraeum, see Cumont, Textes et monuments figurés, 2:193–95, monument 6; and Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 169–71, citing the more extensive discussions of Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. The Capitoline mithraeum was destroyed sometime between 1550 and 1594 and, as far as I can determine, no descriptions of it have survived from the late medieval and early modern periods; however, the surviving relief was seen on the Capitoline in the early seventeenth century by Pignoria who describes it in detailed fashion and supplies an illustration; Pignoria in Cartari, Vere e nove imagini, 505–6. The relief later became part of the Borghese collection. Although not perceiving the connection to Mithras and interpreting the Mithraic relief as an allegory of Agriculture, Marliani (Urbis Romae topographia, bk. 7, 152–53) reports that there are many such works to be seen in Rome, mostly in fragmented condition. He illustrates the intact one to be found “affixed to the wall of the palace of Saint Mark under the tower of that square,” but mentions others, including one in the Cesi collection. It was only in 1606 that the ancient remains depicting the Mithraic myth, copied by Renaissance artists since the fifteenth century, were correctly identified as such by Pignoria who published his commentary in his 1615 revised edition of Cartari’s Vere e nove imagini; see Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, 84–85. A fully accurate interpretation would not come until Filippo della Torre’s Monumenta veteris Antii (Rome, 1700); Cumont, Textes et monuments figurés, 2:71. 77“Etenim regis ego sum Solis assectator et famulus,” “colere nos Mithram,” Julian, Oratio IV, in Juliani imp. opera, ed. Petavius, 254 (i.e., 244) and 289–90. Julian’s treatise on the sun had wide reverberations in early modern Europe; as Eugenio Garin (Studi sul platonismo medievale, 190-215) has shown, Julian’s treatise was much studied by and had a decided influence upon Marsilio Ficino, Ficino’s solar XXXXX

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historical information about underground pagan cults, Mithraism, and Julian, Nicephorus’s seventeenth-century readers would have very likely assumed that the location of the rituals involving Julian, the horrenda spectra, and the taurobolium was a mithraeum. In turn, furthermore, Sweerts’s original audience, reading Plague in an Ancient City through Nicephorus’s eyes and understanding the canvas as a depiction of the Julianic plague, might have likewise interpreted Sweerts’s Black Hall in this same way. Such an interpretation is encouraged, furthermore, by a passage in the apologist Firmicus Maternus. In commenting on the belief in Mithras as the “god born from a rock” and contrasting it with the Christian notion of Jesus as the cornerstone upon which the church is built, Firmicus evokes a distinctive feature about the Black Hall, its disintegrating stone structure, which is in clear opposition to the firm, solid, intact state of the White Temple: Different is the stone which God promised He would lay in making strong foundations of the promised Jerusalem. What the symbol of the worshipful stone means to us is Christ. Why do you, with the knavery of a thief, transfer to foul superstitions the dignity of a worshipful name? Your stone is one that ruin follows and the disastrous collapse of tumbling towers; but our stone, laid by the hand of God, builds up, strengthens, lifts, fortifies, and adorns the grace of the restored work with the splendor of everlasting immortality.78 But is this indeed a correct reading of the Black Hall? Is this what Sweerts himself intended, to evoke a place of Mithraic worship? One must again turn to the visual evidence, being aware, however, that neither Sweerts nor his contemporaries had any real conception of what a mithraeum (or any abode of the mystery religions) looked like, given the total absence (in 1650) of unearthed archeological remains or written descriptions of such locales. Wishing to depict a mithraeum, the artist would have been obliged to invent its contours himself. He would have, however, known some of the Mithraic imagery. But in or around the structure there is none of the specific iconography associated with Mithras or with any other exotic mystery religion, such as that of the great earth mother goddess, Cybele (also traditionally associated with caverns and mountains) and the mystery religion surrounding her son, Attis, whose supposed resurrection from the dead caused him to be seen as a protector of deceased souls

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philosophy influencing, in turn, both Copernicus and Galileo. For Julian’s initiation into Mithraism (a fact probably unknown to the seventeenth century), see Baus, Imperial Church, 55; and Hinson, Church Triumphant, 162. For an English translation of Julian’s complete sun treatise, see King, Julian the Emperor, 219–53. 78 Firmicus, Error of the Pagan Religions, 87 (20.1).

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(and hence his frequent appearance on Roman funerary monuments). Attis was the focus of another popular late imperial cult that would have been well known to Sweerts through the works of Giraldi, Cartari, and company, as well as through the abundant archeological remains in Roman collections. Like Mithras, Attis was associated with the sun and sun worship, according to Lorenzo Pignoria’s treatise, Magnae Deum Matris Idaeae et Attidis Initia ex vetustis monumentis.79 Among the extant works of the emperor Julian available to seventeenth-century readers was the Oration upon the Mother of the Gods, in which he discusses the figure of Attis, “he that resembles the sunbeams,” who “descended into the cave and conversed with the nymph,” as a symbol of philosophical principles.80 It is unlikely, however, that Sweerts means to invoke Julian’s rather esoteric metaphysical notions, nor any of the rites of Cybele and Attis. The latter rites included yearly commemoration of his death, as Firmicus Maternus relates: “In annual rites honoring the earth there is drawn up in array the cortege of the youth’s funeral, so that people are really venerating an unhappy death and funeral when they are convinced that they are worshiping the earth.” 81 There is not enough visual evidence to support such a conclusion; absent, for instance, is any sign of Attis’s sacred pine tree. Furthermore, thanks to the outraged condemnations in Firmicus, in Augustine’s The City of God Against the Pagans (2:5 and 7:26), and in other paleo-Christian apologetic works, the rites of Cybele and Attis were also understood to be marked by sexual obscenity and other moral filth, of which there is no sign in Sweerts’s canvas. On the other hand, there is enough in the depiction of the Black Hall itself to strongly suggest a structure pertaining to secret underground ritual: it is clearly not one of the aboveground public temples belonging to the traditional religion of the Roman state. It indeed has all the air of one of Tertullian’s “strongholds of darkness,” pointedly contrasted by Sweerts with the fully illuminated, intact marble White Temple opposite it. More specifically, as Giraldi points out more than once in his account of Mithras, this god of Persian origin was worshipped in caves or caverns, especially those containing or located near natural springs: these are the localities with which caryatids, the one ornamental detail of Sweerts’s Black Hall, were conventionally associated.82 There is, moreover, elsewhere in the canvas, pointed reference 79 Pignoria, Magnae Deum, 1, citing Macrobius and Arnobius as his authorities. For Cybele and Attis in our period, see also Cartari, Vere e nove imagini, “La Gran Madre,” 186–91; and Giraldi, De deis gentium, Syntagma IV. For a modern study, see Vermaseren, Legend of Attis, 6. Sweerts worked for the Pamphilj and one of the prized possessions of that family’s collection of antiquities was a large statue of Cybele seated upon a lion. The Cybele statue appears to have been an early acquisition by Prince Camillo, although the earliest documentation of its presence in the family holdings dates only to 1666; see Antichità di Villa Doria Pamphilj, cat. 117; and Documenti per servire allo studio delle collezioni Doria Pamphilj, 28. 80English translation from King, Julian the Emperor, 262–63. 81 Firmicus, Error of the Pagan Religions, 48 (3.1). 82 Giraldi, De deis gentium, Syntagma VII, 319–21: “in antro colebatur”; “antrum floridus…prope XXXXX

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to sun worship in the form of the obelisk and the many sun-transfixed individuals scattered throughout the piazza, and heliolatry was a defining feature of Mithraism. Given the perplexing state of the visual evidence discussed, it is not possible to give a secure answer to the precise cultic identity of the Black Hall. It is possible that Sweerts intended to conjure up the notion of secret underground mystery religion in only a generic, somewhat abstracted way, appropriately shrouding it in mystery, just as it had been in late imperial times. His intent may not be to portray in detailed fashion the realm and rites of any particular cult such as those of Mithras, Cybele, or Attis; not only could he have had no accurate idea of what these places looked like, he may have also considered such iconographical specificity irrelevant to the ultimate message of his canvas (namely, a warning to the enemies of the Catholic Church about the swift and fierce reality of divine retribution). The fact is, nonetheless, that the specific name of Mithraism has surfaced in the written sources in connection with Julian, and there is nothing in the canvas that excludes it as a possible informing element in Sweerts’s invenzione. Furthermore and more importantly, there are certain details in the canvas that seem to more positively allude to Mithraism. Hence, the cult remains a useful, if not inevitable, point of reference in attempting to decipher Sweerts’s canvas. Grades of Initiation and Ascent of the Soul The Lange footnotes to Nicephorus’s text supply two other details that may help further unlock the mystery of Sweerts’s canvas: the practice of sun worship and the existence of multiple grades of initiation within Mithraism. One of the most salient physical features of the interior of Sweerts’s Black Hall is its multileveled structure: is this ramplike passageway a straightforward means to get from top to bottom within the structure or does it have some symbolic meaning? Is the long line of men and women entering and ascending the Black Hall by means of the multilevel ramp meant to be an allusion, albeit generic, to the various grades of the cult’s initiates mentioned by Suidas? And is some sort of encounter with the sun the ultimate object of their movement? At the apex of the ramp in the upper right, there is an unseen room or other area from which rays of the sun are pouring forth into the darkness of the edifice. Is the artist communicating here something about the ritual being acted out? Or does the top of the ramp simply lead to another exit from the building? If the latter, then why is no

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fontes”; “antrum vel specus”; “naturalem speluncam et fontibus scatentem.” In these same pages, Giraldi mentions that “there was a temple dedicated to Mithras also in Alexandria where his rites were performed with great display, as we note in the book of the Historia Tripartita” (an anthology assembled by Cassiodorus from the ecclesiastical histories of Sozomen, Socrates, and Theodoret).

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one exiting from the ramp on its lower right, giving onto the piazza? Furthermore, even if the people on the ramp in the upper right are simply exiting the building, the fact they do so directly in the direction of the sun and not away from it (that is, onto the piazza below by means of the lower ramp) would seem to bear some significance. Perhaps in configuring the details of his Black Hall and the flow of people within it, Sweerts is indeed suggesting something important about the nature of the ritual being enacted. It would seem that some sort of dramatic, soul-enlightening and life-transforming encounter with the sun was probably the intended culmination of the successive stages of the initiatory ritual of Mithraism. This is not surprising, given the fact that Mithraism, after all, was a cult of the sun god. And the secrecy surrounding their rites, as well as a more personal, visceral encounter with the divine and promise of ascent for the achievement of personal salvation were features shared by all the ancient mystery cults. It was this soteriological promise that rendered the cults distinct from and more popular than the impersonal traditional state religion of Rome. This fact of the initiatory and soteriological features of the ancient mystery religions was fairly well known to early modern humanists, artists, and other learned contemporaries, as the classic study of Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (first published 1958), demonstrated long ago; echoes of such knowledge are frequently encountered in the art of those centuries. Although even today, information about Mithraic liturgy and creed is limited, a useful analogy can be made, as Manfred Clauss observes, with the initiatory rite of another contemporary mystery cult, that of Isis, which is described in a passage from Apuleius’s perennially popular (and to seventeenth-century readers, widely available) second-century Latin novel, the Golden Ass or Metamorphoses (11.23): “I came to the boundary of death and having trodden the threshold of Proserpina, I traveled through all the elements and returned. In the middle of the night I saw the sun flashing with bright light. I came face to face with the gods below and the gods above and paid reverence to them from close at hand.” Clauss further comments, “It is therefore intelligible that [Mithraic] initiation was understood as a kind of rebirth. An unknown person scratched a graffito into the sidewall of the cult-niche of the mithraeum beneath S. Prisca in Rome: ‘Born at first light when the Emperors (Septimius) Severus and Antoninus (Caracalla) were consuls’…. By analogy with the Sun’s birth at sunrise, the initiand is also ‘born’ through initiation into the mysteries.”83 Given the popularity of The Golden Ass, Sweerts or his learned advisor is most likely to have had access in some form to Apuleius or commentaries on 83 Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 103, 104–5. Apuleius and his works were (and are still) considered important sources of information on ancient religion and philosophy, cited and discussed, to mention only two examples, by Augustine City of God 8:12, 14, 16; and Pignoria, Magnae Deum, 4–6.

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his work. They would have, furthermore, come across reference to the Mithraic intiatory grades and tests not only in the Lange footnotes to Nicephorus, but also in the constantly cited apologetic works of Gregorios of Nazianzos and Tertullian, who wrote to defend Christianity against its enemies and distinguish it from other cults, like Mithraism, that shared common features.84 These scattered references in the Christian classics, together with the testimony of such a widely known work as Apuleius, may have been sufficient for the artist to compose his historia featuring a depiction of the rites of, if not Mithraism, then a generic pagan mystery cult. In short, although it cannot be proved beyond a doubt, the connection between the written descriptions of the Mithraic and other ancient mystery-cult rites and what is seen in Sweerts’s Black Hall remains suggestive. Heliolatry: Mithras, Phoebus Apollo, and “Christ Our Phoebus” Doubt may remain about whether one can read the multitiered disposition and movement of the crowd in Sweerts’s canvas as an allusion to the various grades of initiation of Mithraism or some other mystery cult, but the other piece of information supplied by the first Lange footnote to Nicephorus is, without doubt, directly relevant to this painting: the practice of heliolatry, sun worship, as a characteristic feature of Mithraism. Lange’s footnote accurately states that sun worship indeed represented one of the most conspicuous features, not only of Mithraism, but also of the official state religion of Rome in the later centuries of the empire. Moreover, in those centuries, the cult of the sun god “remained the chief imperial and official worship till Christianity displaced it.”85 The solar deity Mithras, imported from Persia to Rome in the late first century AD, came to be considered yet another manifestation of the universal sun god, already worshipped in Rome under the various guises of Apollo, Helios, and, especially, Deus Sol Invictus.86 The second-century Roman emperor Commodus was himself initiated into the Mithraic cult, as was, it seems, Emperor Julian. (Sweerts and his contemporaries, however, may not have been aware of Julian’s formal initiation into Mithraism since Nicephorus, Baronio, and Julian’s Jesuit editor, Petau, do not mention it.) One of the most literate and philosophical of Roman emperors, Julian, as already mentioned, composed a treatise dedicated to the sun god (Oratio in Regem Solem), which is included in the Paris 1630 edition of his collected works, in which the emperor openly declares himself as the god’s “follower and servant” and refers to the Roman veneration of Mithras. Before his conversion to Christianity, Julian’s predecessor (and 84 Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 102. The cult of Mithraism was restricted only to men, but Sweerts and his contemporaries would not have known this, for it is not mentioned in any early modern source. 85 Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Sol.” 86 In addition to the already cited sources on Mithraism and Sol, see also the relevant entries in Adkins and Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome.

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uncle), Constantine the Great was also an ardent devotee of the sun god: Constantine “hailed [Sol Invictus] as his tutelary god, and persistently portrayed the same deity on his coinage as his invincible companion.” 87 As with many other features of Roman imperial religious praxis, Christianity absorbed this deeply engrained image of the godhead, casting Jesus Christ in a similar guise of solar divinity as deliberate counterforce to pagan usage. Christ is frequently celebrated as “Sol oriens” and “Sol iustitiae,” as, most notably, in the ancient Advent antiphon, “O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae et sol iustitiae.” This is seen in the famous mosaic of the late-third or early-fourth century depicting Christ as an Apollo-like figure in his quadriga, in the necropolis under Saint Peter’s basilica, a motif echoed in a seventeenth-century marble decoration above the inside north transept door of the basilica of Saint John Lateran.88 The same symbolic association also played a role in the decision of the early Christians to adopt Sunday, the day dedicated by the Romans to the solar divinity, as their own formal Sabbath day. The “Christ as rising sun” imagery was especially important during the celebration of the Easter vigil Mass of the Resurrection, properly held in the early morning, in eager anticipation of the new light of dawn. This connection between the rising sun and Christ, together with the knowledge that the ancient Romans worshipped the sun specifically at dawn and not sunset (as seen in this canvas), would thus lead to the conclusion that Sweerts’s White Temple, the Christian house of worship, is facing east, not west, the direction of the setting sun. Given the popularity of the topos, it would have been difficult for Sweerts not to have been aware of the Christological symbolism of the rising sun. “Sol Oriens” is, to cite a further example of its omnipresence in seventeenth-century Catholic culture, one of the images discussed by that bestselling, frequently republished encyclopedia of ancient symbols and emblems, the Hieroglyphica by sixteenth-century humanist Pierio Valeriano (d. 1558), a work much consulted by artists. Elsewhere, in another, less famous work, Hieroglyphicorum collectanea ex veteribus et neotericis descripta, the same Valeriano discusses at length the image of Christ as “Sol Iustitiae,” Sun of Justice, and his comments are very pertinent to the message of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City. In their “foolish senselessness” (stolida insania), Valeriano mockingly writes, the ancient Greeks and Latins turned to their sun god, Phoebus Apollo, when seeking the recovery of their health, but the true “author of life and health” (vitae et sanitatis…auctorem) is Christ, “our Phoebus” (Phoebum nostrum).89

87Grant,

Constantine the Great, 134. the necropolis mosaic, see Jensen, “Two Faces of Jesus,” 50. For the Lateran solar Christological decorative detail, see Zuccari, “Borromini tra religiosità borromaica,” 64, and pl. 16. 89 Valeriano, Hieroglyphicorum (1626), 176, s.v. “Sol Iustitiae.” For Valeriano’s discussion of Christ as the Sol Oriens, see his Hieroglyphica (1602), 470. Nicephorus was one of the sources of the Hieroglyphica, as XXXXX 88For

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To return to the question of the orientation of Sweerts’s White Temple, Christian liturgical scholar Jaime Lara reports that “as early as the first century there is evidence that Christians faced east while praying. Numerous texts show that praying toward Jerusalem or toward the rising sun—as symbol of awaiting the second advent of Christ, the “Sun of Justice”—was prominent in the consciousness of the church, especially in the eastern Mediterranean world.”90 This meant that Christians generally oriented their churches so the apse (where prayer occurred), and not the entrance façade, faced east. However, in Rome the entrance façades of three of the oldest and most venerable of the patriarchal basilicas, Saint Peter’s, the Lateran, and San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, indeed face east, like the Basilica of the Resurrection in Jerusalem: Sweerts may be reflecting this fact in the orientation of his own White Temple. At the same time, the figures on the steps of Sweerts’s White Temple face and reverence the temple itself, as the house of God, and not the sun rising behind them; actual, direct, physical worship of the sun itself was condemned by the church as yet another superstitious trait of the pagans. This was true especially in Rome where “there was a conscious avoidance of practices which suggested the pagan sun cult.”91 This is presumably precisely what the many figures in Sweerts’s canvas facing and intently gazing at the sun are doing: worshipping, or at least reverencing, the sun at dawn, the auspicious moment of its daily rebirth—rebirth being the goal of the Mithraic rites. Obelisks and Their Significance: From Ancient Egypt to Baroque Rome If Sweerts and his contemporaries did not learn that sun worship was a major characteristic of ancient paganism through any other source, they would have certainly known of it and been constantly reminded by a readily available visual source: the Egyptian obelisk, one of the most prominent architectural features of the seventeenth-century Roman cityscape, present in Plague in an Ancient City as well. The obelisk in Sweerts’s canvas is no mere ornamental appendage to the city square, just as it was not for the citizens of seventeenth-century Rome. It was certainly not for the early modern popes who went to considerable expense to repair and re-erect these prized remnants of pagan civilization in the city’s most prominent public spaces. For Sweerts and his contemporaries, the obelisk represented a polit90

noted in the list of “Authores quorum testimoniis in his commentariis usus est Pierius.” 90 Lara, “Versum Populum Revisited,” 213–14; Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), s.v., “Orientation of Churches”; and New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., s.v. “Basilica.” For the importance of sun symbolism in early Christianity, see also Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, s.vv. “Soleil” and “Dimanche”; and New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd. ed, s.v. “Sunday.” 91Lara, “Versum Populum Revisited,” 214. However, there were Christians who continued to emulate the pagan practice of paying homage to the sun itself, doing so in the early morning in the forecourt of Saint Peter’s, as seen a Christmas sermon of Pope Leo the Great; I sermoni del ciclo natalizio, 175, 367–68. See also Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 172; and Lançon, Rome in Late Antiquity, 137.

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ically and spiritually charged symbol, whose value as an instrument of selfaggrandizement and propaganda was much exploited by the Roman pontiffs after the Council of Trent. The key figure in this regard is Sixtus V, whose short but prodigiously productive reign (1585–90) was marked by (to use Erik Iversen’s term) a distinct “megalithomania”—a passion for Egyptian obelisks. The papal passion for obelisks was not aesthetic: just as the Roman emperors, in transporting the awe-inspiring monoliths from Egypt to Rome, used the obelisk in part to celebrate their conquest of and hegemony over the proud and once powerful ancient Egyptian empire, so did Sixtus and other pontiffs after him use these monoliths as a means of publicity and celebration. What they were publicizing and celebrating was not only the victory of Christianity over paganism, but also the supposed triumph of a re-energized Catholicism over its “heretical” and “schismatic” Protestant enemies. The first of Sixtus’s obelisk projects involved the one in his very front yard, the Vatican obelisk, which in 1586 he had moved (through the genius of Domenico Fontana) to the center of Saint Peter’s Square, installed upon a new base, and surmounted by the cross of victory. Echoing the medieval exorcism rituals, one of the inscriptions that Sixtus ordered chiseled into the base was meant to serve as a warning—a pronouncement of “menacing aggressivity,” Giovanni Cipriani calls it—to the enemies of Catholicism and the papacy: “Ecce Crux Domini / Fugite Partes Adversae / Vicit Leo De Tribu Judae” (Behold the Cross of the Lord / Enemies, flee / The Lion of the Tribe of Juda has conquered).92 At the same time architects and engineers were busy moving and reerecting these monoliths, historians were at work educating the public as to the history and meaning of these fascinating remnants of ancient civilization. Among the most important of this new stream of obelisk scholarship was Michele Mercati’s De gli obelischi di Roma (1589), a thorough, wellresearched work covering all the obelisks then visible in the Roman cityscape. Texts such as these uncovered and publicized much ancient lore regarding these venerable structures, of historical, political, and, above all, spiritual nature. The essential points of this information were, in turn, transmitted in condensed form through the new inscriptions composed in elegant Latin for the new bases of the obelisks. Of this large body of data and interpretation, what is important here is the original purpose and meaning of the ancient Egyptian obelisk: for the Egyptians and Romans, the obelisk was a religious icon, a public structure erected in honor of the sun god, whose beneficent, omnipresent rays the monolith’s very physical form was meant to represent.

92

Cipriani, Gli obelischi egizi, 44–45. For the inscription see also Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 1:38.

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This is the historical lesson conveyed by Mercati to the sixteenth-century public. It was later repeated and amplified by Athanasius Kircher’s Obeliscus Pamphilius, published in 1650 to commemorate the re-erection of an obelisk in Piazza Navona, incorporated by Bernini into his lavish and delightful Fountain of the Four Rivers.93 This project occurred not only while Sweerts was in Rome, but also during the years he was working for Prince Camillo Pamphilj, nephew of Innocent X, the pope who commissioned the Navona obelisk/fountain project for the same square that housed his family’s residence.94 This period also corresponds to the years during which Sweerts was conceiving and actively executing his Plague in an Ancient City. If for no other reason, this chronological coincidence would have assured that obelisks, their history and their significance, ancient and modern, would have been much present in Sweerts’s mind and imagination. In the initial description of the complex scene presented in Plague in an Ancient City, it was noted that the apex of the obelisk was cut off at the top of the canvas, as if to suggest it was an object of great height. In fact, the tallest among the thirteen ancient obelisks currently standing in Rome is— and was in the seventeenth century—that which stands in front of the north transept façade of the basilica of Saint John Lateran.95 Could Sweerts have intended this specific reference? Confirming this suspicion is the fact that the two-storied, open-arched palazzo in front of which Sweerts placed his obelisk bears a distinct (albeit not exact) resemblance to the elegant late sixteenth-century façade of the north transept of the Lateran, which in Sweerts’s time was the principal entrance to the basilica (fig. 9.6). Furthermore, the history—ancient and early modern—of both the Lateran and the obelisk associated with it, suggests that their spiritual-political significance is entirely pertinent to the ultimate message of Sweerts’s canvas. Designed by Domenico Fontana in 1588, the graceful new north transept façade was part of the lengthy, elaborate Counter-Reformation reconstruction and embellishment of the greatly deteriorated Lateran basilica. Begun under Pius IV (1559–65) and continuing under several successive pontificates, this restoration was complete in time for the Jubilee year of 1650, which was celebrated during the time Sweerts was most likely at work on Plague in an Ancient City. The Lateran holds the honor of being the oldest 93 Mercati, De gli obelischi di Roma, esp. 68–69; Kircher, Obeliscus Pamphilius, esp. 156–60 (and passim); Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 1:11–18; Cipriani, Obelischi egizi, esp. 27, 38–39, 55–57. Nicephorus is among the authors Mercati used in compiling his work, as acknowledged in his alphabetical list of sources, while Kircher (Obeliscus Pamphilius, 59) cites the writings of Emperor Julian in his own treatise; these are but two further examples of the continuing presence of Nicephorus and Julian in the consciousness of early modern Rome. 94 Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 28–31. See note 44 above for the Sweerts paintings inventoried in the Pamphilj collection; and Capitelli, “Una testimonianza documentaria,” 63, for the “legame di protezione” between Sweerts and Camillo Pamphilj. 95 For the Lateran obelisk, see Mercati, De gli obelischi di Roma, 267–311, 377–87; Cipriani, Obelischi egizi, 46–51; Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 1:55–64; and Freiberg, Lateran in 1600, 32–34.

Fig. 9.6. Domenico Fontana, architect, north transept façade, 1588, Basilica of Saint John Lateran. Rome, Italy. Photo by author.

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and first in rank of the four great patriarchal basilicas of Rome, seat of the pope in his role as bishop of Rome and thus, for many centuries the administrative center of the church, “Mother and Head of all Churches in the City and World,” as its traditional honorific title proclaims (Mater et Caput Omnium Ecclesiarum Urbis et Orbis).96 The church and surrounding property were the gift of Constantine the Great, great hero of the early church, whose dramatic conversion to and subsequent championing of his new religion marked the decisive triumph of Christianity over paganism and the beginning of its long ascendancy in European civilization. It was because of this intimate association with Constantine—the antithesis of and a natural, dramatic foil to his impious and treacherous nephew and successor, Julian— that the post-Tridentine popes lavished great attention upon and poured floods of money into the complete rehabilitation and embellishment of the ancient basilica. One of the consistent aims and concrete results of the rebuilding of the Lateran was to highlight this Constantinian connection, this chapter of glorious ecclesiastical triumph, as a further volley of propagandistic history against the religious and political forces of Protestantism. The same renewal of and emphasis on the Constantinian memory took place in the new Saint Peter’s as well, most notably in the form of the great equestrian statue of the emperor by Bernini, who turned to Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History for what was then considered a most trustworthy source of information about Constantine. Recalling and reinforcing the memory of Constantine and triumph at the Lateran was the Egyptian obelisk, recovered in fragments in 1586 from the Circus Maximus and re-erected in Piazza San Giovanni in 1588. Having survived the violence of warfare and other human and natural calamities, the Lateran obelisk was distinctive not only for its height, but also for its glorious and exceptionally well-documented history, which had begun in the second millennium BC. Much of the early story of the obelisk had been long known from late Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus97 with much more uncovered in the sixteenth century, thanks especially to the excellent archeological work of Michele Mercati. It was Mercati who painstakingly and accurately reconstructed the scattered fragments of the obelisk’s original ancient Roman base, piecing together the various inscriptions that summarized the extraordinary vicissitudes of this obelisk. These ancient inscriptions, however, were replaced by new ones (prepared by Silvio Antoniani [1540–1603], noted Oratorian historian and collaborator of the great Cesare Baronio), which likewise afforded to the public a compendium of the monolith’s history.98 96For the history of the Lateran basilica, especially in this period, see Freiberg, Lateran in 1600; and Luciani, “Il complesso episcopale.” 97 Ammianus Marcellinus, Later Roman Empire, trans. Hamilton, 17:4. 98 For Antoniani, see Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 3:511–15; and Roma di Sisto V, 469–70.

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The obelisk’s long, involved history commences in the reign of Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (ca. 1504–1450 BC). But what is important for this discussion is that, as its ancient and early modern inscriptions proclaimed, the obelisk represented a further connection to Constantine the Great and also commemorated triumph over enemies. The obelisk had been taken from its original home in Thebes by Constantine who intended to ship it to his new capital, Constantinople; however, at the time of the emperor’s death it had made it only as far as Alexandria, as reported in one of Antoniani’s inscriptions: Flavius Constantine the Great, Augustus, the protector and defender of the Christian faith, ordered this obelisk which by an impure vow had been dedicated to the Sun by the Egyptian king to be transported down the Nile to Alexandria, in order to decorate with this monument, the new Rome, recently founded by him.99 Constantine’s son, Constantius II, had the granite monument instead brought to Rome and placed in the Circus Maximus “as a memorial of his triumph in 351 over the tyrant Magnentius, who had murdered his brother Constans.” But, as one of the original fourth-century inscriptions reported, the obelisk was also meant to recall the earlier victory in 312 of Constantius’s father, Constantine, over his own enemy, Maxentius—a victory, as Constantine and all subsequent Christians believed, that was due to the transfer of the emperor’s religious allegiance to the Christian God. As Jack Freiberg notes, “By using the obelisk in this way Constantius documented the legitimacy of Constantinian imperial rule that had been established by God.”100 By using this obelisk and the other remnants of Constantinian history in their own architectural, urban-renewal projects, Counter-Reformation popes such as Sixtus sought to document and reinforce the legitimacy of their own imperial rule, as well as of their version of Christianity— Roman Catholicism—as the one true faith that had triumphed and would, they hoped, continue to triumph over its enemies.

PLAGUE AND THE “HERESY” OF PROTESTANTS AND “APOSTASY” OF CATHOLICS The ultimate symbolism of the Constantinian obelisk would have likely been understood by contemporary viewers as the larger aim of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City as well: to serve as a visual vindication and celebration of Roman Catholicism as the one true faith by recalling an episode of early Christian history, the reign of the “impious” emperor Julian, in which God responded to the persecution of his people by sending a castigating 99Translation from Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 1:64n2. One of the Sistine inscriptions (facing the baptistery) on the new base of the obelisk recalls the conversion of Constantine: “Constantine, victor through the Cross and here baptized by S. Silvester, propagated the glory of the Cross”; ibid., 1:63n7. 100 Freiberg, Lateran in 1600, 33.

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Fig. 9.7. Luca Giordano, The Prophet Gad Offering King David the Choice of Famine, War or Plague, mid-1690s. Fresco, choir vault, monastery church of San Lorenzo, El Escorial, Spain. Photo by author. This previously unpublished scene was painted by a younger contemporary of Sweerts.

plague and other natural calamities. True, the virtuous also suffered and died during the Julianic and other plagues (such as the biblical plague of King David, see fig. 9.7), but, as the apologists reminded the faithful, for the virtuous, such suffering and death represented welcome liberation from this evil world, a necessary testing of their faith and perseverance, as well as grounds for greater merit in the afterlife. This was the standard response to the question first supplied in eloquent, thorough fashion by Saint Cyprian, third-century bishop of Carthage, in his plague sermon, De mortalitate, a classic work of Christian spirituality often quoted in early modern plague literature.101 101 For Cyprian’s De mortalitate in early modern plague sources, see, for example, Possevino, Cause et rimedii, 34v; and Marchini, preface to Belli divini. See also Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 26. As XXXXXX

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This supposed pattern of the history of plague, announced already in the Bible, was in the eyes of apologists a further example of the special status—the divine favor and protection—enjoyed by their faith. The same apologetic message is also contained in the most famous plague painting of seventeenth-century Rome and a source of direct inspiration to Sweerts, Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod. This message is also heard in a Lenten sermon delivered to the papal court during the reign of Paul V by Capuchin preacher Girolamo Mautini (1563–1632), who comments explicitly on the punishment of the Philistines for their profanation of the ark at Ashdod. The biblical episode of the Plague of Ashdod, says Mautini, serves as a direct warning to contemporary leaders of “so many lands infected with heresy” that have become “horrendous monsters no longer recognized in the forum of heaven and of the church.”102 In this, papal preacher Mautini was simply drawing upon an ancient apologetic tradition. Although referring to a different plague of religious history, Eusebios of Kaisareia’s mocking concluding comment about the pestilential scourge sent by heaven during the reign of another imperial enemy of the faith, Maximinus (reproduced verbatim in Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici) is relevant: Such were the rewards [that is, war, pestilence, and famine] of the proud boasting of Maximinus and of the decrees in the cities against us…. The great and heavenly defender of the Christians, after displaying His threat of punishment and his anger against all men as we have shown, in return for the viciousness which they had displayed against us, again gave back to us the gracious and joyous radiance of his providence regarding us;…and he made it clear to all that God Himself had been watchful over our affairs.103 The same boastful note had been taken up by Gregorios of Nazianzos in his Second Invective Against Julian the Emperor. Although Gregorios does not specifically mention the Julianic plague, he does acknowledge plague as one common form of divine retribution in the introduction to his account of the emperor’s demise, wherein he reminds his readers of how God “repays iniquity” and “chastise[s] arrogance with disgrace and with plagues.… Diseases justly sent upon the impious, rendings that cannot be concealed, plagues 102

for the death-by-plague of the innocent faithful, as narrated in 1 Chronicles 21 and 2 Samuel 24, seventy thousand Hebrew subjects of King David died as a consequence of their ruler’s disobedience of God’s will (by taking a census of the people), thus calling down on all their heads a deadly plague; Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 19–20. 102Mautini, “Nel Venderdi della Domenica I di Quaresima,” 347–48. This is not to say that the artist himself necessarily conceived his painting with such an apologetic message in mind; however, there was nothing to stop pious viewers from reading this rather conventional moral lesson from the Frenchman’s depiction of the biblical plague scene. For further discussion of viewer response to Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod, see Hipp’s essay in this volume. 103 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 9:8.

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and scourges of divers kinds, corresponding to the atrocities they have committed, deaths that follow not the common course of nature.”104 Although nothing is known of the provenance of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, given the specific milieu in which it was conceived, it is certain that this apologetic message would have found ready resonance in the hearts of the artist’s original viewers and patrons, especially since the latter included those of highly educated and exalted ecclesiastical status such as the Pamphilj. During the years of Sweerts’s soggiorno in Rome, among the epidemic diseases and calamities, natural (famine) or human-made (war), that either struck the Eternal City itself or came terrifyingly close to it in striking nearby cities, towns, or countryside, was the bubonic plague. With every report or direct experience of yet another dreadful visitation of the plague (or what they called the plague), the inhabitants of Rome were obliged to ponder the nature and meaning of this indomitable invisible enemy that was as merciless in its destruction as it was mysterious in its medical origins and identity. In fact, the same was true for all God-fearing Catholics of Europe during Sweerts’s entire lifetime, for in the period between 1500 and 1700, the bubonic plague struck so often and in so many localities that when the people of Europe were not living through an actual outbreak of the plague, large or small, they were anxiously awaiting its all too certain return, since there were no truly effective means of self-protection except flight and isolation. Despite the impotence of the scientific establishment in providing adequate response to the questions of etiology and cure, there was no doubt in the ecclesiastical realm about the ultimate reason for this scourge. As the popular preachers and other spiritual authorities universally and insistently taught, that reason was sin: in his vengeful wrath, God sends plague (and famine and warfare) as punishment for the sins of humankind. This was the virtually unanimous belief of Christians in early modern Europe.105 Westphalia and “the Definitive Wreck of the Catholic Restoration” Any form of sin could, in theory, provoke God’s wrath and consequently a visitation of the plague. However, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the specific sins for which God especially sends this punishing scourge, according to contemporary Catholic preachers and spiritual writers, was that of heresy. And in the Counter-Reformation environment of Sweerts’s Rome, the heresy most detested and most feared was that of Protestantism. Even though by the mid-seventeenth century, the public virulence of the anti-Protestant rhetoric of the Roman Catholic Church may have been somewhat attenuated on the surface, fundamental Catholic convic104

Published in King, Julian the Emperor, 86–86. For confirmation of this belief as repeatedly encountered in the primary sources, popular and elite, of the age, see the various essays in Hope and Healing. 105

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tions remained unchanged from the preceding century: Protestantism could not be seen as anything but an execrable heresy, a demon-inspired departure from the one true faith. It was an irreconcilable enemy force, both religious and political, whose ultimate goal was the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with that of the papacy. As for the connection between plague and heresy, this is proclaimed in no uncertain terms, for example, in Possevino’s plague treatise, Cause et rimedii. In his enumeration of the six “specific causes” (cause particolari) of the plague, the Jesuit includes prominently (number two on the list), the sin of heresy. Where there is contagion of heresy and false prophets, Possevino warns, there will also be plague, “Divine Justice responding to this internal guilt of souls with the external castigation of their bodies.” And as in print, so too in painting: in Jesuit art of early modern Europe, one encounters the same connection between heresy and plague; in that art, this physical disease was employed as a visual metaphor for that religious malady, as, for example, in Rubens’s altarpiece of 1617, The Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier, commissioned for the Jesuit church of Antwerp.106 However, the association between the two—heresy and plague—was not merely a Jesuit topos: in his 1577 plague sermon to the people of Bologna, famed Franciscan preacher Francesco Panigarola repeats the heresy-as-plague image, explaining that the rapid, widespread dissemination of the “heretical doctrines” of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the other Protestant reformers represents yet another recent pestilential scourge sent by an angry God to punish the sinful world. This flagello began, the friar says, in 1517 when “the wicked Luther mounted his cathedra of pestilence” and promulgated his “ninety-five false axioms,” which “immediately persuaded” the masses. 107 In a later (1614) sermon preached before the pope and the papal court, Jeronimo de Cordoba sounds the same note in denouncing the same longdead but still despised Martin Luther: “Learn, O Luther, plague of Germany, that you turned out worse for the human race than Domitian. He raged like a lion, you lurk like a viper. He forced people to deny the faith, you teach them to deny the Vicar of Christ.”108 In fact, all three priests, Possevino, Panigarola, and de Cordoba, were making use of a common topos—the image of heresy as plague—found in many other printed sources, including two of the most widely consulted and influential documents of early modern Christian history, the inquisitorial manual on witchcraft (then classified as a form of heresy), the Malleus maleficarum (first published 1486), part 3, question 29, and, of greater importance in Sweerts’s Rome, the Catechism of the Council of Trent (first pub106For heresy and the plague, see Boeckl, “Plague Imagery as Metaphor”; Possevino, Cause et rimedii, 13v–14r; and Martin, Plague? 95. 107 Panigarola, “Predica intitolata La Peste,” 272–74. 108 Quoted in McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory, 130–31.

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lished 1566), “Commentary on the Apostles Creed,” article 9 entitled: “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.”109 But of even more immediate importance to Sweerts’s Rome was Pope Innocent X Pamphilj’s bull of proclamation (13 May 1649) of the Holy Year of 1650, which, translated into Italian and printed in broadside form, was affixed to the doors of all the major basilicas of the city. In what is traditionally a completely joyous evocation of the coming Jubilee year, Innocent inserted this most untraditional expression of grief: “But this memory of such happy times [when the leaders of a religiously united Europe used to come to Rome to venerate the tomb of Peter] torments Our heart with a sentiment of great pain whenever We consider how distant is the present generation from the piety of the ancients. How many provinces and nations has the plague of heresy separated from the consortium of the Catholic religion, and how much has it severed them from the joy of this Jubilee and from the celestial wealth granted [to the faithful during this year].”110 Why such gloom in the papal heart? In these years—the same period in which Sweerts would have begun his plague canvas—Innocent X and with him the entire Catholic world was living through the painful aftermath of the monumentally disastrous defeat of the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Encompassing various separate treaties signed at Osnabrück and Münster, the Westphalian peace put an end to the Thirty Years’ War between Catholic and Protestant Europe, thus concluding one of the most devastating military struggles in the history of the European continent. Like many wars of the early modern period, this protracted conflict inflicted upon innocent populations horrendous ravages in many forms, including the dread bubonic plague: this is dramatized in what Jacob Burckhardt called that “immortal and unforgettable frontispiece to the Thirty Years’ War,” Peter Paul Rubens’s allegorical The Horrors of War, completed in 1637 for the Grand Duke of Tuscany and now at the Pitti Palace (fig. 9.8). Sweerts himself took up Rubens’s theme (minus the plague, however, and with focus on the destruction of culture and civilization), in his own Mars Destroying the Arts, executed in Rome circa 1650 to 1652, that is, during the same period when he produced Plague in an Ancient City.111

109 The denunciation of the religion of one’s enemy as “pestilential” is of ancient vintage in Christian polemical literature; Firmicus Maternus repeatedly makes use of plague imagery in his Error of the Pagan Religions, wherein Mithraism is referred to that as “horrid contagion of idolatry” (20.7), while paganism in general is called that “pestilential disease” (28.1). Elsewhere Firmicus counsels the pagans, “Flee unhappy men, flee and abandon that pesthouse [their pagan temple] with all the speed you can” (26.2). 110 Quoted in D’Onofrio, Le fontane di Rome, 395 (author’s translation, emphasis added). This is D’Onofrio’s historical preface to his discussion of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers commissioned by Innocent X. The author sees the latter fountain in part as a form of somewhat delusional assertion of papal dominion over the “four corners of the earth,” in reaction to the vast territorial and financial losses caused by “the humiliation of Munster,” that is, the Peace of Westphalia. 111 For the Rubens canvas (and the artist’s letter explaining the allegory), see Scribner, Peter Paul Rubens, 122, from which the Burckhardt quotation is taken. For Sweerts’s Mars Destroying the Arts, now in XXXXX

To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

Fig. 9.8. Peter Paul Rubens, The Consequences of War (The Horrors of War), 1637–38. Oil on canvas, Galleria Palatina, Pitti Palace, Florence, Italy. Photo reproduced by permission from Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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However, even more relevant to this discussion is the response of the papacy to the Peace of Westphalia. Although relieved to hear of the war’s end, Innocent had no reason to rejoice over the political and economic terms of its settlement. Ratifying in universal and perpetual fashion the principle of “cuius regio eius religio” (the religion of the ruler determines that of his dominions), the Peace of Westphalia was “the most decisive [event]” of Innocent’s reign, which confirmed Protestant control over extensive German lands that the papacy had long struggled to return to the Catholic fold—and treasury.112 The same treaties represented a humiliating defeat for the papacy—“no pope had suffered such humiliation in many centuries”—inasmuch as the increasingly politically irrelevant pope, his interests, and his demands had been completely excluded from all negotiations.113 Westphalia “signaled the end of the Church’s claims to temporal authority and just as importantly, was perceived by contemporaries as doing so.”114 It was, in short, in the words of Pastor, “the definitive wreck of the Catholic restoration” and marks the beginning, as most historians agree, of a dramatically new, more secular, “modern Europe.”115 All hopes of turning back the clock to 1516 seemed completely destroyed. Beginning with the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the papacy had stubbornly refused to endorse or acknowledge any diplomatic compromise that even recognized the mere existence of Protestants, but now had finally to surrender to the new reality of Europe, in face of the Westphalian treaties. The latter treaties had, after all, been signed by the major Catholic powers of Europe: France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire.116 Furthermore, no less catastrophic than the religious and political defeat was the irrevocable economic setback to the papacy: as Pastor reports in detailed fashion, the Catholic Church suffered “gigantic losses” to the Protestants in the form of entire dioceses and archdioceses, bishoprics and archbishoprics, numerous wealthy monasteries, abbeys, canonries, and many other types of ecclesiastical benefices and property, together with their immense annual revenues. Helplessly, Innocent had witnessed this disaster slowly developing over four years of protracted negotiations in Osnabrück and Münster, receiving regular reports from papal nuncio Fabio Chigi (the future Pope Alexander VII). With full papal consent, Chigi (who had refused any contact with the 112

a private collection, see Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 118. For the impact of the Thirty Years’ War on art and artists, see Raab, “Artists and Warfare”; and 1648: Paix de Westphalie. For outbreak of plague during that war, see Benecke, Germany in the Thirty Years’ War, 36, 55. 112 Quotation from Papacy, 2:801. The secondary literature on the Peace of Westphalia is vast and figures into any account of the reign of Innocent X; in the discussion that follows, among the many studies of the Thirty Years’ War and Westphalia consulted for this study, I cite only those quoted directly. 113Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 143 (author’s translation). 114 Rodén, Church Politics, 100. See also Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, 10–11. 115 Pastor, History of the Popes, 30:122. 116 Croxton and Tischer, Peace of Westphalia, 242.

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Protestants at the negotiations) published three formal protests against the terms of peace, but to no avail. Westphalia, in Chigi’s words, was “a deep wound…inflicted on the Catholic religion.”117 Ultimately formal public condemnation came from Innocent himself, the brief Zelo domus Dei (Out of Zeal for the House of God), published in the form of a broadside to be displayed in public forums of Rome and Catholic Europe. In his brief, Innocent “with a deep sense of grief” acknowledges the signing of the treaties but vehemently declares the concessions granted “for all time” to “the heretics and their successors” (the Protestants) to be “utterly null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, condemnable, reprobate, inane, and without legal force or effect.”118 However, the pope’s protest fell upon deaf ears among the political powers of Europe and the terms were applied as stipulated in the treaties. It was a most bitter pill for Innocent and those around him to swallow. Among those around the pope was Michael Sweerts, who had received the knighthood of Christ from Pope Innocent, whose nephew, Camillo, employed Sweerts. It is therefore not surprising that Sweerts, whether commissioned to do so or of his own volition, would have then taken to the annals of apologetic ecclesiastical history in search of some much-needed consoling reminder of the inexorable punishment by God of the enemies of “the one, true faith,” which he then set to canvas in the form of Plague in an Ancient City. Indeed, one wonders, was it Innocent or his nephew Camillo who commissioned this canvas, perhaps intending to send it as a warning, not to the Protestant leaders, but to one of the Catholic signatories at Westphalia? An example of such a political-artistic gesture on the part of the papacy could be found in relatively recent history: Urban VIII made use of Poussin’s two moral-historical canvases bearing a similar message about divine vengeance—The Destruction and Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem (1625–26, Israel Museum, Jerusalem) and Emperor Titus Destroys the Temple in Jerusalem (fig. 9.9). Both had been commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini on behalf of his uncle Pope Urban and sent in presumably monitory or otherwise advisory fashion to, respectively, King Louis XIII of France and Emperor Ferdinand III. Another, well-documented (albeit failed) case of papal utilization of paintings as “visual exempla” (to use Fumaroli’s term) 117 As Pastor reports, “Chigi had seen to it that neither his own name nor that of the Pope appeared in the instrument of peace by which, he lamented, a deep wound was inflicted on the Catholic religion every time it was mentioned”; History of the Popes, 30:120–21. For Chigi’s protests, see ibid., 30:125–26. The full text of Chigi’s protest of 26 October 1648 can be found in Pallavicino, Della vita di Alessandro VII, 1:138–40. 118“ipso iure nulla, irrita, invalida, iniqua, damnata, reprobata, inania, viribusque et effectu vacua omnino” (author’s translation). The brief, officially dated 26 November 1648, was not published until August 1650, its publication delayed for diplomatic reasons until the Swedish troops had left German soil. For the Latin text of the brief, see Feldkamp, “Das Breve ‘Zelo Domus Dei,’” 293–305, quote at 302. See also Poncet, “Innocenzo X,” in Enciclopedia dei Papi, 3:321–35, 329–30 for “Zelo domus Dei”; and Kemper, “Fabio Chigi,” 54, for a photograph of the papal brief in its broadside edition.

Fig. 9.9. Nicolas Poussin, Emperor Titus Destroys the Temple in Jerusalem, 1638–39. Oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Photo reproduced by permission from Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

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aimed at Catholic political leaders is Guido Reni’s exquisite Abduction of Helen (1630–31, Louvre).119 Returning to Sweerts’s canvas, one wonders why this particular fourthcentury plague, and why this particular emperor, Julian “the Apostate”? The choice was not casual: Julian had been baptized at birth into the Catholic faith, but later abandoned his faith to pursue the paganism of his ancestors and the mysteries of the East, all the while giving external pretense of remaining a pious Christian. Once full imperial power was his, he dropped any mask of pretense and began to betray his former faith and coreligionists in a series of oppressive legal measures. However, in the end, divine retribution prevailed: the Virgin Mary ordered the assassination of the emperor in Persia at the hands of two Christian soldiers, Mercurius and Artemius, and the church was released from persecution and restored to her primacy. The polemical relevance and usefulness of Julian’s memory did not escape Counter-Reformation Rome. Commenting on the fresco depicting Julian’s death in Santa Maria Maggiore’s Pauline Chapel, Steven Ostrow explains, “this image of the Virgin’s unrestrained punishment of apostasy functions as a pointed warning to all who stray from the faith, foremost among them the Protestant Reformers, whom the Church viewed as apostates.” In the first decade of the seventeenth century, when the chapel was being decorated, as Ostrow further observes, “this warning may well have been intended especially for King James I, who, it will be remembered, issued his Oath of Allegiance in 1606, demanding all of his subjects to reject papal authority.”120 At the time of Westphalia, there was an even stronger, more painful reason for the papacy to recall the treasonous emperor Julian, for it had just been the victim, in effect, of the treason of two of the Catholic leaders of Europe.121 That disastrous (for the papacy) defeat was clearly only possible because of the behavior of the principal Catholic players at the negotiations: the Holy Roman Empire and France. The two powers had made

119 For the Poussin Titus paintings and their political intent, see Lavin, “Bernini at St. Peter’s,” 163– 66, with further bibliography. For Reni’s canvas and papal “diplomacy through the arts,” see Fumaroli, “Richelieu, Patron of the Arts,” 17–19 (citing Colantuono, Guido Reni’s Abduction of Helen). For further discussion of Poussin’s Sack and Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (1625/26), see Richelieu: Art and Power, cat. #116. 120 Ostrow, Art and Spirituality, 230. Julian’s death is also the subject of one of the frescoes (dating to the late 1650s) by Guglielmo Cortese (Il Borgognone) in the Oratorio della Congregazione Prima Primaria at the Collegio Romano; Salvagnini, I pittori borgognoni Cortese, 126, pl. 48. 121 Another example of the revival of Julian’s memory in Counter-Reformation Rome came in the form of the refurbished church of Santa Bibiana and the new biography of the saint by Domenico Fedini; this revived cult is also related to the Thirty Years’ War by Alessandro Angelini (Gian Lorenzo Bernini e i Chigi tra Rome e Siena, 310); however, referring to the historical context of decades earlier, Angelini sees the Julian reference as pointing instead to the Protestants: “In Fedini’s brief volume, behind the figures of the ‘evil’ emperor Julian the Apostate and the ‘heretics’ who sent Bibiana and her family to their deaths, it is difficult not to see an allusion to the modern enemies of the Catholicism of Rome, Gustavus Adolphus and the Lutherans of the North” (author’s translation).

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major concessions to the Protestants at a direct and disastrous cost to the papacy, doing so not only for the sake of peace but of their own national interests as well. Innocent would have had abundant reason to be infuriated at the Catholics leaders, Emperor Ferdinand III and King Louis XIV, both of whom are mentioned by name at the beginning of Zelo domus Dei. And of the two, Innocent’s rage would have been even greater towards France, long since no friend of the papacy’s: the enmity between Innocent and Cardinal Mazarin is well known and well documented.122 At Westphalia, together with the Protestant Sweden, it was France who in the end derived the “lion’s share of the treaties’ benefit.” In fact, Mazarin so little identified with papal interests that France had entered the war on the side of the Protestants (against their common enemy, the Catholic Hapsburgs) and, thus during the peace process, “assembled with the Swedes and their Protestant allies in Osnabrück—rather than at Münster with the Catholic powers.”123 Even though in 1648 King Louis XIV was only a boy of ten and the country was still governed by Mazarin, Louis was, nonetheless, the universally recognized legal head of the French state, having assumed the throne at the death of his father in 1643. It was in Louis XIV’s name that France signed the Westphalian treaties and, hence, it was his name that Innocent specifically cited (together with Ferdinand III’s) in Zelo domus Dei as being responsible for the instruments of peace. However, there is another fact of Louis’ biography that may well be relevant to Sweerts’s canvas. The birth of Louis—the first and long awaited fruit of the marriage of Anne of Austria and the sickly, melancholy Louis XIII—had been deemed nothing short of miraculous and celebrated with great rejoicing by the French. Louis XIV was born on a Sunday (5 September 1638), the day well known as being devoted in antiquity to the sun god. When a commemorative medal was struck in the newborn’s honor, it bore prominently an image of the sun, Louis’ zodiacal sign (the “heretical” friar-philosopher, Tommaso Campanella, had prepared the royal babe’s horoscope at the queen’s request). Adorning this celebratory medal was the inscription, “Ortus Solis Gallici” (the Rising of the Sun of France). From that moment and increasingly throughout his reign, Louis would be associated with the sun and solar imagery, and was referred to, then as in posterity, as “le Roi Soleil” (The Sun King).124 Examining once again Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, can one read its references to sun worship as a polemical allusion to France and its Sun King who had so betrayed the pope and their own faith by their political 122 For a most thorough and well-documented account of the conflict between Mazarin and Innocent, see Coville, Étude sur Mazarin. For Mazarin and Westphalia, see Croxton, Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe, esp. 259–81. As Croxton (Peacemaking, 274) remarks, “although Mazarin may well have been a religious man, Christianity impinged little upon his political decisions.” 123 The last two quotations come from Buckley, Christina, Queen of Sweden, 83, 87. 124 For Louis’ birth and immediate association with the sun, see Meyer, La naissance de Louis XIV; and Wolf, Louis XIV, 269.

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machinations, not only during the peace process but also during the conduct of the entire war itself? This is yet another unprovable but compelling possibility.125 Consider however Antonio Possevino’s description, quoted above, of the circumstances in which God decides to castigate nations with pestilence: “whenever governments had to be changed in the world or when the Catholic religion had to separate itself from people who had rendered themselves unworthy of her, either because of their sins or their embracing of false doctrines and heresies, or when in the governments of the Christian republic, there were those who commingled worldly judgment with the ways of God.” These are certainly words that could easily be interpreted by the pope and papal loyalists as fully applicable to France in the mid-seventeenth century.

SWEERTS THE PAINTER-EVANGELIST “My lord, see the path of salvation [shown to you] by the hand of Sweerts” As contemporary preachers uniformly and constantly reminded their audiences, the only true, effective remedy for plagues of any sort or dimension was repentance for their sin, emendation of their ways, true conversion, and a return to the “one true faith.”126 This is the message as well of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, as the viewer is reminded by the solemn Blue Prophet, who gestures in deliberate and monitory fashion in the direction of 125 The Barberini, the family of Pope Innocent’s immediate and much unloved predecessor, Urban VIII, had also expressively associated itself with the imagery of the sun, in particular, Urban, the selfstyled “Sun Pope,” who was actively interested in the realm of astrology. The solar association is seen most prominently illustrated and celebrated in the decoration of the Palazzo Barberini, in particular in Andrea Sacchi’s allegorical Divine Wisdom ceiling fresco; Scott, Images of Nepotism. As Scott (ibid., 88–94) persuasively argues, it was probably the same friar astrologer Tommaso Campanella, author of the horoscope of the neonascent Louis XIV, who served as Sacchi’s advisor in the conception of that complex fresco. Scott also points out (ibid., 70) that “in his book of imprese, dedicated to the then cardinal Maffeo Barberini, Giovanni Ferro lists five different solar imprese of the future pope. The most important of these is the rising sun.” Given the stormy history between Innocent X and the Barberini family especially in the first years of Innocent’s reign—Innocent’s investigation into the financial misdoings of the Barberini sent them fleeing to Paris after Urban’s death—one might be tempted to see in the heliolatry of Plague in an Ancient City a reference to Urban or the Barberini. However, by 1648 matters had been patched up between Innocent and the Barberini, if only out of political expediency and not true affection. Moreover, in the aftermath of Westphalia, the pope had much larger concerns and bigger enemies on his mind; see Pastor, History of the Popes, 30:62–65. Pastor notes (30:64) that, in February 1648, Cardinal Francesco Barberini returned to Rome from exile in France and “met with a kindly welcome from the Pope” (“maxima cum benignitate,” reports a contemporary diary), as did Cardinal Antonio. For the “full honors” with which the Barberini returned to Rome, see also Rendina, The Popes, 498–99. 126 With respect to the narrative structure of this complex historical scene, Sweerts may have chosen, in emulation of Poussin’s “emplotment” of his epic canvases, the dramatic moment of Aristotelian peripeteia: thanks to the instruction of the Blue Prophet, the population of this town (represented by his blonde interlocutor) finally begins to understand the true cause of the plague (their relapse into paganism, represented by the ritual in the Black Hall and the references to heliolatry) and its true remedy (return to the worship of the Christian God, represented by the White Temple). For Poussin’s techniques of emplotment, see Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, esp. chap. 6. Unglaub’s description (Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 175) of the French master’s typical compositional strategy is thus pertinent to Sweerts’s canvas as well: “In order to construct a unified plot complete with a beginning, middle, and end, Poussin distills the action to its climactic moment, or dramatic reversal, while subordinate XXXXXX

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the White Temple, symbol of that one true faith. For Sweerts and his coreligionists the one true faith was Roman Catholicism. At the time Sweerts executed his painting, as far as the Protestant powers of Europe who had just achieved a great victory at Westphalia were concerned, a return to the Roman faith was highly unlikely. However, at that point, the situation in Europe was still volatile enough that there may have been those in Rome who believed it could reverse itself in the future. Encouraged by the miraculous tales of divine intervention publicized by apologetic ecclesiastical histories like that of Nicephorus, they may have harbored the pious belief that just as God so unexpectedly and so quickly overthrew Julian and his pagan restoration (by causing the untimely and ignominious death of the emperor in Persia), something similar was being prepared by heaven on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy: somehow, at some future date, it would miraculously be restored to its former primacy. Of course, the call to repentance and the practice of the true faith applied not only to Protestant “heretics,” but to lapsed and lukewarm Catholics as well, including the leaders of France. However, apart from all learned historical reference and contemporary political allusions, the fundamental message of Sweerts’s canvas was a most general one, familiar and applicable to everyone, and thus often repeated in the religious art of seventeenth-century Rome: “Repent and be saved.” Through his Blue Prophet in Plague in an Ancient City Sweerts is saying to the viewer what he will later explicitly say in the inscription of another and likewise enigmatic painting of his, Double Portrait (also known as Two Men in Oriental Costume) of circa 1660/61 (fig. 9.5). Painted (it is currently believed) after the religiously zealous Sweerts had joined the Catholic Foreign Missions (Société des Missions Étrangères) and was about to set off on a long voyage to evangelize the Far East, Double Portrait features an older, bearded male figure of evident moral authority who gestures pointedly in the unseen distance for the benefit of the young man at his side. The young man, in turn, holds a card with the gentle admonition: “Signor mio, videte la strada di salute per la mano di Sweerts” (My lord, see the path of salvation [shown to you] by the hand of Sweerts). Although little is known about Sweerts’s faith life at the time he painted Plague in an Ancient City,127 given what is seen in this ambitiously conceived historical scene, he may have already, ten years before his ill-fated missionary journey, begun to feel the stirrings of a moralizing, evangelical religious zeal.

127

elements in the composition allude to causes and consequences.” This is illustrated in Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod as well, the latter painting being of great inspiration to Sweerts here. 127 For the question of Sweerts’s faith during his Roman period, see Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 26–27.

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CONTRIBUTORS

SHEILA BARKER is a fellow at the Medici Archive Project (Florence, Italy), where she researches the culture of health at the Medici court. Her work on plague includes a 2002 doctoral dissertation at Columbia University (“Art in a Time of Danger: Urban VIII and the Plague of 1629–1634”), an essay on Rome’s plague culture for the exhibition catalogue Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, a study of art and piety during the plague of 1656 for the journal Roma Contemporanea e Moderna, and the Art Bulletin article “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine,” which was awarded the 2005 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize. PAMELA BERGER is professor of medieval art history and film at Boston College. She has published books on late antique and early medieval manuscript illustration (The Insignia of the Notitia Dignitatum) and syncretism (The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectress from Goddess to Saint). Her articles include studies of medieval and nineteenth-century Irish art, as well as Gallo-Roman art. She has also written, produced, and/or directed three feature films: Sorceress, about a thirteenth-century woman who was accused of being a heretic when she actually was a healer; Imported Bridegroom, about an immigrant family in the Boston of 1900; and Magic Stone (also known as Kilian’s Chronicle) about an Irish slave who escapes from a Viking ship and is rescued by Native Americans. At present she is working on a film that takes place in seventh-century Jerusalem. WILLIAM EAMON is a Regents Professor of History and dean of the Honors College at New Mexico State University where he also holds the S. P. and Margaret Manasse Chair. A specialist in the history of science and medicine in early modern Italy and Spain, he is the author of Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, which won the History Book Award from the American Association of Publishers. He has also published over fifty articles, essays, and book chapters. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Valencia and Würzburg and has lectured at Harvard, Notre Dame, Wisconsin, Indiana, and other universities. He was a Mellon Fellow at Harvard, a Villa I Tatti Fellow, and has been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned 313

314 Contributors

Societies. His most recent book, The Charlatan’s Tale: A Renaissance Surgeon’s World, is currently under review by a university press. ELINA GERTSMAN, assistant professor of medieval art at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, received her PhD in art history from Boston University in 2004. She has published essays in Gesta, Religion and the Arts, and Studies in Iconography, among other journals, and has presented papers at conferences throughout the United States and Europe. She has just completed her book, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance, and is editor of the forthcoming interdisciplinary volume, Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts. She is working on a book on the discourse of unveiling in Gothic art. ELISABETH HIPP received her doctorate in art history in 1999 from the University of Tübingen with a dissertation on Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod, which was awarded the Prize of the Womens’ Commission of the Faculty for Cultural Studies (Dissertationspreis der Frauenkommission der Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften). Since 2000 she has been working at the Dresden State Art Collections (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen) where she currently serves as research associate in the Old Masters Picture Gallery (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister). Her book, Nicolas Poussin: Die Pest von Asdod (a revised version of her dissertation), was published in 2005. ANTHONY KALDELLIS holds a PhD in history from the University of Michigan (2001) and is professor of Greek and Latin at Ohio State University. He has published analyses of major Byzantine authors, focusing on the literary and philosophical aspects of their works, including The Argument of Psellos’ Chronographia and Procopius of Caesaria: Tyranny, History and Philosophy at the End of Antiquity. He has also written on the Byzantine history of the island of Lesbos, and has published translations of Byzantine sources, including the historian Genesios and Michael Psellos (the works on his family). His current interest in the reception of the classical tradition in Byzantium has resulted in two books, Hellenism in Byzantium and The Christian Parthenon. FRANCO MORMANDO is associate professor of Italian at Boston College, where he has just completed a five-year term as chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He holds a doctorate in Italian literature from Harvard University as well as a licentiate in church history from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, having also completed the Biennio di Filosofia program at the Gregorian University in Rome. In 1999 he was principal curator and catalogue editor of the Boston Caravaggio exhibition, Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image. He was also cocurator of the 2005 exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum entitled Hope and

Contributors 315

Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800. His book, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy, was awarded the Howard Marraro Prize for Excellence in Italian historical scholarship by the American Catholic Historical Association. In September 2005 he was inducted by the president of Italy into the Italian Republic’s meritorious Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana, with the title of Cavaliere (Knight). Author of various articles on Italian literature, popular religion, and sermons, he has lectured extensively on the religious art and culture of early modern Italy at various universities and museums. RONALD K. RITTGERS holds the Erich Markel Chair in German Reformation Studies at Valparaiso University, having been previously associate professor of the history of Christianity at Yale University Divinity School, and associate professor of history at Yale University. He earned his PhD in 1998 from Harvard University. His book, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany, examines how the decision of early Lutherans to retain a modified version of private confession shaped the politics and piety of the German Reformation in important ways. Rittgers has authored a number of articles and book chapters on the theme of penitential thought and practice in late medieval and early modern Christianity. His current research focuses on the efforts of Protestant reformers to change the way their contemporaries understood and coped with suffering, especially plague. THOMAS WORCESTER is an associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross. A specialist in the religious and cultural history of early modern France and Italy, with a PhD from Cambridge University, Worcester is the author of Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus. He has published articles in journals such as SeventeenthCentury French Studies and Sixteenth Century Journal; he contributed the essay “Trent and Beyond: Arts of Transformation” to the 1999 Boston College exhibition, Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image, which he cocurated. With Pamela Jones, he co-edited From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550–1650. Worcester was one of four curators of Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, an exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum. He has edited The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, a volume of some eighteen essays scheduled for publication in 2008.

INDEX

Note: Numerals in italics indicate illustrations

Personified Blindfold Death Holding Arrows of Affliction (Lavaudieu wall painting), 45, 46 portraits of Bible personages, 271 Saint Sebastian (silver statue of), 106 (wood statue), 110, 111 The Three Dead and the Three Living (details; late 15th c.), 71, 73 transi tomb of Cardinal La Grange, 74, 75, 76, 78 Wildenstein Panel, 100 See also manuscript illumination Antioch, destruction of, 5 Antoniani, Silvio, 290–91 apocalypticism, and rejection of saints, 149 Apollo, 4, 93, 284-85 apologetics, on plague and heresy, 291– 94 Apuleius, Golden Ass/Metamorphoses, 283– 84 architecture Basilica of St. John Lateran, 288, 289, 290 caryatid symbolism, 249–54 as clues in Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, 242–43 obelisks, 286–91 Aretino, Pietro, 194 Arian heresy, 2 Aristides of Thebes, 182, 244 Aristotle/Aristotelianism intromission theory of, 51 on pleasure, 199 on poetry vs. tragedy, 51, 198–200 in Raphael and Poussin, 189, 191 Arringhi, Paolo, Roma subterranea novissima, 259, 268

A Aetios of Amida, 6, 8 Agathias of Myrina, 15–19 Agatho, Pope, 92 Alberti, Leon Battista, 256 alchemists/alchemy, 104, 157, 163–67 Alciato, Emblemata, 192 Alexander III, Pope, 95 Alexandria, plague in, 243, 260–61, 265, 271, 275, 291 Alhazen, optician, 51 Anatolios, 16 angels as accompanying souls to heaven, 49, 65 Botticini’s depiction of, 124 as deliverers of plague, 42–43, 56, 58, 98 as protectors from plague, 139, 148, 151, 160n Annovazzo, Francesco, 168–69 anonymus artworks Dacia Weeping, 244 Dance of Death, 77, 84 Dura-Europus Synagogue fresco, 38 Flagellants, 53 Hannover panel, 45 Jesus Throwing Arrows of Plague (altar panel), 47 Last Rites (ca. 1350), 30 Lo Perso sculpture, 279 Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (ca. 1173– 79), 96 Minerva Giustiniani statue, 249 Mors fresco, 82

317

318 Index arrows as divine anger, 10, 106–14, 136, 148 as plague imagery, 45–61, 82 and Saint Sebastian legend, 94–103, 107 as talismanic, 97 art/art theory Cartesian concepts, 201–2 macabre, 56–61, 64–85 of Poussin, 196–203 as social commentary, 241 therapeutic beauty of, 123–27, 227–28 use of body language, 256–57 artworks. See also images/iconography; manuscript illumination; and individual artists Abduction of Helen (Reni), 301 Baglioni Altarpiece (Raphael), 194 Clothing the Naked (Sweerts), 257 Consequences of War (Rubens), 297 Constantine equestrian statue (Bernini), 290 Dacia Weeping, 244 Dance of Death, 77, 84 Death of Germanicus (Poussin), 204 De deis gentium (Giraldi), 278, 279, 281 Diagram of an Eye (Pecham’s Perspectiva), 50 Diana with Nymphs at Play (Domenichino), 188 Double Portrait (Sweerts), 257, 258, 304 Dresden Altarpiece (Dürer), 119, 121, 124 Dura-Europus Synagogue fresco, 38 Emperor Titus Destroys the Temple in Jerusalem (Poussin), 299, 300 Fire in the Borgo (Dente), 190 (Raphael), 189, 195, 209 Flagellants, 53 Fountain of the Four Rivers (Bernini), 263, 288 Gambassi Altarpiece (del Sarto), 117 Gathering of the Manna (Poussin), 188, 201 Hannover panel, 45 Ignorance Expelled (Fiorentino), 193 Jesus Throwing Arrows of Plague (altar panel), 47 Last Judgment (Gislebertus), 68 Last Rites (ca. 1350), 30 Loggie (Raphael), 195

Madonna and Child between Saints Peter and Sebastian (Bellini), 124 Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (Perugino), 117, 118 Madonna della Misericordia (Barnaba da Modena), 83 Madonna with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian and Two Donors (Boltraffio), 124, 126 Mars Destroying the Arts (Sweerts), 296 Martyrdom of Erasmus (Poussin), 187 Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (ca. 1173–79), 96 (Gozzoli), 107, 108 (Pollaiuolo, 1475), 111, 112, 114 Massacre of the Innocents (Poussin), 201 (Reni), 201 Minerva Giustiniani statue, 249 Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier (Rubens), 295 Misericordia Standard (Master of Staffolo), 107 Il Morbetto (Raimondi), 183, 184, 195, 239 Mors fresco, 82 Lo Perso sculpture, 279 Personified Blindfold Death Holding Arrows of Affliction (Lavaudieu wall painting), 45, 46 Plague at Ashdod (Poussin), 177–223, 178 Plague in an Ancient City (Sweerts), 238 portraits of Bible personages, 271 Resurrection Polyptych (Titian), 107, 109, 115 Sack and Destruction of the Temple… (Poussin), 180, 204, 299 Saint Irene and Saint Sebastian (Perugino), 117 Saint Roch Curing the Plague Stricken (Procaccini), 209, 210, 211 Saint Sebastian (Bacchiacca), 119, 120 (Gozzoli), 105–6 (Luini), 117, 119 (Mantegna), 102, 103, 115 (Perugino), 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119 (silver statue of), 106 (wood statue), 110, 111

Index 319 Saint Sebastian Tabernacle (Rossellino/ Botticini), 124, 125 Saint Sebastian Triptych (Giovanni del Biondo), 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 122 Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece (Bellini), 107 (Ghirlandaio), 102, 123 Seven Sacraments (Poussin), 204 The Three Dead and the Three Living (details; late 15th c.), 71, 73 transi tomb of Cardinal La Grange, 74, 75, 76, 78 Triumph of Death (Costa), 69 (Meo da Siena), 70 Le vere e nove imagini… (Cartari), 278 Wildenstein Panel, 100 Assisi, 105 astrologers/astrology, 18, 149–50, 302, 303n Athens, 13, 18, 192, 240–41, 250 Attis (sun god), 280–81 Augustus, 228, 291 Avicenna, 104, 160

B Il Bacchiacca (Francesco Umbertini), Saint Sebastian, 119, 120 Badt, Kurt, 189 Barbaro, Daniele, 250 Barberini family, 303n Barberini, Cardinal Francesco, 204, 205, 299, 303n Barberini, Cardinal Maffeo, 117, 303n Barnaba da Modena, Madonna della Misericordia, 83 Baronio, Cardinal Cesare, Annales ecclesiastici, 259, 265, 268, 270, 273, 284, 293 Barsanouphios (holy man), 17–18 Bartolomeo, Fra, Saint Sebastian, 115 Baschenis, Simone, 79 Baudrillard, Jean, 72, 82 Bellini, Giovanni Madonna and Child between Saints Peter and Sebastian, 124 Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece, 107

Bellobuono, Decio, 165–69, 172 Bellori, Giovan Pietro, 179, 188 Benigno (monk/biographer), 99–100 Bernini, Gianlorenzo Constantine equestrian statue, 290 Fountain of the Four Rivers, 263, 288 Berytos, destruction of, 5 Bibiana, Saint, 249–50, 263 Bible references Old Testament Exod. (9), 42–43, 181 Num. (13:27–14:13), 141 Deut. (28:15, 21–22, 59–61), 141 1 Sam. (5–6), 23–42, 179 2 Sam. (24:10–17), 141, 181 1 Chron. (21:8–17), 58 Psalm (91), 142 New Testament Matt. (10:30), 146 Luke (12:7), 146 Heb. (12:3–11), 138 Rev., 42–45, 102 as linear history, 3, 31 Masoretic Text, 27 Morgan Bible, 24, 27–29, 34, 36 Pamplona Bible, 36–39 Picture Bible and Illustrated Lives of Saints, 39–41 Septuagint, 24–25, 27, 28, 38, 179 Vulgate (Jerome), 24, 29, 179 Binet, Etienne, S.J. advice for religious superiors, 232–35 Consolation et réjouissance des malades, 225 on disease as spiritual opportunity, 224–36 Quel est le meilleur gouvernement, 232–35 Remèdes souverains contre la peste et la mort soudaine, 206–8, 212, 214, 225 on theodicy, 211 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 65, 99, 158, 208–9 Boissard, Jean Jacques, Romanae urbis topographia et antiquitates, 244, 252, 279 Boltraffio, Govanni Antonio, Madonna with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian and Two Donors, 124, 126 Borromeo, Carlo, 234

320 Index Bosio, Antonio, Roma sotterranea, 250, 259, 268 Botticini, Francesco, Saint Sebastian Tabernacle, 124, 125 Brandenburg-Nürnberg Kirchenordnung, 138 Braun, René, 263 Brejon de Lavergnée, Arnauld, 237 Bremond, Henri, 232 Brenz, Johannes, Brandenburg-Nürnberg Kirchenordnung, 138 Brockliss, Laurence, 224 Burckhardt, Jacob, 296 Byzantium, 1–6, 18–19, 265–68

C Campanella, Tommaso, 302, 303n Campania, Jacomo da (aka Decio Bellobuono), 167 Carlo, Ferrante, 188, 189 Caroselli, Angelo, 186, 187 Carracci, Annibale, 205 Cartari, Vincenzo, Le vere e nove imagini de gli dei delli antichi, 278, 279, 281 caryatid symbolism, 249–54 catacombs of Rome, 90, 94, 259, 268 Catechism of the Council of Trent, 295–96 Cava, Domenico della, 166 Centuriators of Magdeburg, 268 Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de, 197, 198 Chantal, Jane de, 235 Chantecler, Charles de, 267 charity/compassion as artistic motif, 192, 194, 201, 212 by Christians in Alexandria, 243n and martyrdom, 230 during plague, 141, 142, 207, 230–32 and rise of hospitals, 104–6 Sweerts’s depiction of, 257 for syphilitics, 164 Chigi, Fabio, 298, 299 children, as plague victims, 12, 18, 80, 81, 135, 146, 182, 194 Christ. See Jesus Christ Christianity/Christians as depicted by Sweerts, 257–59 as a historical religion, 3–4 orans prayer form, 257–59, 268

persecuted by Julian, 273 salvation history, in Poussin’s painting, 191, 194, 215–17 church history. See history/historiography Cipriani, Giovanni, 287 Clauss, Manfred, 277, 283 Clement VI, Pope, 45, 54, 106 clergy, and plague, 18, 49, 51, 65 Cohn, Samuel, Jr., 79 Comestor, Peter, Historia scholastica, 28– 29, 31 commedia dell’arte, and medical charlatans, 171 Condio, Lorenzo, Medicina filosofica contra la peste, 206–14 confession. See repentance confraternities, 164 disciplinati, 106–7, 109 San Rocco (Reggio Emilia), 209 Congregazione della Sanità (Rome), 204–5, 213, 216 consolation, 151, 206, 225–27, 229 Constantine, 284–85, 290, 291 Constantinople, 7, 14, 18 Constantius II, 291 Conti, Sigismondo dei, 161 Corbin, Alan, 231 Cordoba, Jeronimo de, 295 Corippus, Flavius Cresconius, 10–11, 16, 19 Cortona, Pietro da, 189 Costa, Lorenzo, Triumph of Death, 69 Costello, Jane, 186 Cox-Rearick, Janet, 114 Cramoisy brothers, publishers, 263, 267 Cybele (pagan goddess), 273–74, 281 Cyprian of Carthage, Saint, Address to Demetrianus, 278

D death aesthetization of, 56, 64–67 Book of the Craft of Dying, 64 Catholic apologists’ view of, 292–94 equalizing nature of, 71–78, 84–85 fear of, 147, 229 as female, 69, 82, 83, 84

Index 321 and the macabre, 64–85 memento mori art, 102, 103 sudden, 229 del Biondo, Giovanni, Saint Sebastion Triptych, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 122 del Garbo, Tommaso, 98–99, 122, 123 della Cava, Domenico, 166 dell’Antella, Filippo di Neri, 99–100 del Sarto, Andrea, Gambassi Altarpiece, 117 Dempsey, Charles, 242 Dente, Marco, Fire in the Borgo, 190 Descartes, René, 201–3 Dietrich, Veit, 145 diseases chicken pox, 160 dysentery, 181 English sweating sickness (sudor anglicus), 158, 159 epidemic, 158–60 eye, as gateway for, 51 illnesses/disabilities as spiritual medicine, 225–27 influenza, 159 measles, 160 meningitis, 159 as moral and physiological corruptions, 163–64 peste/pestis/nósos, 181–82 as punishment for sin, 5–10, 16, 135, 141–46, 150–51, 164, 181 rise of, and treatment for, 156–73 smallpox, 10 from Variola minor to Variola major, 158–60 sociocultural impact of, 169–70 syphilis (malfranciosati; French pox), 156–58, 161–64, 172–73 typhus, 158, 159 university medical treatment of, 98– 102 venereal, 181, 205 Domenichino, Diana with Nymphs at Play, 188 Dominicans, as alchemists, 167n Du Duc, Fronton, S.J., 267, 268 Dufur, Liliane, 109 Dürer, Albrecht, Dresden Altarpiece, 119, 121, 124

E Effetti, Antonio degli, 264 Egypt, oracles, 18 empirics (healers). See under physicians, healers England, manuscript plague imagery, 42 Erasmus, on French pox, 157 Eusebios of Kaisareia, Ecclesiastical History, 265, 293 Evagrius, chronicler, 11–13, 18, 19 Evangelicals. See Protestantism

F Facundus, Petrus, 36–39 faith, as stoicism, 143–49, 152n Falucci, Niccolò, Sermones medicinales, 104 fear of death as basis for justice and piety, 15–16, 142, 147, 150 and burial practices, 254 as fear of plague, 207, 212 overcome by true philosophy, 207, 214 Fedini, Domenico, Vita di Santa Bibiana vergine e martire romana, 263 Félibien, André, 179 Ferdinand III, 266, 299, 302 Ficino, Marsilio, De vita triplici, 123–25 Fiero, Gloria, 65 Fioravanti, Leonardo, 163–65 Fiorentino, Rosso, Ignorance Expelled, 192, 193 Firmicus, Error of the Pagan Religions, 277– 81 Fittler, James, The Plague, 246, 247, 248 flagellation, 51, 53, 54, 85, 106–7, 109 flight from plague of clergy, 49, 51, 65 by Nürnbergers, 134–35, 143, 146–47 as self-protection, 294 views of Luther, 143 Osiander, 141–43; Petrarch, 207 physicians/healers, 146 Sachs, 146–47 Florence, 99, 102, 104–6 Foligno, 105

322 Index Folz, Hans, Plague Regimen, 133–34, 139, 141, 150 Fontana, Domenico, 287, 288 fortune/chance, 14, 45 Fracastoro, Girolamo, De contagione, 159, 160 France and Peace of Westphalia, 301–2 plague in, 34, 36, 54, 224–25 Francis de Sales, as model superior, 234– 35 Francis of Assisi, 232 Franks, and cult of Saint Sebastian, 93–94 French Royal Academy, 197, 198 funerals and funerary practices abandoned during plague, 276 aesthetization of death, 56–61 Attis figure depicted on monuments, 280–81 cremation and burial, 253 and the macabre, 64, 65, 67, 74 in Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, 252–55, 271–72

G gender, and qualities of governance, 232, 234–35 geographical position, as clue in Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, 256, 274–75 Gerson, Jean, Opus tripartitum de praeceptis decalogi, 64 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece, 102, 123 Gibbon, Edward, 2 Gigli, Giacinto, 241 Ginzberg, Lewis, 27 Giovanni del Biondo, Saint Sebastian Triptych, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 122 Giraldi, Lilio Gregorio, De deis gentium, 278, 279, 281 Gislebertus, Last Judgment, 68 God as amoral, 14, 15 in ark/Ashdod story, 182 fisherman metaphor for, 230 as gentle, 233

as loving and chastening, 208 and compassionate, 7, 151–52, 225 like a father, 225 and tender, 225–26 as merciful, 13 role of, in history, 3–4, 10–11, 19 as source of plague, 260–61 as sovereign, 134–35, 137–40, 144–49 as surgeon, 225 as wrathful, 17–18, 135, 141, 150, 169, 294 Gozzoli, Benozzo Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 107, 108 Saint Sebastian fresco, 105–6 Gregorios of Nazianzos, 2, 293 Gregorios of Nyssa, 1–2, 16, 18–19 Gregory IV, Pope, 94 Gregory the Great, Pope, 91, 93, 171, 184 Grossman, Sheldon, 270 Guy of Chauliac, 45

H healers. See physicians heliolatry. See sun worship Henderson, John, 104 heresy, 2, 293–303 Heyligen, Louis, 44, 47 historians/chroniclers of plague Agathias of Myrina, 15–19 Evagrius, 11–13, 18, 19 Gilles li Muisis, 51, 52, 54 Prokopios, 13–17, 19 Theophanes the Confessor, 7–8 Yuhannan of Amida, 8–10, 13–14 Zacharias of Mytilene, 11 historical sources on death Ars Moriendi, 64, 65 Book of the Craft of Dying, 64–65 Decameron (Boccaccio), 65 Hours of Catherine of Cleves, 67 on plague “A Disputation betwixt the Body and Worms,” 71 Anglo-Norman group, 42–43 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 259, 265 Beatus of Liébana commentary, 42– 43

Index 323 Bible moralisée, 28, 34, 36 Carolingian cycle, 42 Cloisters Apocalypse, 43 compared, 32 Eusebios, Ecclesiastical History, 265 Farsi and Judeo-Arabic texts, 28 Golden Legend (Voragine), 56 Legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living, 71–72, 75, 78, 79 Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History, 264–71 Possevino, Cause et rimedii, 260, 264 Psalter of Saint Louis, 34, 36 Talmud, 27, 28 Vatican Codex Greek 333, 38 history/historiography and archival records, 158 of Byzantine Christianity, 1–4 of Christian salvation, 191, 194, 215– 17 and composition of paintings, 187–89 importance of to artists, 270–71 to Sweerts, 264–65 intersection of human and divine, 3 of Lateran obelisk, 290–91 and nature of divine justice, 4 Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History, 264– 71, 280 of obelisks, 287 of Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod, 186–96 and Reformation “Battle of Books,” 265–70 Holstenius, Lucas, 264, 269 Holy Family, 232–33 Holy Roman Empire, and Peace of Westphalia, 301–2 Holy Shroud, in artworks, 270 Horace, 199 hospitals dedicated to Saint Sebastian, 136 established by Justinian, 6 for incurables/syphilitics, 164 as medicalized and charitable, 104–6 and memento mori art, 102 public, in Florence, 104–6 at San Marco, 157 human sacrifice, 276–77 Hutten, Ulrich von, 162

I Ignatius of Loyola, 232 illness/disabilities. See under diseases Ilyricus, Matthias Flacius, Magdeburg Centuries, 268–69 images/iconography. See also artworks; manuscript illumination angels of death, 185 arrows/weapons, 45–61, 185 of Dagon/false worship, 192 Dance of Death, 76, 79 death images, 67–71 funerary/macabre, 56–61, 71–78 of obelisks, 286–91 Offices of the Dead, 67, 82 Philistine as Saracen as Jew, 29–34 plague saints, 56, 185 in Poussin’s work, 177–96 theology of, and Poussin’s work, 215 Triumph of Death, 67–71, 79 Incarnation, Byzantine views of, 3 Innocent X, Pope, 288, 296, 303n Zelo domus Dei, 299, 302 Inquisition, 156–58, 166–67 intromission (Aristotelian theory), 51 Ioannes of Thessalonike, 10, 17 Irene, Saint, 91, 94 Iversen, Erik, 187

J Jacmé, Jean, 43–44, 51 Jane de Chantal, 235 Jesus Christ as casting plague arrows, 45, 47 compared to Prodigal Son story, 233– 34 as gentle, 232–33 as solar divinity, 284–86 Jews, 31, 32, 54 Job, Saint, patron of syphilitics, 164 John of Ephesos. See Yuhannan of Amida (aka John of Ephesos) John of Rupescissa, 104 Jones, Colin, 224 Josephus, Flavius Jewish Antiquities, 179–80 as source for Poussin, 175–80, 185, 215, 216

324 Index Josephus, Flavius, continued and translations of peste, 179, 185 Wars of the Jews, 26–29, 31, 180 Julian, Emperor of Rome and Julianic plague, 259–65, 267 Julian, Emperor of Rome, continued and mystery religions, 273–82, 301 Oratio in Regum Solem ad Salustiam, 279 Oration on the Mother of the Gods, 281 Virgin Mary orders assassination of, 261, 301 justice, as fear induced, 15–16 Justinian, 4–7, 15, 17

K Keazor, Henry, 192 Kirchenordnung adopted in Nürnberg, 138 Kircher, Athanasius Obeliscus Pamphilius, 288 Scrutinium physico-medicum contagiosae luis, 185

L Lambeck, Peter, 268, 269 Lampridius, Aelius, 275–76 Lange, Johann, 266, 275, 276, 282 Lapide, Cornelius a, 181 Lara, Jaime, 286 Lavaudieu, plague imagery at, 82–83 wall painting, 45, 46 Le Brun, Charles, 197, 198 Lemaire, Jean, 187 letters of burghers on Nürnberg plague, 143–49 Protestant salutations and closings, 145–46 Du Duc to Tegnagelius, on church history, 268 Nicholas Poussin, on art theory, 197– 203, 213–15 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 165 Ligorio, Pirro, 250 Linck, Wenzeslaus How a Christian Person should Console Himself in Suffering, 137, 151 literature itinerant healer trope, 170–71

medical, 206 Medicina filosofica contra la peste (Condio), 206–15 moralizing, 206–15 and Plague at Ashdod (Poussin), 206 Remèdes souverains contre la peste et la mort soudaine (Binet), 206 and visual art, 211–15 Lodovico Capponi, Gino di, 111 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo, 194–95 Longhi, Roberto, 243–44 Longobard family, 92 Lothair, adopts Catholicism, 94 Louis, Saint (Louis IX) plague imagery and crusades, 34, 36, 228–29 Louis XIII, 299 Louis XIV, 302 Luini, Barnardino, Saint Sebastian, 117, 119 Luke the Evangelist, as portrait painter, 271 Lunghi, Elvio, 10 Luther, Martin castigated by Catholics, 295–96 on suffering, 140, 151 Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague, 143

M magic, 144 Mahon, Denis, 204, 205 Malalas, Ioannes, 7, 13, 15, 19 Malleus maleficarum, 295 Mancini, Giulio, Considerazioni sulla pittura, 200, 204, 205 Mantegna, Andrea, Saint Sebastian, 102, 103, 115 manuscript illumination Ark in the Temple of Dagon and the Suffering of the Philistines, 30 Burial, 60 Burning of Jews, 54, 55 Burying Plague Victims, 52 Child in the Cradle, from Dance of Death, 80, 81 Dance of Death, 76, 79 David Praying to Avert the Plague on Jerusalem, 59

Index 325 Death, Devil, and an Angel at the Bedside, 49 Death Strangling a Victim (Stiny Codex), 48 Destruction of the Temple of Dagon…, 39 Dying Man Tempted by Impatience, 66 Funeral in a Church, 58 Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 57 Philistines Beset with Plague, 41 Philistines Suffering from the Plague, 40 Plague of the First Vial, 44 Plague of the Philistines, 25, 35, 37 Plague of the Philistines (Plague of Ashdod), 24, 25, 28–31 Psalter of Saint Louis, 34, 36 Return of the Ark, 33 Marcellinus, Ammianus, 290 Marino, Giambattisa, 194 La Galeria, 201 Strage degli Innocenti, 200–201 Martinez, Pierre, 267 Mary, Mother of Jesus, 135, 136, 263 order assassination of Julian, 261, 301 Master of Staffolo, Misericordia Standard, 107 Maternus, Firmicus, The Error of the Pagan Religions, 277–78, 280 Mautini, Girolamo, 293 Maximinus, 293 Mazarin, Cardinal Jules, 302 medicinal analogies, in Binet’s work, 232– 35 medicines/remedies alchemical cures, 163, 165 aqua vitae, 166, 172 bloodletting, 231 bread, as plague protection, 97 commercialization debates about, 172–73 curative herbs, 249 devotional practices as, 207, 228–29 emetics and purgatives, 163 guaiac (lignum sanctum/lignum vitae), 162 healing waters, 250–51 images as, 123–27, 227–28 mental repose as, 208 mercury, 162 moderation and peace of mind as, 207 myrrh, aloes, 231

natural, 141, 231 as spiritual adultery, 142 views of Folz, 134 plant-based pharmaceuticals, 119, 122 Il precipitato (mercuric oxide, HgO), 163 and rise of hospitals, 104–6 and secularization of disease, 98–102 sensual pleasures as beauty, 123–27, 227–28 joyous living, 231 music, 228 for syphilis, 156–58, 163 Meo da Siena, Triumph of Death, 70 Mercati, Michele, De gli obelischi di Roma, 287, 288, 290 mice. See rodents Michault, Pierre, La Danse aux Aveugles, 69 Michelangelo Deluge, 182 Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave as models, 115 Minerva Medica, Temple of (Rome), 249 Mithras/Mithraism (sun god worship), 275–82 Monophysites, 8, 10 morality, 149, 151 moral lessons, in macabre works, 74–75 moral logic of Agathias, 15–17 of Corippus, 11, 16, 19 of Evagrius, 11–13 of Justinian, 5–6 of Malalas, 7, 13, 15, 19 of Prokopios, 14–17, 19 of Yuhannan, 8–10, 15, 16 Mornaeus, Philippus, 28 Moryson, Fynes, Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, 170–72 Moses, 232 Moulins, Guyart des, 39, 42 music as medicine, 228 as motifs in Poussin’s work, 196–97 Muslims. See Saracens mystery religions, 273–82

326 Index

N New World, and disease, 10, 160 Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulus, Ecclesiastical History, and battle of the books, 265–71 Nördlingen, as haven from plague, 135, 144, 149–50 nudity and perfection of human body, 126 as pilgrimage ritual, 109, 111 in Renaissance art, 114–15 Nürnberg, 132–55 nymphaea, of Rome, 250–51

O obelisks, significance of, 286–91 Offner, Richard, 100 Orthodox church ecumenical council of 381, 1 Osiander, Andreas, 138, 140–41, 146 Ostrow, Steven, 301 Ozment, Steven, 148

P Padua, Inquisition trial of Volpe, 156–58 paganism as caryatid in Sweerts’s painting, 249– 54 demonized by Christian apologists, 271–73 as depicted by Sweerts, 257–59 healing temples and freshwater of, 251 initiation and ascent of the soul, 282– 84 Julian, Mithraism, and mystery religions, 273–82 reversion to, in plague, 18 waning of, 261–62 Paleotti, Alfonso, Explicatione del lenzuolo, ove fu involto il Signore…, 270 Palladio, Andrea, Four Books on Architecture, 251 Pamplona, 36–39 Panigarola, Francesco, 295 Paracelsus, on mercury treatment, 162 Paris, plague in, 204 Park, Katherine, 171

Parma, 105 Passeri, Giambattista, 179 Pastor, Ludwig von, 298 Paul the Deacon, 91–92, 97 Paul V Borghese, Pope, 262, 293 Pavia, cult of Sebastian, 91–92, 97, 105 Peace of Westphalia, as Catholic defeat, 296, 298–99 Pecham, John, Perspectiva communis, 50, 51 penance/penitential rituals abolished in Nürnberg, 137 to combat plague, 134, 135, 141–42 flagellation, 106–7, 109 and macabre art, 70, 71, 74 processions, 135 and Saint Sebastian’s image, 106, 107, 114–19 Persia, astrologers, 18 Perugino, Pietro Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian, 117, 118 Saint Irene and Saint Sebastian, 117 Saint Sebastian, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119 peste/pestis. See under plague Petau, Denis, S.J., 263, 267 Peter, Saint, 232, 270 Peter Comestor, 28–29, 31 Petrarch Invectivae contra medicum, 100 Remediis utriusque fortunae, 207 pharmacy, the Bear (Venice), 165 Philistines, 29, 30, 31, 32 physicians, healers Bibiana, 249–50 charlatans, 170–72 Christian shamans, 164–65 empirics, 157, 161–63, 165 exploitation by, 161–62 on flight from plague, 146 as fraudulent, 171–72 of Justinian, 5 and medical self-fashioning, 163 Minerva Medica as, 246, 249 as model for government, 225 and payment in kind, 205 on plague cure and prevention, 79–80, 133–34, 139

Index 327 Plague Regimen of, 139, 150 Prokopios’s views of, 14 Rhazes, 160 A Short Regimen for How One Should Conduct Oneself during Plague, 139, 142 as spiritual metaphors, 225–35 university training of, 98–99 piety as fear induced, 15–16 and noble lies, 5–6, 16 as result of plague, 9 and “sola existence,” 149 as stoicism, 143–49 Pignoria, Lorenzo, Magnae Deum Matris Idaeae et Attidis Initia…, 278–81 Pius IV, Pope, 288 plague Byzantine response to, 17–19 carriers of, 18, 24–29, 42–45, 54, 133– 34 as corrective chastisement, 208, 292– 94 and cult of Saint Sebastian, 90–98 decline of, 79–80 forms of as Black Death, 42–43, 45, 79, 80– 85, 102, 158–59 and era of new diseases, 158–59 bubonic, 47, 158, 182, 185, 294 hemorrhoidal, 27 pneumonic, 47 See also under diseases and heresy, 294–303 interpretations of religious/spiritual, 5–11, 16, 100, 106–14, 134, 135, 229–32 secular, 65, 99–102, 104–6 and the macabre, 78–85 as metaphor, 172–73 of mice, 36–39, 43, 179, 180, 182 (see also rodents) in Nürnberg, 133, 142–43 as peste/pestis, 159, 179, 181–82 prevention and treatment of, 80, 133– 34, 139 as punishment for sin (see under sin) and socioreligious change, 65–67, 104–6 and sudden death, 229 symptoms/manifestations of, 24, 26, 42, 43, 45–48

and weapons imagery, 10, 45–61, 82, 94–103, 106–14 plague literature. See literature plague motifs, in artworks, 177–86 Plague of Gregory the Great, 182, 184 Plague of Julian, 259–65, 267, 292 Plague of King David, 184 Plague of the Philistines (Plague of Ashdod). See also under Poussin, Nicolas as bubonic, 185 manuscript illumination of, 24, 25, 28–31 plague saints. See individual saints Pliny the Elder, 182 Pollaiuolo, Antonio and Piero, Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 111, 112, 114 Possevino, Antonio, S.J., Cause et rimedii della peste, 260, 264, 295, 303 Poussin, Nicolas allegorical/associative themes, 186– 96, 213 artworks of Death of Germanicus, 204 Emperor Titus Destroys the Temple in Jerusalem, 299, 300 Gathering of Manna, 188, 201 Martyrdom of Erasmus, 187 Massacre of the Innocents, 201 Plague at Ashdod, 177–223, 178 Sack and Destruction of the Temple, 180, 204, 299 Seven Sacraments, 204 influence of, on Sweerts, 239, 256, 293 letters on art theory, 197–203, 213–15 narrative technique of, 188–89, 191– 92 use of plague motifs, 177–186 Pozzo, Cassiano dal, 205 prayer orans pose for, 257–59, 268 against the plague, 56, 207 Procaccini, Camillo, Saint Roch Curing the Plague Stricken, 209, 210, 211 Prokopios, historian, 5–6, 13–17, 19 Protestantism as assaulting Catholic Church, 262, 263, 267–69, 293–94 Evangelicalism as source of comfort, 151–52

328 Index Protestantism, continued as heresy, 293–94 Nürnberger responses to plague, 132– 36 responses to plague, 132–55 as stoic, 143–49 views on plague and suffering, 137–43 Prudentius, Peristephanon Liber, 273

R Rabelais, on mercury treatment, 162 Raimondi, Marcantonio, Il Morbetto, 182– 84, 195, 239 Raphael, 182 Baglioni Altarpiece, 194 Fire in the Borgo, 189, 195, 209 Loggie, 195 Rashi, on plague of the hemorrhoids, 27 rats. See rodents relics, of Saint Sebastian, 91–95, 100, 105 Remiet, Pierre, Death, Devil, and an Angel at the Bedside, 49 Renaissance influence on art, 114 Reni, Guido Abduction of Helen, 301 Massacre of the Innocents, 201 repentance. See also penance/penitential rituals and confession, 150 from fear of plague, 137, 141–42, 230– 31 Rhazes (physician), 160 rhetoric depicted in art, 191 of moralizing literature, 206–7, 212–15 Richer, Jean, 263 Ripa, Cesare, Iconologia, 184 Rochus, Saint (Roch, Roche, Rocco), 136 rodents, as cause of plague, 24–39, 42, 158, 179, 180 Roman Catholics. See Catholic Church Rome ancient monuments, 250–51 archaeology of, 259, 268, 278–79 board of health, 204 cult of Saint Sebastian, 95–96 plague in, 204, 241

Rossellino, Bernardino, Saint Sebastian Tabernacle, 124, 125 Rossi, Gian Vittorio, 205 Royle, Nicholas, 72 Rubens, Peter Paul Consequences of War, 297 Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier, 295

S Sacchi, Andrea, 189 Sachs, Hans “Das 13 capiel Osee” poem, 147–49 survives plague, 149 Wittenberg Nightingale poem, 146–48, 152n Saint John Lateran basilica, 288, 289, 290 saints. See also individual saints appeal to, for healing, 6, 17–18, 135– 36 as examples of consolation, 227 in plague pictures, 185 plague saints, 56 Protestant views of, 144–46, 148–49 Sandrart, Joachim von, 179 San Gimignano, cult of Saint Sebastian, 105 San Rocco Confraternity (Reggio Emilia), 209 Santa Eugenia, Francisco Javier, 123 Saracens, 29, 30, 31–32 Sarto, Andrea del, Gambassi Altarpiece, 117 Savonarola, Girolamo, 78, 82 Savonarola, Michele, 82 Schreyer, Sebald, 136n Sebastian, Saint beauty of, 114–19, 123–27 cult of in Assisi, 105 in Florence, 99, 102 in Foligno, 105 Frankish, 93–94 in Parma, 105 in Pavia, 91–92, 97, 105 in Rome, 95–96 in San Gimignano, 105 in Soissons, 93–94 distribution of relics of, 91–95, 100, 105 hospital dedicated to, 136

Index 329 legend of, 94–98 martyrdom of, 90–94 and medicinal simples, 122 as pacifying divine ire, 106–14 as patron of public hospitals, 105 as plague saint, 90–131 and political relationships, 93–94 tended by Saint Irene, 91, 94 Second Coming, Byzantine view of, 3, 17 shamans, 164–65 sickness. See diseases Simeon Stylites, Saint, 12 sin blasphemy as, 5, 18, 19, 151 heresy, as cause of plague, 294–303 punishments for diseases/plague, 5–10, 16, 135, 141–46, 150–51, 164, 181, 230– 31, 294 kaulotomia (penis cutting), 5 sodomy as, 5, 19 and suffering, 137–38, 225–26 Sixtus V, Pope, 287 Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, 276 Soissons, and cult of Saint Sebastian, 93– 94 soteriology Christian, in Poussin’s painting, 191, 194 pagan, 282–84 Spain flagellation of undesirables, 54 mice/plague images, 36, 37, 38–39, 43 stoicism, 143–49, 214 suffering as Christian myth, 165 illness as purgatory, 225–26 views of Binet, 225 Catholic apologists, 292–94 Protestants, 137–43, 151–52 Sachs, 147–48 sun worship of Cybele and Attis, 279, 281–82 Jesus as solar divinity, 285 and Louis XIV as Sun King, 302 and Mithraism, 284 in Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, 255

superstition, 137, 138, 273 Sweerts, Michael Clothing the Naked, 257 Double Portrait, 257, 258, 304 Mars Destroying the Arts, 296 as painter-evangelist, 303–4 Plague in an Ancient City, 237–312, 238 symbolism of obelisks, 286–87 of plague language, 23 of sun-god as Christological, 284–86

T Tassi, Leonardo, Sebastian sculpture, 117 Tertullian, 259, 277, 281 Theodosius I, convenes general church council, 1–2 theology. See also heresy as defining the nature of God viewed abstractly, 2–3, 10 punitive, of Justinian, 5 and responses to catastrophe, 4–5, 8– 10 Theophanes the Confessor, chronicle of, 7–8 Thucydides and The Plague of Athens, 240– 42 Thürlemann, Felix, 201–4 Titian, Resurrection Polyptych, 107, 109, 115 tragedy, as artistic motif, 189, 191, 194, 198–200

U Urban VIII, Pope, 16, 117, 299, 303n

V Valeriano, Pierio Hieroglyphica, 285 Hieroglyphicorum Collectanea, 285 Valguarnera, Fabrizio, 186 Vasari, Giorgio, 114 Venette, Jean de, chronicler, 65 Venice, 10, 156, 170–72 Veronese, Saint Sebastian, 115 Villani, Filipo, 98–99 Virgil, Aeneid, 182, 239 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, 250

Vittoria, Alessandro, portrait of, 115 Volpe, Antonio, Dominican friar cure for syphilis, 156–58, 163 legal case used as precedent, 168–69 Volpe, Antonio, continued Inquisition charges against, 165–73 rumors about, 165–66 Voragine, Jacobus de, Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), 56, 95, 97

W Westphalia, Peace of. See Peace of Westphalia Wiesner, Merry, 232 Wind, Edgar, 283 Wittkower, Rudolf, 270

Y Yersin, Alexander, 23 Yuhannan of Amida (aka John of Ephesos), 8–10, 13–14, 16, 18, 19

Z Zacharias of Mytilene, Ecclesiastical History, 11 Zoroastrianism, 277