Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque by Franco Mormando Thomas Worcester & Thomas Worcester

Author:Franco Mormando,Thomas Worcester & Thomas Worcester [Mormando, Franco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS037090 History / Modern / 16th Century
ISBN: 9781612480084
Publisher: TrumanStateUP
Published: 2015-11-05T06:00:00+00:00

[183] 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.

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 [185]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

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