Until 1894, nobody knew what caused plague. For more than three centuries it kept coming back to European towns, and painters had to show a killer that no one could see. The twelve images here found very different answers, and one of them got its painter expelled from the Royal Academy of Painting in Paris.
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How These Were Chosen
After the Black Death of the 1340s, doctors blamed plague on corrupted air, and many people saw God's punishment in it. Towns and confraternities paid for altarpieces of saints to protect them, and that is how plague entered art.
Every image here shows the epidemic through its sick and its dead, or gives plague or Death a form that can be seen. A saint standing alone, with no victims in sight, stays out. An engraving and a manuscript page come in on the same rule.
One gesture returns from century to century: a hand, a sleeve or a handkerchief pressed to the nose, sometimes over a sponge soaked in scented vinegar, the only defense anyone had against air believed to be poisoned.
12. Arnold Böcklin, The Plague (1898)
A dragon flies low down a narrow town street, its black wings filling the picture from edge to edge. On its back rides the plague in the shape of Death, a corpse with gray-green skin swinging a scythe. Below, a woman in red has fallen across a woman in white on the paving stones, and farther down the street people run from the monster.
Arnold Böcklin, the Swiss painter born in Basel, made the picture in 1898, when he was 71. By then plague had not been seen in Europe for almost two hundred years. The epidemics he knew at first hand were cholera and typhus. Cholera killed his first son in 1854, typhus another son four years later, and both diseases came close to killing the painter himself more than once.
That is why the rider is older than its name. In drawings dated 1876, Böcklin had already worked out this Death sweeping through a town on a dragon, and the subject then was cholera. More than twenty years later he gave the same rider the name of the older disease, which had broken out again in Bombay in September 1896 and was spreading across India while he worked.
The name changed, and the town in the picture still has no defender. Older votive pictures of plague put a saint in the foreground to fight the disease. Böcklin keeps only a small shrine on the wall at the left, a Madonna and Child with a few flowers. A man slumps against the wall beneath it, and the dragon flies straight past.
At a Glance
Artist: Arnold Böcklin (1827 to 1901)
Painted: 1898
Medium: Probably tempera, on fir wood
Size: 149.8 × 105.1 cm (59 × 41.4 in)
Where to see it: Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
11. Jules-Élie Delaunay, The Plague in Rome (1869)
On the steps of a house in Rome, a dark, half-naked figure strikes a door with a spear, and above him a winged figure in a red robe points at the same door. Victims lie in shadow on the paving at the left, and a statue of a horseman stands where the empty street ends. Jules-Élie Delaunay, a painter from Nantes, showed the canvas at the Paris Salon of 1869. The spear has not finished knocking, and in the story he painted, every knock is counted.