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Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Louise Marshall
Louise Marshall*
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Extract

The Infamous Black Death of 1348 signaled the reappearance of bubonic plague in Europe after long centuries of absence. Contemporary accounts vividly describe the shock and horror of universal and indiscriminate mortality. From Tournai, Gilles Li Muisis observed that “no one was secure, whether rich, in moderate circumstances or poor, but everyone from day to day waited on the will of the Lord.” In any given area, between one third to half of the population would die. Worse still, the Black Death was only the beginning of a worldwide pandemic, or cyclical series of epidemics, recurring at intervals of two to twenty years throughout Europe until well into the seventeenth century.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1994 , pp. 485 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1994

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Footnotes

*

Material in this article is drawn from my doctoral dissertation, “ Waiting on the Will of the Lord: The Imagery of the Plague”, University of Pennsylvania, 1989. I wish to thank my advisor Leo Steinberg for his inspiration and support. Research for this article was made possible by the generous support of a Chester Dale Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and a Faculty Research Award from the University of Melbourne. This essay was accepted for publication in April 1992 and thus does not contain any bibliography beyond that date. The following abbreviations are used in the notes: AASS, Acta Sanctorum; BSS, Bibliotheca Sanctorum.

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