Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

In making for Genoa these ships put in at Messina in Sicily and left the infection there. Michael Platiensis (of Piazza), a Franciscan friar, has given an account of its course in this city. He refers to infection by means of the breath, and by contact with the belongings of, the infected. Gabrielle de Mussi seems to hold a similar belief. ‘We’ [i. e. the Genoese sailors], he says, ‘reach our homes: our kindred and our neighbours come from all parts to visit us. Woe to us, for we cast at them the darts of death! Whilst we spoke to them, whilst they embraced us and kissed us, we scattered the poison from our lips. Going back to their homes, they soon infected their whole families.’

De Mussi explicitly asserts that the plague was carried from the seaport of Genoa by some Genoese to Bobbio, and to his city of Piacenza. Here such was the mortality that ‘no prayer was said, no solemn office sung, nor bell tolled for the funeral of even the noblest citizen: but by day and night the corpses were borne to the common plague pit without rite or ceremony’.

So Italy had been primarily infected at Venice and at Genoa, and from these sea-coast cities the disease spread itself over the whole Italian peninsula.

At Venice the example of Galen had sunk deep into the hearts of her physicians. They fled before the advancing enemy and shut themselves up in their houses, leaving the surgeons, led by Andrea di Padova, to fill their place. Physicians would do well to bear this occasion in mind, when they complain of the encroachments of surgery into the domain of medicine. On March 30, a.d. 1348, the Grand Council of Venice appointed three men to act as a Committee of Public Safety. These men had large burial-pits dug in one of the islands of the lagoon, and organized a service of boats to transport the bodies to them.

Rome was not so hard hit as some of the cities of Italy. Nevertheless, there remains to this day a monument of this plague in the flight of marble steps leading up to the church of Ara Coeli. These were set up by Giovanni de Colonna in October 1348, out of the spoils of the temple of the Sun on the Quirinal, and were designed for the use of the citizens, who with ropes round their necks and with ashes on their heads climbed the hill barefooted, to implore from the Blessed Virgin the cessation of the plague. The thirteenth-century mosaic of the Madonna and Child may still be seen above the side entrance of Ara Coeli at the head of the well-worn stairs leading up from the Capitoline Piazza. The object of worship remains, but the worshippers are no more.

Lanciani[148] has reproduced an old engraving showing women ascending the marble stairs on their knees. This staircase would seem to be indicated both in Delaunay’s picture and in the fresco by which it was inspired.

There is a legend in Rome, that as the panic-stricken people were carrying an effigy of the Madonna from the Ara Coeli to St. Peter’s, the statue of the angel on the Castel S. Angelo bowed its head to do homage to it.

Plague was not the only enemy in Rome in a.d. 1348, for a terrible earthquake on September 9 and 10 wrought havoc among the remaining monuments of ancient Rome. Those citizens, who had escaped the plague and from death among the falling ruins, lived for weeks in the open Campagna with no shelter from the inclemency of the weather. Perhaps it was this accident that served to bring the visitation to an end at Rome more rapidly than elsewhere.

Agnolo di Tura, in his Cronica Senese, edited by Muratori, gives a graphic picture of the Black Death in Siena. A large uninteresting picture in the church of S. Maria dei Servi depicts St. Catharine attending the plague-stricken, and there is an ugly, almost ludicrous, fresco of the same subject in the House of St. Catharine of Siena. The painter brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti were both carried off by plague. But it is in the Duomo itself that the mark of the Black Death is most apparent. Begun in a.d. 1339, on the site of an older cathedral dedicated to the Madonna of the Assumption, the transepts were built, the foundations of the nave and choir were laid, and their walls partly raised according to the designs of Lando Orefice, when the Black Death broke out in the city in a.d. 1348. The money collected for the building was diverted to urgent public purposes, and the work, once suspended, has never been completely accomplished. The present cathedral, splendid as it is, is a mere fragment of the magnificent fabric, in which Orefice purposed to enshrine a memorial to the glory of fourteenth century Siena.

The little Cappella di Piazza, attached as a loggia to the Palazzo Publico of Siena, was set up in gratitude for the cessation of the plague that carried off no less than thirty thousand persons. It was commenced in a.d. 1352 and completed in a.d. 1376. Hard by Siena the citizens of San Gimignano vowed an altar to St. Fabian and St. Sebastian as the price of their protection, and set it up between the doors of the Pieve or Collegiata. Above the place where once it stood is now the fresco of Benozzo Gozzoli, commemorating the plague of a.d. 1464.