Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

No less a man than Petrarch[149] has chronicled this plague at Parma. His letter is in no sense descriptive, but rather a long-drawn-out wail over the devastation, the loss of friends and relations, and the magnitude of the destruction, that seemed to him to threaten the utter extinction of the human race. Affectation is the key-note of his lamentations, that are freely interspersed with allusions to the ancient classics. Laura had died of plague at Avignon in a.d. 1348, and Petrarch in sadness of soul wrote these lines on the manuscript of his beloved Vergil, now in the Ambrosian Library at Milan:

‘Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth, the 6th April, 1327, at Avignon; and in the same city, at the same hour of the same 6th April, but in the year 1348, withdrew from life, whilst I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss. The melancholy truth was made known to me by letters, which I received at Parma on the 19th May.’

‘Her chaste and lovely body was interred on the evening of the same day in the Church of the Minorites: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven, whence it came.’

‘To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it something of a cruel sweetness, but I forget that nothing more ought in this life to please me, which by the grace of God need not be difficult to one who thinks strenuously and manfully of the idle cares, the empty hopes, and the unexpected end of the years that are gone.’

The Florentines, by way of rehabilitating their city after the Black Death, founded a university, and offered Petrarch a professorial chair, which he declined.

Matteo Villani[150] wrote a plain unvarnished account of the state of Florence during the Black Death, but it has found little favour beside the lighter sketch that stands as a prelude to the Decameron. His brother Giovanni, the Florentine historian, was one of the early victims, and Matteo takes up his history at the point at which he left it, and begins with a description of the epidemic. Famine had preceded the plague, and like it was regarded as sent by Heaven for the punishment of sin. But the energy of the government, in importing corn and distributing it to the destitute, had done much to relieve the distress, when this worse enemy presented itself at the gates.

Both Villani and Boccaccio enlarge on the futility of all measures, preventive and remedial alike, and the intense infectiveness of the disease. They believed that it could be communicated by a look, as well as by contact with the person or belongings of an infected subject. Boccaccio mentions the speedy death of two pigs from rooting among some infected clothing. Some pinned their faith on strict seclusion: some on temperate living, some on intemperance: others sought safety in the carrying of aromatic substances. Both Villani and Boccaccio lay stress on the utter depravity and demoralization engendered by the plague. Great uncertainty of life has never failed to generate corresponding recklessness. It has always been the same tale in every desperate city; it was so when Jerusalem, panic-stricken at the threatened attack of Sennacherib, gave itself over to wild revelry: ‘And in that day did the Lord God of Hosts call to weeping and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: but behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’ Matteo Villani traces to the Black Death the social and moral degeneracy and the political anarchy, that were rampant in Florentine life, in the centuries that followed close upon it. Family affection is apt to reach its lowest ebb in the houses of a plague-stricken city. Villani and Boccaccio echo the language of Thucydides when they tell of parents deserting children, and husbands wives, in their hour of need, and the neglect of the sacred rites of sepulture. The plague raged in Florence from April to September, and Antoninus, Archbishop of Florence, computes the mortality within the city at 60,000 persons, two-thirds of the total population. Boccaccio actually raises the figure to 100,000 between March and July only, but this figure, if correct, must comprise also the surrounding district, which suffered only less severely than the city itself. One bright record stands out against this dark background of social demoralization in the devotion of the Compagnia della Misericordia to their self-appointed task. Instituted in a.d. 1244 for the service of the sick, they now also lent themselves to the transport of the dead. A picture by Cigoli (a.d. 1559-1613), now in the church of the Misericordia, shows the brotherhood in red robes—now changed to black—gathering up the dead and dying at the foot of Giotto’s Tower. The bearers may be seen to this day in the streets of Florence in the same robes and hoods masking the whole face but the eyes, but the hand-litters and sedans of Cigoli’s picture have now been slung on wheels and sanctified to modern use with the addition of a motor ambulance. Great wealth flowed into the coffers of the guild from men who desired to crown a vicious life with a comfortable death and a decent burial.

The horrors of the plague-stricken city, with which Boccaccio has prefaced his Decameron, stand out in striking contrast to the gay frivolity of the young men and women round whom his romance ranges. Plague and pleasure jostle each other in jarring juxtaposition. Boccaccio of set purpose chose this dark background for the staging of his brighter theme. Thucydides had done the same before him, in setting the panegyric of Pericles side by side with the plague of Athens: and Manzoni has done so after him in the romance of Promessi Sposi. Perhaps also he had learnt, amid the fierce realities of the plague, to envisage life as it is, and so present it to his readers.

Niebuhr, in tracing the decadence of Roman literature to the Antonine plague, cites as a parallel illustration the influence of the Black Death on early Florentine literature. In the latter case, at any rate, it is difficult to bring his dictum into line with the actual circumstances. It would seem rather that the break in the vernacular Florentine literature after Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, was deliberate, and in no sense accidental. What Petrarch perceived, and perceived unerringly, was the poverty of the material on which the vernacular had maintained a starved existence; and he saw in the ancient classics, in their mythology, in their speculative freedom, in the principles of their art, liberation from the bondage that the Church had laid on literature. What he did not perceive was that in reverting to ancient modes of thought it was needless, nay even harmful, to adopt also the language of the ancients. It was not open to him to see, as it is to us, that no great work of literature has ever been produced in any language but that in which the writer speaks and feels and thinks: any tongue but the tongue of his daily life must needs be artificial and inanimate. Petrarch himself little guessed that with posterity his fame would rest on his Rime in the vernacular, and not on his epistles and multifarious dissertations in a lifeless Latin language. It is this mistaken teaching of Petrarch that explains the abrupt break of a century or more in vernacular Florentine literature, to which the Black Death can have been at most a trivial contributory cause. As soon as this mistake came to be recognized Florentine literature flows on again in its old channel in the full stream of the fifteenth and sixteenth century masterpieces of Ariosto, of Tasso, and the rest. It was the advice of Petrarch that turned Boccaccio from the vernacular to Latin, after he had completed in his Decameron a masterpiece of Italian prose. The influence of the classical revival that Petrarch had brought to life was destined also slowly to secularize Florentine art, but the time of its complete emancipation was not yet.

The Black Death first touched French soil at Marseilles, brought thither, it was thought, by ships from Genoa. Simon de Covino, a doctor, described the features of the disease as he witnessed it at the neighbouring town of Montpellier, in Latin hexameter verse. He clearly recognized its contagious character, for he says, ‘By a single touch or a single breath of the plague-stricken they perished.’