Raphael’s drawing of ‘[Plague]’,[166] now in the Uffizi gallery at Florence, has become much worn with time. The picture is divided into two parts by a head of the god Terminus mounted on a lofty pedestal. To the right it is night-time, but the interior of a house of mourning is shown in vertical section. In its courtyard is a young man, with a torch in his right hand, counting the number of stricken animals, while with his left he prevents one of the sheep from coming near to those that are dead. An ewe lies dead with a young lamb fastened to her dried-up udder. An ox lying down surveys the scene sadly. Above this corpse-strewn court a stream of light, penetrating into the interior of a room, illumines the figures of two Sisters of Charity, as they minister to the master of the house, who is dying: he is stretched on his bed, lying in a dense shadow—the shadow of impending death. He seems to turn away from them and to reject their help.
In the other part of the picture it is day, and daylight shows up everywhere scenes of suffering, death, and desolation. In the foreground lies the body of a woman stretched out in death, while her child struggles to reach her ice-cold breast. The father bends down hastily to hold the child away, and, as he does so, covers his nose and mouth with his hand, to keep out the contagion of the pestilence. Behind this group an older woman turns away in horror: before it, an old man buries his face in his hands against the plinth of the statue in an anguish of sorrow, while a young man makes off in panic. In the background broken columns and the dead body of a horse serve to intensify the desolation of the scene.
Raphael’s rendering of the scene, for all the horror of its details, serves rather to inspire pity than horror. He holds the balance evenly between the horrible realities of the plague and the redeeming spirituality of human nature. Compassion and suffering stand side by side. The ox pities his kind passively, as the Sisters seek to minister actively to their kind. In the features and attitude of the child Raphael has depicted the devotion that does not die with death. The deepest note of pathos is touched in the form of the old man in the centre of the picture, whose grey hairs are brought down in sorrow to the grave.
It has been asserted that Raphael’s rendering of the dead mother and the child was inspired by an actual record of Ambroise Paré, but as Paré was only born three years before Raphael died, the statement falls to the ground.
Raphael’s debt seems to go back as far as to Aristides of Thebes, who flourished about 340 b.c. Pliny[167] mentions a picture by him, which so impressed Alexander the Great, at the sack of Thebes, that he took it for himself, and ordered that it should be sent to Pella. According to Pliny, the picture represented a wounded mother lying at the point of death, and her infant child creeping to her breast. Fear is written in the expression of her face, lest the child should draw blood from her breast, now that her milk is dry.
Raphael’s drawing has been engraved by Marco Antonio Raimondi under the name of ‘Il Morbetto’. In Delaborde’s Marc-Antoine Raimondi it is reproduced under the name ‘La Peste de Phrygie’, because on the pedestal are inscribed the words of Vergil:
Linquebant dulces animas aut aegra trahebant corpora.[168]
Vergil, in this brief description of pestilence, aims at no more than mere poetic effect. It is introduced only to fill up the cup of trouble for the Trojan wanderers, and is compressed into a few lines. The Trojan fleet had just made the land: Aeneas had laid the foundations of a new town, and Ilium was to live again in Pergamus. Then the plague broke out.
