PLATE XX PLAGUE.
A DRAWING BY RAPHAEL
(Face Page 148)
Iamque fere sicco subductae littore puppes; Connubiis arvisque novis operata iuventus, . . . . . . . . subito cum tabida membris, corrupto caeli tractu, miserandaque venit arboribusque satisque lues et letifer annus. linquebant dulces animas aut aegra trahebant corpora; tum steriles exurere Sirius agros; arebant herbae, et victum seges aegra negabat.
Scarce stand the vessels hauled upon the beach, And bent on marriages the young men vie To till new settlements, while I to each Due law dispense and dwelling place supply. When from a tainted quarter of the sky Rank vapours, gathering, on my comrades seize, And a foul pestilence creeps down from high On mortal limbs and standing crops and trees, A season black with death, and pregnant with disease.
Sweet life from mortals fled: they drooped and died. Fierce Sirius scorched the fields, and herbs and grain Were parched, and food the wasting crops denied. (Fairfax Taylor.)
As it stands, this is an outline sketch of a famine-pestilence, which Raphael had no intention of depicting, when he adopted the line. Surely Sisters of Charity would not figure in a Phrygian plague, some thousand years before Christ!
Besides pictures, a few medals exist commemorative of plagues prior to the sixteenth century: these were sometimes struck as mediums of spiritual consolation. Frequent devices on these were representations of Christ on the Cross, or of a Serpent on a pole. The specimen figured here ([Plate I (4)]) is a Wittenberg thaler of 1528. It shows these two devices on the opposite faces of the medal, each with a descriptive legend.
The fifteenth century had drawn to a close in Italy amid a confusion of epidemics. Pintor, the personal physician of Pope Alexander VI, has left a book in which he says that the morbus Gallicus first appeared at Rome in March 1493 and had claimed numerous victims by the August following. Then, after an inundation of the Tiber in December 1495, plague broke out fiercely in Rome. Pintor states that the touch of certain precious stones was vaunted as a specific. In 1493 plague was raging also at Genoa and Naples. At the latter city the mortality amounted to 20,000 souls. A Genoese chronicler, Seneraga, attributes the outbreak at Genoa to pollution of the shore by the dead bodies of the Jews, who had sought sanctuary there on their expulsion from Spain in 1492, but had died of starvation on the outskirts of the inhospitable city. Jewish writers asserted that there was plague in Spain, and that it was carried by the fugitives in their ships to Italy. Most of the expelled Jews found shelter from the persecution of the Cross under the protection of the Crescent, in Constantinople, Salonica, the Levant, and Northern Africa. It was this far-reaching epidemic that drove Charles VIII of France out of Florence, Rome, and Naples in succession, almost as soon as his army had entered them.