Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

CHAPTER IX

Throughout the sixteenth century plague epidemics follow each other in almost unbroken succession throughout Central Europe. In Rome alone, during this century, there were no less than twelve severe outbreaks. The archives of the Capitol and the registers of contemporary notaries[169] abound in scattered information concerning these visitations. It had become an established custom that at the first appearance of an epidemic the Pope and his court should escape from Rome to a place of safety, leaving the municipality to provide for the situation as best it could. In May 1449, Nicholas V had fled into Umbria: in 1462, Pius II had fled successively to Viterbo, Bolsena, and Corsignano. In 1476, Sixtus IV had flitted in like manner from place to place. So in April 1522, at the height of the epidemic, it seemed only in accordance with precedent, when Adrian VI from his secure seclusion in Spain sent word to Rome of the necessity of imposing a fresh tax for supporting a crusade against the Turks. The Cardinals seem to have desired to emulate the example of Adrian, for in June the Town Council asked the Sacred College not to forsake their posts. Deserted by their spiritual leaders, the populace lent a ready ear to the imposture of the Greek necromancer Demetrius of Sparta. He persuaded the terrified people that the plague was the work of demons, and that, by appeasing them, it might be brought to an end. So he paraded the streets of the city, leading by a silken cord a bull that he professed to have tamed by spells, and sacrificed it in the Colosseum with full pagan ritual to the hostile demons. As soon as the clergy realized the enormity of the sacrilege they had condoned they instituted a penitential procession, which marched through the city, scourging themselves to bleeding and crying Misericordia. If we may credit Paolo Giovio, chief physician to Clement VII (a.d. 1523-34), it was neither prayer nor sacrifice that put an end to the plague, but a wonderful oil invented by Gregorio Caravita, a physician from Bologna. The Oratorio del Crocifisso, near the church of S. Marcello, is said to have been erected in expiation of this event. This plague lingered on at least till the following year, a.d. 1523, for Benvenuto Cellini[170] records his experience of it in some detail. He says that it dragged on for months, and that several thousands died daily in Rome. In not unnatural apprehension on his own account, he determined to adopt such amusements as would promote cheerfulness of mind, which many believed to be the best remedy against infection. So he betook himself to shooting pigeons among the ancient monuments of Rome, and found the pursuit so beneficial to his health that he succeeded in staving off for a long time the plague, to which many of his comrades succumbed. But somewhat later, after spending the night with a young serving girl, he himself fell a victim and has recorded his initial sensations as follows:

‘I rose upon the hour of breaking fast, and felt tired, for I had travelled many miles that night, and was wanting to take food, when a crushing headache seized me: several boils appeared upon my left arm, together with a carbuncle which showed itself just beyond the palm of the left hand, where it joins the wrist. Everybody in the house was in a panic: my friend, the cow [Faustina] and the calf [the serving girl] all fled. Left alone there with my poor little prentice, who refused to abandon me, I felt stifled at the heart, and made up my mind for certain I was a dead man.’

By the constant ministrations of a male friend and the help of a physician, whom the apprentice summoned, Benvenuto threw off the sickness, but while the bubo was still open and plugged with lint under a covering of plaster, went out riding on a little wild pony. Benvenuto’s account is valuable as the record of the personal sensations and sufferings of a plague-stricken man, and tells us also something of the treatment to which he was subjected at the hands of sixteenth-century medicine.

Benvenuto says that the joyous reunion of the survivors, after the plague was over, led to the formation by one Michael Agnolo, a sculptor, of a club of all the leading painters, sculptors, and goldsmiths in Rome. The meetings of the club, to judge from his descriptions, seem to have been devoted to merrymaking rather than to artistic discourse. On his return to Florence he found that his father and most of his household were dead, and his surviving sister Liparata, believing him to have died at Rome, swooned at sight of him. But under the mellowing influence of supper, at which weddings were the main topic of conversation, sorrow speedily gave place to gaiety.

Marselius Galeati of Padua at the beginning of the fifteenth century had drawn up the first known code of ‘Regulations against the Plague’, based on the belief that the disease was imported to Italy by foreign commerce.

From the records of the city of Rome it is possible to gather some idea of the measures adopted by the Popes and Town Council for the suppression of epidemics of plague. There isolation of infected individuals or districts was attempted. All wearing apparel and other materials and articles capable of spreading the infection, were liable to be destroyed. The city gates were closed, and every incomer was subjected to strict inspection, and was frequently rejected. Those gates that were left open could only be used from daybreak to nightfall, when they were locked against all comers. Navigation of the Tiber was sometimes suppressed; Lanciani says that an order was issued on July 30, 1575, that all the boats on the Tiber should be scuttled in three days, because it was found that the boatmen were ferrying passengers across stream for bribes. Two transgressors were actually put to the rack for their offence, which was placarded over them for all to read. On one occasion a wholesale destruction of dried fish was taken in hand. Contract medical practice seems to have existed even in these days. Lanciani has noted among the city records agreements between physicians or quacks and Roman families for the provision of medical advice and drugs for a stipulated payment of money. Wills were often dictated from windows, while lawyer and witnesses stood in the street beneath.

Confraternities for ministering to the sick and removing them to the hospitals existed in Rome, though perhaps numerically less than in other great cities of Italy. The confraternity of the Pietà had been instituted during a plague epidemic, in the time of Eugene IV (1431-47), and still has a nominal existence in Rome.

Plague broke out fiercely again in Rome in 1527, at the time of the sack of the city. Florence was also involved in this same epidemic. It is this visitation that gave birth to Machiavelli’s Descrizione della Peste di Firenze dell’ anno 1527, cast in the form of a letter to a friend. In it we find no vivid picture of the awful catastrophe that was overwhelming Florence, but in place of that a cold-blooded cynical record of the trivial doings of a loafer sauntering idly through the streets of the plague-stricken city. It is a record that challenges comparison rather with the casual entries of Pepys’s Diary, than with the formal descriptions of Bocaccio and Manzoni, his own compatriots. Opening with a vapid soulless lamentation, in the vein of Petrarch, over the general demoralization and devastation produced by the plague, he passes on to describe his own daily mode of living, from which his correspondent is invited to infer that of the general body of citizens. The liaisons of licentious monks, the vile ribaldry of infamous buriers, the vain recourse to preservatives against the plague, these are the things that are uppermost in his mind, as he depicts his own amorous intrigues against the dark background of the plague, with the fidelity of a Pepys and the light-hearted insouciance of a Guy de Maupassant.