Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

A knowledge of these routes is necessary to understand the leading part that Venice and Constance played in the carriage and distribution of plague.

The discovery of the Cape route to the east in 1486, was the death-blow to the trade monopoly of Venice. The lines of commerce shifted step by step from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and away from the ships of Venice into those of the Portuguese, Spaniards, English, and Dutch.

The history of plague in Venice is in large part written in her public monuments: her archives tell the rest. Venice has virtually no literature of her own: two or three patriotic diarists, and that is all. Her Renaissance gave birth to no harvest of men of letters: painting and architecture sapped all her strength. Artists vied with architects to write her history on canvas or on stone, not for the enjoyment of private patrons, but for the embellishment of the city of their birth.

In a.d. 1410 plague swept over Venice and Chioggia. In 1423 another epidemic was imported from the east. It was this visitation that led the Venetians to establish a pest-house or lazaretto on the island of Santa Maria di Nazaret for infected persons and goods. It was supplied with food, medicine, and medical attendance out of the revenue from salt. This was the first institution of the kind in Europe, but it quickly led to the establishment of more elsewhere.

The Government of Venice was never wont to fold its hands when plague was at its door. So far back as the Black Death they had appointed three nobles as provveditori sopra la salute della terra to fight the scourge. In 1468 these were supplemented by the addition of two inhabitants of each sestiere, and in 1485 this commission was reorganized as a permanent Board of Health. So by the end of the fifteenth century Venice had organized and equipped an efficient defensive system against the constant recurrence of plague.

A second lazaretto was established during the plague of 1576 on the island of Sant’ Erasmo, and in the same year the Republic summoned learned professors of medicine from Padua—Girolamo Mercuriale and Giovanni Capodivacca—to identify the disease, and it was no fault of the Republic that they pronounced it not to be plague.

A curious evidence of the mutual influence of religion and therapeutics on each other is the fixing of quarantine at forty days, because this was the period that Christ dwelt apart in the wilderness.

Venetian doctors for the most part seem now to have mended their ways and devoted themselves loyally to the service of the sick. In a book published in Venice in a.d. 1493, Fasciculus medicus Johannis de Ketam, the physician Pietro da Fossignano is shown visiting a plague patient. As he feels the pulse, he holds to his mouth and nostrils a sponge, steeped in some antipestilential aromatic. Pietro’s death about a.d. 1400 helps towards fixing the date of this simple clinical precaution. In later years a special plague dress was devised for doctors, which was adopted from Italy by France, and of which several engravings exist of about the time of the 1720 plague of Marseilles ([see pp. 206-8]). Ambroise Paré recommends that the material should be camlet, serge, satin, taffeta, or morocco, but not cloth, frieze, or fur, which might harbour the poison and carry death to the healthy.

Venice had also her street ambulance in the brotherhood of S. Rocco, instituted for the purpose of conveying the sick to hospital and the dead to burial. Their services were sorely taxed in times of plague. A specimen of the working dress of the Order may still be seen in the Treasury of the Scuola di San Rocco. It is a loose white cotton overall with full hanging sleeves. On each side of the chest is an oval white satin badge, embroidered with red silk and edged with red lace. On one the figure of Christ is embroidered in silk: on the other that of S. Rocco with his dog. It is bound at the waist with a corded girdle of white cotton with heavily ornamented cotton tassels at each end. A deep peaked hood of the same material completely covers the head, having only slits as apertures for the eyes. White leather gloves complete the costume. A similar dress was worn by many of the charitable confraternities of Central Italy, and is to be seen in several Sienese pictures ([see Plate VIII]). It has its modern counterpart in the operating dress of the aseptic surgeon, but by a queer turn of the whirligig of time its purpose is no longer to keep infection out, but to keep it in.

The Guild of San Rocco had come into existence at least as early as a.d. 1415, but it was not till 1478 that leave was obtained from the Government to enlist a confraternity under the standard of San Rocco. Its first meeting-place was the church of San Giuliano, but in 1485 the guild undertook to build a church for the custody of the body of the saint, which some Venetians had surreptitiously removed from Montpellier. Five years sufficed to complete the church, and the saint’s body was laid in it with great solemnity. The precious relic was destined to bestow great prestige on its possessors. Of the five great charitable guilds of Venice, that of S. Rocco was by far the greatest. From 1516 to the end of the Republic each Doge was enrolled a member, along with many of the richest merchants of Venice. In this year the brethren determined to erect a meeting-house adjacent to the church, which should be an added ornament to the city. So the building of the Scuola was commenced in 1517 by Bartolommeo Bon, only to be finished in 1550 by Antonio Scarpagnino.