The plagues of the seventeenth century have left behind them very many memorials both in literature and in art: among them the great plague of Milan is only one of many.
Southern France was attacked again and again, and in 1643 plague raged fiercely at Lyons. Over the portico of the church of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, which stands high up on the precipitous hill that overhangs the town, is a frieze commemorating this plague.
In Italy, city after city succumbed. Guido’s picture, ‘Il Pallione del Voto,’ reminds us that Bologna suffered along with Milan. Venice suffered too, and out of her ruin rose the church of S. Maria della Salute.
Florence retains in the Bargello a hideous reminiscence of her visitation in a wax representation of ‘Pestilenza’ by Zumbo Gaetano Giulio (1656-1701). Corpses are lying about in various stages of decomposition: among them lies a dead mother beside her infant child. A man, whose nostrils are covered with a bandage, attempts to carry away a corpse. In the background great bonfires are burning. The modelling of the carcases is anatomically exact, but the production as a whole is utterly repulsive.
In 1656 Naples assumes the leading rôle in this hideous Dance of Death. Soldiers brought the plague on a transport from Sardinia. At first the viceroy attempted to disguise the true character of the disease. The first doctor who dared to pronounce the sickness plague was promptly put in prison. Malcontents spread the report that the Spaniards had designedly introduced the plague, and were employing people to go through the city in disguise, sowing broadcast poisoned dust. The infuriated populace turned on the Spanish soldiery, who sought safety by transferring the accusation to the French. Nothing but blood would satisfy the mob, and Angelucci di Tivoli, reputed author of the plague powder, was broken on the wheel as a peace-offering to their bloodt-hirsty fury. The Spaniards were accused also of poisoning the holy water in the churches by means of the deadly powder. Superstition was rampant in every form. One said that he had been miraculously cured by drinking holy water before an image of the Virgin. Another saw a marble statue of the Madonna and Child in the church of S. Severo covered with sweat, and the faces of both livid and marked by the plague. A doctor, Francesco Mosca, who printed a formula for curing the plague, was honourably entitled Protomedico. A nun prophesied that the building of a convent on the hill of St. Martin for her sisterhood would bring to an end the pestilence. The building was taken in hand in eager haste, rich and poor vying in bodily labour, but in spite of all their efforts the mortality grew apace. By a strange perversity of reasoning penitential processions paraded both day and night the very streets in which priests, in terror of the contagion, were administering the Sacrament on the end of a stick. The death-roll of six months was 400,000 lives. Various writers have described this plague, among them Muratori, Giannone, and de Renzi in his Naples in the year 1656, published in 1667. The Papal Nuncio in Naples at the time thought fit to write a pamphlet on it, and of modern writers Shorthouse has made poor use of it in his John Inglesant.
Micco Spadara (1612-79), who actually witnessed this plague, has left a [picture of it], which is now in the National Museum at Naples. It represents the Piazza Mercatello, a veritable pandemonium of dead and dying. Monatti, drawn from the galley-slaves, are dragging the corpses with hooks to carts in which to carry them to the burial-pits. Here and there sedan chairs are seen. These were used to carry the sick to the lazarettos. At first chair-bearers were selected from the citizens who volunteered for the task, but when all these were dead, galley-slaves and convicts took their place. In the plague of Marseilles in 1720 sedans were put at the disposal of the doctors, ‘for their more easy conveyance everywhere’, by order of the Town Council.
There was plague in Rome as well as Naples in 1656. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was resident in Rome, and has left the testimony of an eye-witness in his picture, ‘The Plague of Rome,’ now in the Czernin Collection at Vienna. It is a landscape with architectural features, of which Denio[179] gives this brief notice: ‘Two men are seen dragging a corpse to the mouth of a vault, whose opening is already barred by dead bodies. A man, enveloped in a white mantle, directs the bearers where to go: by his side is a jackal-like dog. On the high platform of the receptacle we notice a group of six men. Broken columns take the place of the half-seen trees in other works, while sarcophagi and tombs indicate a cemetery. Beyond the arch stretches the Campagna.’ Poussin has introduced into the picture the Castle of S. Angelo, mindful, no doubt, of the legend of Gregory’s vision.
PLATE XXVI PLAGUE OF NAPLES, 1656.