Introduction: Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy: What the Primary Sources, Printed and Painted, Reveal
 Franco Mormando 
https://www.francomormando.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Mormando-Response-to-Plague.pdf

“Will you believe such things, oh posterity, when we ourselves who see them can scarcely believe them and would consider them dreams except that we perceive them awake and with our eyes open and that after viewing a city full of funerals we return to our homes only to find them empty of our loved ones?” Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarum libri, VIII:7, Letter to His “Socrates” on the Black Death 

Plague and Art: The Subject of this Exhibition

The Role of Art in Times of Disaster
Unlike the chroniclers (medical or otherwise) of the period, early modern painters did not
primarily seek to document the gruesome effects of the contagion, its horror and destruction.

This was deemed alien to the nature and purposes of what we now call “fine art.” Rather, during these times of social crisis, the role of plague-related art – whether commissioned by confraternities, communes, or private citizens – was, above all, to be an instrument of healing and encouragement, a mirror and a channel of society’s search for solace and cure from the heavens, that is, from God and the saints. While inevitably reflecting society’s anxieties and sufferings in the face of the unconquerable scourge, art served to remind the viewer of the necessity, availability, and efficacy of the various “celestial cures” at their disposal, thus offering comfort and hope in times of despair. Furthermore, specifically ex-voto works of plague art (e.g., cats. 7, 29, 36) rendered another form of comfort and hope inasmuch as they represented for the faithful effective oblational offerings to God or the saints. Let us note that even those works commissioned by civic authorities are explicitly religious in nature, the products of a society utterly defined by Roman Catholicism.

Drawing from a wide reading of the abundant primary sources, this essay will look at
early modern Italian beliefs surrounding the nature and cause of the plague and examine the varied, pro-active measures recommended by civil, medical, and ecclesiastical authorities in the face of the plague or threat thereof. In contemporary parlance, these measures were called “rimedi” (remedies) and we find them repeatedly described in the most widely disseminated, influential primary sources in print. Plague rimedi fall into two categories: “temporal” or “human” remedies (rimedi temporali, umani), that is, medical-social-political measures taken to contain the epidemic, and “spiritual remedies” (rimedi spirituali), those enunciated and mandated by the Church. 

Among the latter were special prayer, to Christ, the Virgin Mary, and other heavenly intercessors and protectors against plague; confession and public penitential processions; fasting; almsgiving and other acts of charity (the traditional “corporal works of mercy”); and prayerful meditation upon the inevitability and omnipresence of death and the vanity of this world as well as reward and punishments in the next life. All of these rimedi spirituali, in turn, we find depicted or alluded to in many of the plague-related images produced Hope and Healing in the period for, again, such was the role of art in time of plague, to remind viewers of these efficacious ecclesiastical rimedi at their disposal.

Scholarship on the plague has been largely epidemiological or sociological in nature,
focused primarily on temporal remedies, that is, public health measures (quarantine, sanitation, hospitals, law enforcement, etc.) and political-economic consequences of the pandemics.

This in spite of the fact that there was virtual unanimous agreement among early modern
Italians that the only really effective remedies were spiritual. These spiritual remedies have
received far less attention in modern scholarship than they receive in the primary sources,
printed and painted. This essay – and indeed this catalogue and the exhibition – strives to
correct the balance by focusing on the rimedi spirituali considered central in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.