Week One: The Plague Strikes Europe

In the mid fourteenth century Europe fell victim to a devastating illness that came to be known as the Black Plague. Originating in china, this plague found its way to Europe through trade routes that carried it to the city of Kaffa, and through Genoese sailors to Messina, a major trading port in Italy. This plague then spread from Sicily to the rest of Europe infecting everyone from peasants to the nobility. Death had no bias; it took lives from everyone which resulted in the deadliest natural disaster of all time. The plague took the lives of an estimated 50 million people; about half of the population of Europe at the time. Something that I found interesting as a result of the plague was people's view of death and how they represented it. More specifically through the portrayal of death in paintings and art. In class we looked at a series of paintings by the german artist Hans Holbein which were made after the black death.   

One of the themes in these prints was that death can strike anyone, anywhere, at any time, and struck quickly. This themes are obviously similar to the way the black plague struck. Without any knowledge of modern medicine the way the plague spread and its cause was a mystery so it appeared to strike for no reason. In addition, the plague would kill quickly, usually within 2-4 days. This caused death to go from being a rarer occurrence in which one would be ceremoniously passed on to the afterlife. I was curious however to see how this new portrayal of death was different from pre-plague artistic representations. As I searched for about forty five minutes I found that it was difficult to find paintings from before the plague with death as a subject at all. The closest I could come to a difference was this painting.

This painting, called The Procession of Saint Gregory (c. 1300) shows death as the angel in the top right corner. The sheathing of its blade is a depiction of Saint Gregory's procession successfully stopping the effects of the plague. Due to the scarcity of paintings portraying death, it seems as though the Black Plague could have created an obsession with death once it struck. The constant dying of people and the retched atmosphere appears to have created a new movement of art in which death was consistently portrayed as a skeleton.