Like the Plague

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, discusses the long history of plagues and their relationship to the art of our Western tradition, especially in Venice.

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2020

Like the plague

On the art of illness in Venice.

The history of culture is a history of plague. The Abrahamic religions were forged in it. The deity Horus might be a bigger bird today were it not for the ten plagues of Egypt. “The Egyptians shall know that I am the lord, when I have gained honor for Myself over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his horsemen,” we read in the Book of Exodus. Each spring, the Passover holiday marks the freedom of the Jews from Egypt by reenacting the Israelites’ salvation from the torments that plagued Pharaoh. The ten drops of wine ceremonially spilled in the Seder meal are meant to cast out the bloody water, frogs, lice, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and firstborn death, the last of which “passed over” the Chosen People. Plague not only meant the exodus of the Jews and the beginning of the end of Pharaoh. Plague also meant the start of the world as we know it today.

Yet somewhere along the way to modernity these important lessons were lost if not willfully forgotten. Primary among contemporary fallacies is the belief that science alone offers salvation. Pandemics, to the contrary, and often quite inconveniently, remind us of the limitations of human power, and so are readily forgotten. For this reason, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 quickly came to be regarded as a historical footnote rather than the world-defining event that it was—killing, as it did, more people than were killed in battle during World War I. There are few memorials to this Spanish influenza. The literature it inspired is scant. H. L. Mencken noted how the 1918 virus had “an enormous mortality in the United States and was, in fact, the worst epidemic since the Middle Ages,” yet it is “seldom mentioned, and most Americans have apparently forgotten it. This is not surprising. The human mind always tries to expunge the intolerable from memory, just as it tries to conceal it while current.”

We don’t have to look far and wide to see how disease has challenged and shaped our increasingly cosmopolitan world. The modern epidemics of cholera, typhus, yellow fever, measles, smallpox, and polio, among a host of other infectious diseases, might have better prepared us for our current crisis—if only their histories were better remembered and their dead and injured duly honored. In a more just world, London’s Broad Street pump and New York’s High Bridge would both be shrines to our cholera dead, one for marking a locus of contamination, the other for the delivery of clean Croton water.

Epidemics were a central feature of Venice, with its “putrid smells,” “febrile effusions,” and “revolting sultriness,” in the words of Thomas Mann, long before Death in Venice. From its swampy beginnings through its mercantile heights, the Most Serene Republic has been defined by disease. Yet rather than turning away from its fate, Venice has used illness as inspiration for its greatest works of art and architecture. Such thoughts have been on my mind since I toured the city one autumn not long ago with Frederick Ilchman, the curator and Tintoretto expert, whose exhibition of the cinquecento master was on view at the time at the Palazzo Ducale. Now with the Covid quarantine—which, in the West, began appropriately enough in Lombardy and the Veneto—Venice’s story of sickness and survival takes on renewed significance.

The author and company before the facade of the Chiesa di San Sebastiano, Venice.

It is the deliverance of Venice from plague that should give us inspiration in our own age of pandemics and pandemonium. A center of maritime trade founded on the saltwater marshes of a lagoon, Venice has been hit hard by the diseases of ship and swamp. It was primarily the waves of bubonic bacterium, Yersinia pestis, that swept through Europe in the last millennium which affected the port city in ways that continue to shape its identity. A disease that infects the lymphatic system, the bubonic plague became known as the Black Death in its most deadly outbreak of the mid-fourteenth century for its ability to swell and burst the lymph nodes, further spreading illness before causing necrosis, fever, and death. Its horrific effects would put the novel coronavirus to shame. The plague could kill within days. Its signature boils became known as buboes, from the Greek word for groin, where they often appeared. From bubo, we may, in fact, have gotten the term “boo-boo.”

As the bubonic plague spread throughout Europe, killing upwards of fifty million people—over half the population of Europe­—the Venetians turned to the “plague saints” for protection. A central figure was Roch. The Golden Legend, a collection begun by the thirteenth-century archbishop Jacobus da Varagine and added to by subsequent church historians, includes a CliffsNotes version of his miraculous deeds. Saint Roch, known in Italian as San Rocco, was born around 1300 to a nobleman in what is now the southern French city of Montpellier. Taking a strict vow of poverty, he made his way to Rome to tend to the plague-ridden. When he became ill himself, he was cast out of town to die in the forest. Here he made a home of branches and drank from a miraculous spring. A hunting dog brought him bread and licked his wounds, restoring him to health. Roch then returned to his hometown only to be mistakenly imprisoned and die a spy. He did not want to be glorified by revealing his true identity.

Tintoretto, St. Roch Visiting the Plague Victims, 1549, Oil on canvas, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

In addition to being the patron saint of dogs and pilgrims, Roch became venerated for his ability to survive illness. In the sixteenth century, the plague-ravaged Venetians dedicated a new church and confraternity building, or scuola, to Roch, both to aid the city’s sick and to venerate his relics, newly brought to La Serenissima. The Scuola Grande di San Rocco has become known as the “Sistine Chapel of Venice” for its cycle of religious paintings created by its most famous member, Tintoretto. Yet in the church next door to the Scuola, often overlooked by tourists, the cinquecento furioso artist also created a set of four monumental scenes from the saint’s life. They remain some of the most affecting works in Venice for depicting Roch’s devotion in the face of an invisible scourge.

Here, for the chancel, Tintoretto conceived a cycle of four paintings from Roch’s final days to surround the saint’s remains. St. Roch Visiting the Plague Victims (1549) is arguably the first representation of plague in Venetian art. Facing this work is St. Roch in Prison Comforted by an Angel, completed near the end of Tintoretto’s overall work in the Scuola in 1567. Both are of cinematic scope—sprawling, dark, and filled with pathos. Tintoretto had a great feel for the placement of his compositions, considering the height and angle of a work to the viewer and maximizing those effects to narrative advantage. Here seen from below and to the side, each work spirals into view, drawing the eye up into both the fictive space of the painting and the real space of the reliquary-altar, where Roch’s body is preserved.

Tintoretto, St. Roch in Prison Comforted by an Angel, 1567, Oil on canvas, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

Not far away, in the sestiere of Dorsoduro, another plague saint gets his due. Built on the site of a medieval hospice, the church of Saint Sebastian, or the Chiesa di San Sebastiano, received its own cycle of paintings, this time by the Renaissance master Paolo Veronese. Sebastian may be best remembered for his willowy body pierced with arrows—long a favorite for artists. Many forget the early Christian martyr survived this first attempt at execution. With spent arrow in hand, as depicted by Veronese, Sebastian went to reprove Diocletian for his sins—an insult for which the pagan emperor finally had him clubbed to death and thrown in the Cloaca Maxima. Since buboes resemble arrow wounds, Sebastian became venerated as another saint to survive bodily torments.

In 1555, the church hired Veronese, then an emerging star of cinquecento Venice, to paint these frescoes and canvases for the ceiling, organ loft, and altar. A restrained technician in contrast with Tintoretto and his furious brush, Veronese filled every available space, from the golden-coffered ceiling on down, with paintings of Sebastian’s life and martyrdom among images of the Blessed Virgin, Esther, the Evangelists, and the martyrdoms of Saints Mark, Lawrence, and Marcellinus. Behind the high altar, Madonna in Glory with St. Sebastian and other Saints (1570)pulls the opulent program of heaven and earth together. This was the last work completed by Veronese for the church. After his unexpected death in 1588, the artist was buried here, joined by the remains of his family, a testament to his artistic achievements and this ethereal work.

Paolo Veronese, Madonna in Glory with St. Sebastian and other Saints, 1570, Oil on canvas, Chiesa di San Sebastiano, Venice.

As the Venetians turned to Sebastian and Roch, they also developed some of the first civic procedures for caring for the sick and curtailing the spread of epidemic disease. Long before our modern understanding of germ theory, in 1423 Venice began sequestering potentially sick visitors away from its populated islands. As thirty-day exclusions turned to forty, una quarantina di giorni gave us the word for “quarantine.” Our term lazaretto, for plague hospital, likewise comes from the name of the lagoon island by one of these early quarantine sites. And the Venetian “plague mask,” now a Carnevale favorite with its protruding nose, was the original medical prophylactic, encouraging “social distancing” while allowing space for perfumed sachets to filter out the airborne disease.

Venice’s grand institutions made no separation among faith, art, and medicine. All worked together in the power to cure. In the sestiere of Castello, the Scuola Grande di San Marco may have lost its famous paintings in the Napoleonic suppression of the lay confraternities. Tintoretto’s miraculous Miracle of the Slave, originally painted for the Scuola in 1548, now resides in Venice’s Accademia Gallery. But the opulent building, recently restored and now a medical museum, speaks to its early mission of charity and public health in the name of Mark, a healer-Evangelist. It is no coincidence that the Scuola now serves as the entryway to Venice’s modern hospital.

Saints and science still could not stop the return of plague to Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Between 1575 and 1576, some forty-six thousand Venetians, up to 30 percent of the city’s population, including both Titian and the painter’s son Orazio, succumbed to a particularly deadly episode. In 1630, another wave killed a third of the population. Yet the city survived. In thanks for this deliverance, the Venetian Republic erected two of its most notable landmarks: the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, known as the Redentore, designed by Andrea Palladio on the island of Giudecca; and Saint Mary of Health, the grand domed church designed by Baldassare Longhena and known simply as the Salute, built on a million wooden piles by the Punta della Dogana at the entrance to the Grand Canal. Both transformed the skyline of the Renaissance city: one with classical order; the other with the celestial wonders of the baroque.

The Santa Maria della Salute in Venice. Photo: Moonik/Wikimedia Commons.

While most visitors are oblivious to the sources of its beauty, Venice still commemorates its history of death and salvation. As in the age of the Doge, a feast parade marks each plague. On the third Sunday of July for the Redentore, and November 21 for the Salute, temporary bridges cross the canals to bring the islands together. They are still wonders to see and cross—like walking on water, as I felt crossing to the Salute during my visit there over that recent November.

We are all Venetians now, even arguing over the nature of our illness and the costs of our quarantines, as Venice famously did in 1576. Yet as we contemplate our own modern-day plague, St. Science alone seems little able to bring our islands together. It helps to think of Sebastian, Roch, and Mary—or, at the very least, the art and culture they inspired.

Venice's Last Judgment

James Panero on the beginning and end of the Most Serene Republic, occasioned by "Venice's last judgment" from the September 2019 issue.

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2019

Venice’s Last Judgment

On the beginning and end of the Most Serene Republic.

The Venice Biennale, that strange pageant of contemporary fashions, offers the opportunity, if not the necessity, to explore the real art of La Serenissima. At the furthest extreme from the latest forms on display in the Biennale’s Giardini are the ancient mosaics of the Church of Santa Maria Assunta, on the distant lagoon island of Torcello. I brought my family to Torcello’s desolate piazza on what proved to be the hottest morning of a hot Italian summer. Torcello is an hour by vaporetto water bus from the Fondamente Nove, on the northern edge of Venice’s sestiere of Cannaregio. We cut the time in half by water taxi and sped past the islands of Murano, Burano, and Mazzorbo before idling up to Torcello’s Ponte del Diavolo, where the narrow canal becomes too shallow for navigation.

Since we arrived early, we had to wait for the church lady to unlock the doors of the basilica. We fed the languid fish schooling by the abandoned quay of a nearby channel. Then we huddled in what shade we could find on this barren deposit of alluvial silt. Torcello’s tiny Locanda Cipriani, the fabled retreat where Hemingway wrote Across the River and into the Trees, was closed for the day, so the negronis would have to wait. At one point, we begged someone inside the island’s archaeological museum for some shelter from the sun. Mi dispiace, he said, closing the shutters on us. Our water supply started running low, as did my party’s patience. In the Italian custom, the attendant for Torcello’s lavish municipal bathroom had overslept and missed his ferry, and no one else had the key.

The privations no doubt made the sight of Santa Maria Assunta, once we were let inside, all the more thrilling. On its western wall, the golden vision of its “Last Judgment,” which received a full cleaning and restoration in February, is as profound as any art in Venice. With six vertical registers, the mosaic is filled with an awe-inspiring amount of visual information: scenes of the crucifixion, anastasis (resurrection), deesis (Christ with Mary and John the Baptist), and psychostasis (the weighing of souls) all rest on vignettes of heaven and hell divided in the lowest registers.

The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

The decorative splendor of this mosaic barely holds its dynamic forces together. In the upper registers, an expressive Christ pulls the souls of the Old Testament up from limbo to heaven by their wrists. Below, a snaking line of judicial plumbing leads down to increasingly explicit visions of hell. Two demons try to tip the scales of Saint Michael with their pitchforks while pouring out sins from bottles and bags. Meanwhile the damned are subdivided among the lustful, gluttonous, wrathful, envious, avaricious, and slothful, where they endure fiery and icy torments, when not being eaten by worms.

Today Torcello is an overlooked shoal in the northern lagoon, but at one time the island nurtured the first seeds of what became the great Republic of Venice. Torcello flowered as the original center of activity in the Veneto, before its channels silted up and its inhabitants relocated to the nearby islands of Burano, Murano, and the high ground of the Rialto. A millennium ago, at its apex, there were some ten thousand inhabitants on Torcello. Today, only about a dozen remain. Torcello’s “Last Judgment” therefore offers genuine revelation. The end times here have already come.

There was a period when Torcello was the crucible of Venice’s unexpected beginnings. In the final days of the Western Roman Empire, barbarian hordes descended on the old Roman towns still clinging to the shores of the northern Adriatic. As Attila the Hun surrounded the town of Altinum in 452, its residents fled to the sandbars of the nearby lagoon. These Roman holdouts and refugees from the other Veneti towns became lagoon dwellers, incolae lacunae, just three miles south of Altinum on the shifting delta sands of the River Sile.

Today the view from Torcello’s campanile does not look all that different from what those settlers first saw fifteen hundred years ago. In The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin called the sight “one of the most notable scenes in this wide world of ours. As far as the eye can reach, a waste of wild sea moor, of a lurid ashen gray; . . . lifeless, the color of sackcloth, with corrupted sea-water soaking through the roots of its acrid weeds, and gleaming hither and thither through its snaky channels.”

A close-up of “the Envious,” The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

The Venetian lagoon has always been an alien landscape, but its separation from the mainland provided essential protection from Italy’s drawn-out period of Germanic incursions and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. In their exodus, the settlers built houses on pilings of hardwood driven into the mud flats. All of Venice was built this way. It is said that the baroque church of Santa Maria della Salute, the towering domed memorial to the devastating plague of 1630 by the Punta della Dogana, rests on a million wooden piles. The Venetians also organized their new community along Roman republican lines. Rather than be ruled by an emperor or king, they elected their leader—dux in Latin, duke in English, doge in Italian. In this way the Veneti of the lagoon formed their mighty maritime republic that endured for over a thousand years. In the Republic’s final days, before its destruction by Napoleon, the Venetians even counseled the architects of the United States on the secrets of their Republic’s endurance.

The foundation stone of the Torcello basilica was laid in 639, a year after the town’s bishop had a vision that his flock should abandon what remained of Altinum. As Torcello rose in importance, its basilica became a prominent cathedral. The nearby channel, now little more than a shoaled-up estuary that harbors those languid fish, was once Torcello’s bustling Grand Canal. The relics of Saint Heliodorus, the Altinum bishop who accompanied Saint Jerome and was martyred in 390, were carried off from his Roman town and laid to rest beneath the basilica’s altar. His golden reliquary can still be seen there today. Since the Torcello basilica predates the construction of even the first cathedral of San Marco in Venice by some two centuries, one legend maintains that the body of Saint Mark was first interred here, perhaps in the crypt’s Roman sarcophagus, after two Venetian merchants alighted with the Evangelist’s remains from Alexandria, Egypt, which was then under the dominion of the Abbasid Caliphate.

About the time of the height of Torcello’s predominance in 1100, the interior of the basilica received its cycle of golden mosaics, which includes a sorrow-filled image of the Virgin and Child in the main apse above a swirling, tessellated marble floor. Byzantine in form, the selection of a Last Judgment scene for the opposite towering western wall, through which congregants once entered and exited, is said to have been a particularly Venetian touch.

Torcello reveals Venice in its true provisional strangeness, where art gives vision to immanence and relics buoy the faithful to the final days. The great works of Venice have always conveyed these contingent qualities—as a world between worlds. Rather than gaze up to some idealized beyond, the art of Venice looks out to proximate, felt, rough-and-tumble revelation.

A close-up of “the Gluttonous and Avaricious,” The Last Judgment, ca. twelfth century, Gold and glass mosaic.

Art has always played a central role in connecting the Venetian experience to the cosmic story. The particular hardships endured by the disease-prone city can be seen through its adoration of the “plague saints”: San Rocco, in whose scuola and church, in the sestiere of San Polo, Tintoretto painted one of the world’s greatest cycles of Christian image-making; and San Sebastiano, in whose church, on the site of a medieval hospice in the sestiere of Dorsoduro, Veronese painted some of his own masterpieces. For the Scuola Grande di San Marco, which now serves as the entrance to Venice’s hospital, in the sestiere of Castello, Tintoretto painted his breakthrough Miracle of the Slave (1548), along with his famous depictions of how the body of Mark came to Venice (and its miraculous rediscovery after the Evangelist was, for a time, temporarily misplaced).

Art holds a particular power over the city, just as the city conveys a particular power to art. Undoubtedly this is the reason why many contemporary artists come to congest Venice’s art-filled walls: to claim the city’s revelations, even if what they themselves purport to reveal may be facile and false. Of course, the science-fiction didacticism of the group show in this year’s Biennale, full of blinking lights and spinning whirligigs, speaks little to the art of Venice’s resonant past. In our secular age, so enraptured with the present moment, how could it? Yet sometimes connections can still be made: in the United States Pavilion, the sculptures of Martin Puryear, which draw together the classicism of many sculptural traditions, are fraught with memory; an exhibition on “The Nature of Arp” at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection speaks to the aquatic forms of the lagoon; “Pittura/Panorama: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952–1992,” at the Palazzo Grimani, returns the great modernist to Venice some fifty years after she dazzled in the United States Pavilion with her aqueous compositions; and at Ca’ Pesaro, “Arshile Gorky, 1904–1948” reveals the tragic vision of the American abstractionist who lost his family in the Armenian genocide.

Through plague and pestilence, rising sea waters and sinking salt marshes, in Venice the end has never seemed all that far off. Today the flood that troubles Venetians most is the tourists pouring out of grandi navi, the massive cruise ships that wreak havoc on the Giudecca Canal and may soon be banned, not the city’s frequent inundations of acqua alta, which locals take in watery stride. Last November, when I was previously in Venice for the Tintoretto exhibitions at the Palazzo Ducale and Accademia museums, the high-water siren sounded at daybreak. The sirene allertamento acqua altanow broadcast from twenty-two points across the historical center and islands of Venice. From my window overlooking the Accademia, I listened as the signal broke the morning spell from the alarm atop San Trovaso. As my water taxi motored up the Grand Canal, the flood waters compounded with the morning rain and washed over the calliaround the Ponte di Rialto.

Thirty-five years ago Venice installed its first flood alarm on the campanile of San Marco. A new alarm developed by the Centro Previsioni e Segnalazioni Maree now uses a wireless network and digital signals of various tones to indicate the height of the rising tide. Venetians also sign up for emergency notices by text message, giving them a few extra minutes to slide in the low metal barriers at the bottom of their doorways to hold back the headwaters. In the months of fall, as the sirocco southern wind, the full moon, and other hydrological effects converge on the Adriatic to push water into the lagoon, many Venetians now simply leave the barriers in place.

The waters of the lagoon have always offered protection and destruction in equal measure. With its canals framing an architecture of exquisite lace, the city’s liquid light gives evanescent form to the miraculous story of survival that began, and ended, on humble Torcello. “Without making this excursion you can hardly pretend to know Venice,” Henry James said of his own visit to that island. “It is impossible to imagine a more penetrating case of unheeded collapse. Torcello was the mother-city of Venice, and she lies there now, a mere mouldering vestige, like a group of weather-bleached parental bones left impiously unburied.”