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.

Monumental Madness

THE NEW CRITERION, April 2020

Monumental Madness

On the neglected Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park.

Just down the street from my apartment, on the West Side of Manhattan, is a memorial of memorials. The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, at Riverside Drive and Eighty-ninth Street, is one of those veterans of the city landscape that has waged a long war against the forces of ruin. Now, once again, the monument finds itself in a pitched battle over its own survival. The mortar of the structure has eroded away. Rainwater runs through its marble interior. Metal flashing dangles off its cornices. Weeds grow out of its cracked façade. A chain-link fence surrounds the memorial tower and invites further mischief. Young men dash around the enclosure to deface the stonework—something I saw firsthand walking by the other afternoon. They know they have it to themselves.

Some fifteen years ago, in the city’s previous administration, the then–Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe elevated this monument’s aging public promenade from an overgrown asphalt jungle into an appropriate civic space. Yet the monument’s tower has not undergone a major overhaul since 1961. Those repairs may cost $35 million. The city says it has other priorities.

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Photo by the author.

You might think that such a monument, a city and state landmark of national historical importance, would take top priority. Since its dedication on Memorial Day in 1902, this Greek Revival temple has honored the Union sacrifices of the Civil War. It has also served as a focus for all of New York’s wartime remembrances. President Theodore Roosevelt officiated over its opening day as veterans of the Civil War paraded up Riverside Drive, thirty-seven years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. A seventy-four-foot-long American flag, the largest to that date, covered the ten-story tower before it was unveiled. “The memories that hover around it,” Mayor Seth Low declared at its opening ceremony, “already clothe it with a light that makes it sacred to the eye.”

The same light still shines over it today. On a promontory overlooking the Hudson River, even in its neglected state the monument can glow like a rocket as the western sun sets behind it. Twelve Corinthian columns, thirty-six feet high and arranged around an inner marble drum, give its finialed crown of eagles and cartouches a sense of lift. Its ringed base, in smooth stone, adds a compressive and centripetal force.

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument. Photo by the author.

Surrounded by a complex series of terraces, stairs, benches, and plazas, the monument provides various precincts for gathering and ceremony. To the west, centered on a flagpole nearly as tall as the monument itself, a stairway leads in the direction of the river. At one time, these stairs were meant to connect this sailors’ shrine to the waterline. To the north, a lower platform that follows the contours of the natural plateau provides a tight perspective for more personal remembrance. To the south, the semicircular arms of an open and low-stepped quadrangle draw in observants who arrive up the Drive—a curving road that straightens to provide an unobstructed approach to this battery-like promontory, which includes the silenced cannon and cannonballs of 1865.

The monument stands as one of the finest examples of the City Beautiful movement, which populated New York with statues and memorials at the turn of the last century. Charles and Arthur Stoughton, brothers who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, won the competition with the white marble design, called the “temple of fame,” to serve as the southern bookend for the General Grant National Memorial, completed five years earlier at 122nd Street and based on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and the Dôme des Invalides. For the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Stoughton & Stoughton adapted the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, a sort of music trophy featuring the myth of Dionysus and the first to use free-standing outdoor Corinthian columns, for a new sober purpose. Paul E. M. DuBoy, the architect of the Ansonia apartment building at Seventy-third Street, designed its sculptural program.

The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, pictured during a naval review in 1945.

The monument’s public precincts pay tribute to the Civil War service of New York’s volunteer regiments, with the names of battles and generals listed on the surrounding plinths. Its monumental tower honors the memory of their fallen brothers in arms. A single bronze doorway, topped with an eagle and the words in memoriam, leads into a tall inner sanctum of sculptural niches and ethereal light.

A few years ago, I may have been one of the final people to enter this solemn and spectral space. For decades the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument Association, a volunteer group working with the Riverside Park Conservancy, has organized the monument’s Memorial Day tribute and opened its door to the public for that one day of the year. This community group is among many organizations that has quietly restored and championed Riverside Park’s monuments, memorials, and gardens (see my “Gallery chronicle” of January 2016 for the history of the nearby Joan of Arc Memorial).

Yet for recent tributes, the chain-link fence has had to serve as the backdrop. Without urgent repairs, the monument is now at risk of demolition. As the Riverside Park Conservancy again presses its case, City Hall indeed has had other priorities. As historical structures have been left to ruin, the administration of Bill de Blasio, fresh off his stumblebum presidential run, has pursued an extensive program of cultural grievance and redress. In part this has meant denigrating the city’s past and even toppling memorials in public displays of desecration. In this space in September 2018, I wrote about the removal of one Central Park monument, of J. Marion Sims, a doctor who revolutionized gynecology by developing a surgical cure for a serious complication of birth, but whose practice in the antebellum South has caused his reputation to be denounced by racial activists. For the mayor, such removals, motivated by political bullying rather than historical nuance, were but the pretext for the next campaign: the installation of new leftist monuments throughout the city. At the center of this radical initiative is not just the mayor himself but also his wife, Chirlane McCray, a Madame Mao of New York politics with her own designs on city-wide office.

Our fractious times have not been kind to even the most seemingly innocuous efforts at new memorialization. A well-funded private initiative to mark the centenary of the Nineteenth Amendment saw fit to attack what it called the “bronze patriarchy” of city monuments to get out the vote for its monument to women’s suffrage. The rhetoric at monumentalwomen.org ridiculed Central Park’s historical markers and played the gender card, only to be trumped by the race card. After the classical sculptor Meredith Bergmann worked up a depiction of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The New York Times asked in a headline, “Is a Planned Monument to Women’s Rights Racist?” A columnist denounced the “explicit prejudices” of the two historical figures “that erased the participation of black women in the movement.” Then, when a depiction of Sojourner Truth was added to the tableau, twenty academics objected in a letter that the new arrangement whitewashed the racist politics of the white suffragists, who “treated black intelligence and capability in a manner that Truth opposed.”

A similar circus has surrounded efforts to replace the toppled statue of Sims, at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, with a new counter-monument. After a seven-hour meeting last fall at the Museum of the City of New York, a city panel selected the sculptor Simone Leigh, an artist whose work has appeared at the Guggenheim and Whitney museums and along the High Line, for a racial riff on Manet’s Olympia called After Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, Henrietta, Laure, and Anonymous—so named for Sims’s enslaved patients. At the announcement, community activists shouted down this selection over the work of Vinnie Bagwell, a local favorite, whose Victory Beyond Sims proposed a less avant-garde sculptural figure. Tom Finkelpearl, the city’s then–Cultural Commissioner, scrambled to address the protest, and Leigh withdrew her design.

The next figure to go down was Finkelpearl himself. Last fall the city put out a public ballot asking for women who should be memorialized as part of its “She Built nyc” initiative. The popular winner, by a wide margin, was Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917). Known to New Yorkers as Mother Cabrini, this heroic nun fought for immigrant health, founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and became the first American citizen to be canonized in the Roman Catholic Church.

Mother Cabrini was indeed a woman who “built nyc,” just not the right kind of woman for Chirlane McCray, the unelected executive of her husband’s $10 million sculptural initiative. In the political storm that followed, the actor Chazz Palminteri accused McCray of racism for ignoring a worthy white candidate, de Blasio demanded an apology from the Bronx actor, Governor Cuomo stepped in to say he would memorialize Cabrini himself, and Finkelpearl lost his job in the kerfuffle with the mayor’s family.

The “nomination process was never intended to be a popularity contest,” McCray said in response. It turns out it was never exclusively meant to memorialize women at all, as the First Lady advanced two transvestite figures to take Mother Cabrini’s place. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were individuals on the outer fringes of the city’s cultural life. Both started out as prostitutes on Forty-second Street. After founding a group called Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, each descended into mental illness and substance abuse. Johnson’s body was pulled from the Hudson River near Christopher Street, while Rivera succumbed to liver cancer living at a shelter called Transy House.

The extremis of these sad individuals is precisely what appeals to the ever more absurdist politics of identity and representation. Mother Cabrini will have to wait as McCray pushes for a $750,000 memorial to the two drag queen activists. “The lgbtq movement was portrayed very much as a white, gay male movement,” she declares. “This monument counters that trend of whitewashing the history.”

The she of She Built nyc is ultimately New York’s current First Lady, who will not stop at using city funds to memorialize her own political hubris. Her sculptural initiative is but a small representation of her mismanagement of city affairs. For example, as she now organizes her fourth exhibition at Gracie Mansion, this one called “Catalyst: Art and Social Justice,” which opened in February, the city has seen little justice done to a $1 billion mental health initiative, called ThriveNYC, that has languished under her stewardship.

Such machinations will do little to save a monument that, one might say, memorializes our country’s greatest act of “social justice.” America’s deadliest conflict, after all, was the war that ended the country’s acceptance of chattel slavery. This historical reality is what makes the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument so problematic in today’s political climate. In a culture obsessed over America’s “structural racism” through such initiatives as the New York Times’s bogus “1619 Project,” a monument that memorializes the nation’s most anti-racist struggle complicates facile politicized narratives. Rather than remembering, the point now is forgetting, and neglecting, our history in metal and stone.

Stalin at Yale

SPECTATOR USA, January 29, 2020

Stalin at Yale

Art history for the age of identity politics

Are we in our own revolutionary moment? Many of our leading institutions clearly believe so. Yale University has been working overtime to prove it is on the right side of history. ‘Problematic’ colleges have been renamed. ‘Offensive’ stained-glass windows have been knocked out. Only the leadership of an Ivy League school could spread such a poisonous rash. Heading the charge against the Dead White Male has been a progressive Yale bureaucracy that is, for the most part, pale and stale.

Now the task of dismantling Yale’s famous art history survey course has fallen to a scholar I respect, Tim Barringer. British-born, Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and has been a leading curator at the Metropolitan Museum. He even mounted the Met’s exceptional 2018 exhibition on Thomas Cole.

Following a 2017 mandate to ‘decolonize’ Yale’s Department of English, Barringer is giving over the keys of Yale’s famous art survey course to the identity vandals. According to the Yale Daily News, instead of one class that will tell the story of art from ‘Renaissance to the Present’, new courses will, Barringer says, be devised to consider art in relation to a five-step history lesson, ‘questions of gender, class and race’, with further discussion of art’s ‘involvement with Western capitalism’. Of course, ‘climate change’ will also be a ‘key theme’.

Art doesn’t fare well in revolutionary times. Likewise, revolutionary sentiments are often revealed in the treatment of art. If only Professor Barringer had looked more carefully at another five-step history lesson, Thomas Cole’s ‘Course of Empire’ tableau (1833-36), he might have seen how civilizations burn down from decadence as well as assault.

Russia, after all, was once a leading promoter of modern painting. Then the Bolsheviks arrived to make sure their Picassos suffered the same fate as their Romanovs. Yet the murder of art is rarely immediate. The death occurs over time. In the early years of the Russian Revolution, the painting collections owned by the industrialists Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov were first ‘nationalized’. You could still see them, now in those new proletarian museums, but they were mainly on display for the purposes of public derision by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate.

Then Stalin came along. He declared that this art was too ‘politically harmful and is contributing to the spread, in Soviet art, of hostile, bourgeois, formalist opinions’. Want to see the Matisse? Sorry, comrade, now you were out of luck. Modern art was deemed to be ‘composed mainly of ideologically inadequate, anti-working class, formalist works of Western bourgeois art devoid of any progressive, civilizing value for Soviet visitors’. The paintings all went to the vaults of the State Hermitage and Pushkin Museums, not to be seen again for decades. In their place went up a three-year ‘Exhibition of Gifts to Comrade Stalin From the Peoples of the USSR and Foreign Countries’. A thousand busts of Stalin replaced the great modernist works. Expect a thousand busts of Comrade Thunberg at Yale.

So it’s down with ‘Art for art’s sake’, and up with art for the sake of political expediency. No surprise, but Yale undergraduates have rushed to sign up for the final survey course taught in the traditional sequence. The story of Western art is the story of Western civilization, and that’s just the problem. Perhaps Barringer, like those early Soviet curators, believes that his art will be saved by the new political order. Or maybe the move was merely a prerequisite for Yale’s 2020 receipt of a $4 million bequest from the Mellon Foundation to support ‘race studies’.

It’s only a matter of time before the history of art ends up underground. Maybe even next semester. Meanwhile, the students surely know better and are voting by signing up for the old course, capitalism and all. As Stalin would have said, wisdom is sometimes with the people, not the commissars.