Black Death Affect on Art and Music

The age when European art rose to glory was an age of disease and death. In 1347 the Black Death – probably bubonic plague – was brought by a Genoese ship to Sicily. In the next few years, it is estimated to have killed about a third of the entire population of Europe. Some cities, such as Venice, lost more like 60% of their people.

The Renaissance was just getting started, and the plague, too, was at the beginning of its reign of terror. The Black Death was more than a medieval explosion of horror: it kept coming back. For the next 300 years and longer, plague became a regular part of life – and death – in Europe. Terrible outbreaks periodically devastated cities. One of the very last, and most terrifying, of these plagues hit London in 1665 and is described in chilling detail in one of the first historical novels, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year.

Another catastrophic attack of plague massacred the people of Palermo in Sicily in the 1620s, and this outbreak is chronicled in a new exhibition, Van Dyck in Sicily: Painting and the Plague, 1624-5, at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Van Dyck, the gifted Flemish painter, had been working in Genoa, where brilliant works by him survive. But when he moved on to Palermo he soon found himself surrounded by death and panic. The exhibition shows his art in this eerie light.

It is a fascinating perspective, yet it is just the tip of an iceberg, for if you think about it, the entire story of the Renaissance and baroque periods in art is sealed inside the kingdom of the plague. Pestilence had all of Europe in its grip from 1347 to the late 17th century, with outbreaks in southern Europe recurring in the 1700s. This means the lives of all the "Old Masters" were experienced in its shadow: Michelangelo, Rembrandt and the rest all faced the danger that mortal contagion could at any moment seize their city.

Some great artists, probably including Hans Holbein and Titian, died of it. Others tried to fight it with art, like Tintoretto – who painted his greatest works in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, a building dedicated to a plague-protective saint.

Yet the strangest thing, today, is this.

The art of these centuries abounds in images of death, sure, yet it is also full of joy. The Europeans of the 1500s and 1600s created incredible treasures and beacons of civilisation. Far from being driven to despair by pestilence, it is as if they were spurred to assert the glory of life.

In the 21st century, nameless terrors grip us. We fear epidemics that never come. We imagine that if a natural catastrophe hit our society, the result would be total collapse. Yet history is actually full of optimistic messages. People have endured disasters that modern Europeans can barely comprehend, and come out not just fighting but winning – just look at St Paul's cathedral, a hopeful dome that rose from a city blighted by the 1665 plague, and the Great Fire soon afterwards that necessitated Wren's rebuilding.

Human beings have a shocking resilience. They also have the power to rise above self-pity. If that does not seem obvious today, just consider St Paul's, serene in the London sky, a message to us from an age of everyday heroism.

Black Death Affect on Art and Music

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/feb/15/brush-black-death-artists-plague

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