Much of Europe’s greatest art is haunted by outbreaks – but amid the death are testimonies of love.

Plague visionaries: how Rembrandt, Titian and Caravaggio tackled pestilence

It seems incredible that we should find common cause with the people of 500 years ago, who faced disease without any understanding or remotely adequate treatment. But on Sunday, Pope Francis walked the streets of Rome, left empty by coronavirus, to visit the church of San Marcello on the Corso – and revere a cross that supposedly protected Rome from plague in 1522.

Albrecht Dürer: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498)

Salvator Rosa: Human Frailty (c1656)

Titian: Pietà (1575-6)

Antonio Zanchi: The Virgin Appears to the Plague Victims (1666)

Rembrandt: Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels (c1654)

Gerrit van Honthorst: Saint Sebastian (c1623)

Caravaggio: The Seven Works of Mercy (1607)

One of the most distressing results of Europe’s original pandemic and its recurrences was that the dead could not be buried decently. This was a basic “mercy” of a Christian community, as Caravaggio shows in this shadowed vision of people doing good deeds on the mean streets of Naples. A priest holds up a torch as a man is carried to burial by night, his feet peeping from his shroud. In his eyewitness account of the Black Death in Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio tells how mourning broke down and bodies were dumped in the street. “Plague pits” that have been discovered crammed with bodies confirm that the dead were dumped in mass graves.

Caterina de Julianis: Time and Death (before 1727)

See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/mar/17/plague-visionaries-how-rembrandt-titian-and-caravaggio-tackled-pestilence