Late Middle Ages

How the Black Death influenced medieval art

The mass mortality of 1347–1351 left a distinctive mark on the visual culture of the late Middle Ages. Across painting, sculpture, manuscript illumination, and the minor arts, the second half of the fourteenth century saw the consolidation of a new iconography: skeletons, corpses, skulls, hourglasses, and arrows; the corpse of the deceased shown stripped of dignity on his or her own tomb; saints pierced with arrows or pointing to the plague-sore on the thigh. The argument of this article is that the Black Death did not invent a new set of motifs — most of them had medieval antecedents — but it raised them from the marginal to the central, and recast the visual language of devotion around a single insistent claim: that death is the one certainty of human life.

The broader context is set out in the overview of the Black Death and its aftermath and in the cultural and religious impact of the Black Death. The figure of the plague doctor, which became the visual shorthand of the entire age, is treated in The plague doctor: origins, costume, and meaning. The flagellant procession, the other great image born of the plague years, is examined in The flagellant movement and the Black Death.

An Old Motif Made New

The memento mori — “remember that you must die” — was not a Black Death invention. The desert fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries had meditated on the skull in their cells, and medieval preachers had long used the image of death as a spur to repentance. The early fourteenth-century mural of the Triumph of Death at the Camposanto in Pisa, usually attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco and dated to around 1336, already shows a graveyard of open coffins, skeletal riders, and processions of victims from every estate being herded to their graves. The plague, as Samuel K. Cohn Jr. argued in The Black Death Transformed (2002), was not so much the origin as the accelerator of a tradition that was already in motion.

What changed after 1348 was the volume, the violence, and the ubiquity of the imagery. The dead were no longer a small company of holy ascetics or anonymous victims in a morality play: they filled the cemeteries, the charnel houses, and the streets of every town. Artists responded by multiplying the skulls on tombs, the worms in the sarcophagi, and the skeletons in the margins of manuscripts. The wall paintings, woodcuts, and frescoes of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries show, in microcosm, a society that had lost the capacity to look away from the corpse.

The Dance of Death

The most enduring of the new motifs is the Dance of Death, the Danse Macabre in which a personified Death — usually a skeleton or a desiccated corpse — leads away a series of victims from every estate. The pope, the emperor, the cardinal, the king, the knight, the merchant, the physician, the peasant, the child, the hermit: each in turn is seized by the hand and pulled towards the open grave. The point of the dance is social as well as spiritual: death comes to all, regardless of office, wealth, or sanctity.

The earliest documented example of a monumental Dance of Death cycle is the lost fresco painted on the walls of the Cemetery of the Innocents (Cimetière des Innocents) in Paris in 1424. The work, commissioned by the bishop of Paris and painted under the direction of the painter Guy Marchand, is known only through later copies and descriptions, but its influence was enormous. Variations soon appeared at the Church of St. Mary at Lübeck (1463, painted by Bernt Notke), at the Church of the Holy Spirit at Tallinn (a copy of the Lübeck cycle, also by Notke), and on the wall of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Piano at Loreto Aprutino in the Abruzzi (1485). Hans Holbein the Younger produced the most famous printed version, a series of woodcuts published in 1538 under the title Totentanz, which circulated in every part of Europe and shaped the modern idea of the motif.

The Dance of Death was not only a visual theme. It was a literary one. The German friar Johannes Pauli collected the verses that accompany the Lübeck cycle in his Scherz mit der Wahrheit of 1519, and the French poet Guyot Marchand attached a corresponding text to the Parisian fresco. The dances were designed to be read as well as seen, and the verses were often scurrilous: the pope is reminded that his mitre cannot help him, the emperor that his crown cannot save him, the physician that his own remedies will not cure him. The genre is therefore best understood not as a piece of late medieval aesthetic morbidity, but as a catechism of death: a set of images, set to verse, designed to make the viewer think about his own end.

The Transi Tomb

The transi tomb is a French invention of the mid-fourteenth century in which the deceased is shown not in the traditional pose of serene prayer or noble repose, but as a decomposing corpse, often with the shroud half falling away from the flesh, the ribs exposed, the belly distended, the eyes already eaten by worms. The earliest documented example is the tomb of the cardinals of the House of La Châtre in the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, datable to the 1370s. The most famous early example is the tomb of Philippe Pot in the Louvre (c. 1477–1480), a recumbent figure in lead of a high-ranking Burgundian nobleman attended by a line of hooded mourners, with the corpse of the same man, in advanced decay, displayed on the underside of the slab.

The English form of the transi tomb is best represented by the royal tomb of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia in Westminster Abbey, executed c. 1395 by the London workshop of Henry Yevele. The faces of the king and queen are the only part of the monument in gilded gilt, while the sides of the tomb are painted black and the gilt of the surface gives way, in the marginal sculpture, to skeletons, the souls of the dead being weighed, and small scenes of the Last Judgment. The tomb was designed to be read from a distance, as a celebration of the royal couple, and at close range, as a warning of the corruption of the flesh.

The transi tomb is one of the most important art-historical documents of the period because it gives visual form to a particular late medieval understanding of death: that the corpse, not the soul, is what the viewer should remember. The contrast with the contemporary gisants of earlier medieval kings, who are shown crowned, sceptred, and idealised, is deliberate and pointed. The transi is the inverse of the gisant: a deliberate dis-figuring of the traditional tomb.

The Saints of the Plague on the Wall and the Panel

The two saints most closely associated with plague — Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch — were already objects of devotion in 1348, but their visual cults expanded explosively in the second half of the fourteenth century. The principal late medieval depictions of Saint Sebastian are the three great Italian paintings of c. 1474–1480: Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian in the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice, Botticelli’s panel of the same subject in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and Giovanni Bellini’s altarpiece of c. 1480, of which the most famous version is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Each of these shows the saint bound to a column, pierced by arrows, the body strained upward in an attitude of suffering that the painters used to display the nude male figure in a classical idiom; but the iconography is also that of a plague intercessor, and the arrows were read by contemporaries as the darts of the pestilence.

Saint Roch, by contrast, is shown in pilgrim’s garb: cloak, staff, hat, and the small dog that, according to his legend, brought him bread when he had fallen ill of the plague at Piacenza. The plague-sore is conventionally shown on the saint’s thigh, with the dog licking it or pointing to it. The most famous late medieval Italian image of Saint Roch is Bartolomeo Montagna’s altarpiece of 1484, now in the Louvre, which shows the saint kneeling in a landscape with the angel who is healing his sore. In Venice, the church of San Rocco was built in the late fifteenth century to house the relics of the saint, and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, decorated in 1564 by Tintoretto, became one of the great shrines of plague-devotion in Europe.

The saints of the plague appear in every medium of late medieval art. The Virgin Mary, especially under the titles of Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of Mercy, and the Mater Dolorosa, expanded rapidly in the wake of the catastrophe and was depicted in the new altarpieces commissioned by plague-survivors as a sign of thanksgiving. The Pestkreuz or pestilence cross, a small devotional object marked with the instruments of the Passion, was carried as a protective amulet; images of these crosses appear in late medieval portraits as part of the costume of the sitters.

Painting Itself: Plague Imagery in the International Gothic

The dominant visual style of the courts of Europe in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — the International Gothic of the courts of Paris, Burgundy, Prague, and Milan — looks at first sight like a world of courtly refinement, of long-necked Madonnas, of gold leaf, of elaborate fabrics, and of love poetry. The style was patronised by the patrons who survived the plague, and it is intimately bound up with the political settlement of the years after 1380. Yet the memento mori sits inside the style, not outside it.

The Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–1399, National Gallery, London), painted for King Richard II of England, shows the young king being presented by the three patron saints of England — John the Baptist, Edward the Confessor, and Edmund the Martyr — to the Virgin and Child, who are surrounded by eleven angels. The courtly, the angelic, and the political are entirely to the front. But the diptych is also a plague-image. Richard was almost certainly a survivor of the Pestis Secunda of 1361, and the diptych’s iconography, in which the king is shown kneeling in supplication to a heavenly Virgin, is a typical plague-votive form. The same is true of the Vienna Diptych of c. 1390, painted for a noble woman of the French or Burgundian court, which shows a young girl kneeling before the Virgin while St. Michael and St. Margaret stand nearby. The contrast between the gold leaf and the gentle expressions of the courtly figures, on the one hand, and the imagery of death that surrounds such works in the wider culture, on the other, is exactly the tension that Cohn identified in his argument that the Black Death transformed but did not abolish the older visual tradition.

The crucial point is that the International Gothic and the iconography of plague are not opposed styles. They are, rather, two registers of the same visual culture. The same workshops that painted courtly Madonnas also painted the skulls on the memento mori panels; the same patrons who commissioned the Wilton Diptych also commissioned the transi tombs in Westminster Abbey. The Black Death did not invent a new art, but it ensured that the older themes of mortality acquired, in the new visual regime, a central place that they had not previously held.

The Haunting That Lasted

The iconography of the late medieval memento mori did not disappear with the plague. The skeletons and the corpses of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are still the standard visual reference of the entire age of plague: a survey of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painting shows that the Dance of Death, the transi tomb, the arrowed Saint Sebastian, and the plague-sore of Saint Roch remained the dominant visual motifs of plague until at least the great plague of Marseilles in 1720.

The persistence of the imagery is one of the things that makes the Black Death a turning-point in European art. As the historian Philippe Ariès argued in L’homme devant la mort (1977), the late medieval plague-iconography marks the moment at which death becomes, in Western art, a thing to be stared at directly: a presence in the household, a theme in the painting, a feature of the tomb. The death of the Middle Ages, Ariès suggested, was the death of the plague — public, collective, and indifferent to status. It was this death, more than any of the other deaths of the period, that the visual artists of the late Middle Ages tried, with extraordinary concentration, to depict.

References

  • Cohn, Samuel K. Jr. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • Ariès, Philippe. L’homme devant la mort. Seuil, 1977. (Translated as The Hour of Our Death, Knopf, 1981.)
  • Boeckl, Christine M. Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology. Truman State University Press, 1991.
  • Binski, Paul. Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. British Museum Press, 1996.
  • Camille, Michael. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art. Cambridge University Press, 1989.