Art in a Time of Plague
4 March 2021
Artistic responses to pandemics past.
Billy Jobling
Billy Jobling is Senior Writer and Researcher in the Post-War and Contemporary Art department at Christie's, London.
The Triumph of Death, fresco, Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, Sicily, circa 1440s, 600 x 642 cm.
Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, Sicily, is a fresco known as The Triumph of Death. It was painted in the 1440s by an unidentified artist. At around six by six metres, its size is overwhelming. On a visit there some years ago, I remember craning my neck to take in its central figure: a gleeful skeleton archer astride a cadaverous horse, which charges over the scene in a pale, terrifying arc.
In pre-pandemic 2019, the British artist Cecily Brown painted a monumental reboot of The Triumph of Death. It was unveiled in an installation at Blenheim Palace in autumn last year. ‘If you were looking for a kind of Covid-19 Guernica,’ wrote Alastair Sooke, ‘announcing a society in turmoil, and reminding us of our vulnerability despite 21st-century medical technology, well, here it is. Sometimes, artists seem to possess prophetic powers.’
The comparison is apt—Picasso’s appalled masterpiece, with its own skeletal horse, took cues from the original fresco. Writhing with saturated colour and dissolute form, Brown’s brushwork befits the tumult of our times. But what would a true ‘Covid-19 Guernica’ look like?
Egon Schiele, The Family, circa 1918, oil on canvas, 150 x 160.8 cm.
Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Recent precedent is far from instructive. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 infected around a third of the world’s population and killed up to 100 million people, likely surpassing the toll of the First World War. Overshadowed by the conflict’s horrors, however, it left little direct artistic trace. Edvard Munch recorded his illness and recovery in a pair of haggard self-portraits; Egon Schiele’s The Family (1918) is a plague piece in retrospect, depicting the artist, his wife and their unborn child, all of whom died of the flu before he could finish the painting.
For a parallel in living memory, we might look to the AIDS epidemic of 1980s New York. Robert Gober made haunting sculptures of sinks without taps, giving physical shape to anxieties about cleanliness. Félix González-Torres’ installations figured lives fading away, with strings of lightbulbs slowly burning out, and piles of candy, which viewers were invited to take from, gradually disappearing. Keith Haring challenged the stigma around the disease following his own HIV diagnosis in 1987, creating iconic images for safe-sex campaigns and organisations like ACT UP. These are all powerful works, expressing fear, hope, and rage at a government many felt was doing little to help. Reflective of a relatively localised crisis, though, they feel distinct from today’s pandemic in their specificity.
Félix González-Torres, "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.).
Credit: mark6mauno, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Perhaps we should look back further, like Brown and Picasso, to The Triumph of Death. Stand close to the wall, and his victims are at eye level: nobles and bishops in a jumbled pile of gaudy silks, rich brocades and ornate headwear, their faces all struck by the same yellow-grey pallor. Arrows jut from their necks in cruel diagonals. To the right, a group of living nobles have noticed Death’s approach. Two of them grimace as the first shafts thud into their bodies. Others look away as if in denial, turning their attention to the music of an attendant lute-player. The moral is viscerally clear: Death comes for us all, and all the wealth in the world can’t keep you safe.
There are details, however, that paint a more eerie and enigmatic picture. For one thing, Death seems to have come from the East. His ‘Mongol bow’ is of a type from Central Asia, where the Black Death had emerged before tearing down the Silk Road into the ports of Europe less than a century earlier. Then there is the clutch of people to the left, who have mysteriously been spared. Among them appear to be hermits, Jewish women wearing tallit prayer shawls, and a leper with bandaged hands. These groups—due either to their seclusion from urban society, or their adherence to the Torah’s strict edicts on sanitation—were all more likely to have survived the plague than clerics or courtiers.
The Triumph of Death was originally commissioned for the courtyard of the Palazzo Sclafani, which had been converted to Palermo’s first public hospital in 1429. With its focus on death among the rich and powerful, the mural may have been intended to comfort afflicted patients, reminding them that even the mighty faced mortality—and, perhaps, that plague was not an equal-opportunities disease. In this sense, it strikingly inverts an aspect of today’s situation, where Covid-19, spoken about at first as a ‘great leveller’, has plainly sharpened existing inequalities. The past holds up a provocative mirror to the present. As a Black Death Guernica, moreover, the fresco’s vision of terror and chaos endures. The painter and his assistant stare out gravely from the surviving crowd; then, as now, the pale horse screams overhead.
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