Art Appreciation Lecture Series 2019 The hedgehog saint and the walking dead: escaping the plague in Louise Marshall 6/7 March 2019

Lecture summary:

In this lecture we look at works of art commissioned in response to the repeated experience of bubonic plague epidemics in Italy, which began with the infamous Black Death of 1348 and recurred in any given locality every two to twenty years until well into the eighteenth century. Plague art provided men and women facing the constant threat of mass epidemic disease with essential coping strategies. Works of art were made as tools to negotiate for protection with powerful heavenly protectors against the disease. Here we focus on works made to petition and thank the two universal ‘specialist’ plague saints, Sebastian and Roch. As we shall see, Renaissance imagery of both saints is highly somatic, focused on bodies and flesh. Both saints are wounded, yet both are shown very much alive. It is precisely this conjunction of deadly wounds and healthy living bodies that is the key to their enormous popularity as protectors against plague. We explore why Sebastian can be called the hedgehog saint, shot through with arrows ‘like a hedgehog’, as his biography reports, and why Roch is a kind of Renaissance ‘walking dead’, marked for imminent death by his bubo and yet alive.

Selected slide list: Giovanni del Biondo, Sebastian altarpiece, 1370s (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, ). Altarpiece for Florence Cathedral.

Jacopo Moreno, Martyrdom of St Sebastian, signed & dated 1457 (parish church, Pornassio, Liguria). Frescoed altarpiece in right wall of nave.

Benozzo Gozzoli, Martyrdom of St Sebastian, January 1466 [1465 local dating] (Collegiata, San Gimignano). Commissioned by the town council as a frescoed altarpiece of civic chapel of St Sebastian, on back wall of church (directly underneath Taddeo di Bartolo’s earlier Last Judgement). Signed & dated in long inscription that hails Sebastian as the most glorious athlete of God: A[D] LAVDEM GLORIOSISSIMI ATHLETE SANCTI SEBASTIANI…

Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, Martyrdom of St Sebastian, 1475 (, ). Altarpiece of the Pucci family oratory at SS. Annunziata, Florence.

Sandro Botticelli, St Sebastian, 1473/74 (Gemäldegalerie, ). Pier panel from S. Maria Maggiore, Florence.

Matteo di Giovanni, St Sebastian, 1470s? (National Gallery, London). Frame partly original; probably also a pier panel.

Andrea Mantegna, St Sebastian, c. 1457-59 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, ). Tiny panel (680 x 300 cm without frame), probably the “little work for the podestà [judge] of that Mantegna had to finish before he went to in 1459. Signed in Greek letters on pier to which saint is tied, which spell out, ‘This is the work of Andrea’.

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Antonello da Messina, St Sebastian, c. 1478-79 (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, ). One wing of a triptych with polychrome wooden statue of St Roch in the centre and a matching panel of St Christopher by Antonello, completed by his son after Antonello’s death in 1479; both now lost. Commissioned by the newly-founded Venetian confraternity of St. Roch for their altar in the church of S. Giuliano, .

Liberale da , St Sebastian, 1490s? (, ). From S. Domenico, Ancona.

Pietro Perugino, St Sebastian, 1490s? (, ). Inscribed: SAGITTAE TVAE INFIXE SVNT MICHI (Psalm 38: ‘For thine arrows have stuck fast in me’).

Andrea Mantegna, St Sebastian, c. 1505 (Galleria Giorgio Franchetti, Ca d’Oro, Venice). Inscribed on paper wrapped around candle: NIHIL NISI DIVINVM STABILE EST COETERA FVMVS (Nothing stands firm except the divine; the rest is smoke).

Pietro Perugino (attrib.), Sts Romanus and Roch intercede with God the Father on behalf of Deruta, 1479 (Museo Civico, Deruta). in main church in town, S. Francesco, commissioned by the town council of Deruta (Umbria). Inscribed: DECRETO PVBLICO DERVTA ANNO D[OMI]NI MCCCCLXXV[III]

Bartolomeo dell Gatta, St Roch intercedes with Christ on behalf of Arezzo, c. 1479 (Museo Medievale e Moderno, Arezzo).

References Polzer, Joseph, “Aspects of the Fourteenth-Century Iconography of Death and the Plague”, in The Black Death: The Impact of the Fourteenth Century Plague, ed. D. Williman (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1982), 107-30

Marshall, Louise, “Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy”, Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 485-532

Marshall, Louise, “Plague Literature and Art, Early Modern European”, in Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics and Plagues, ed. Joseph Byrne, 2 vols. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2008), 2: 522-30

Marshall, Louise, “A New Plague Saint for Renaissance Italy: Suffering and Sanctity in Narrative Cycles of Saint Roch”, in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence. Acts of the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University, 2009), 543-49

Lightbown, Ronald, Mantegna (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986)

Campbell, Stephen and Jérémie Koering, eds, Andrea Mantegna: making art (history) (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2015)

Excellent digital images of , often with zoom capabilities, can be found on most museum websites (National Gallery London, Louvre, Brera, Berlin, Dresden) & Google Arts and Culture (Mantegna Vienna Sebastian)

For access to all past lecture notes visit: https:// www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/members/current-members/member-events/being- human-figure-art/