Scholarship on Art and Epidemics

This is an informal sampling of the substantial art historical  and related scholarship on art, plagues, and epidemics. Please let us know of significant work we have missed, or send along annotated commentaries  on sources you find useful.

John Aberth. From the brink of the apocalypse: Confronting famine, war, plague and death in the later Middle Ages  2013


 BAILEY, Gauvin Alexander ; JONES, Pamela M. ; MORMANDO, Franco ; WORCESTER, Thomas W. eds. Hope and healing : painting in Italy in a time  of plague, 1500-1800 (Catalogue of exhibition)  University of Chicago Press, 2005. 

Sheila Barker. 2005. Plague art in early modern Rome : divine directives and temporal remedies.
_______________.Poussin, plague, and early modern medicine The Art Bulletin 86 (4), 659-689
 _______________. The Making of a Plague Saint. Saint Sebastian's Imagery and Cult Before the Counter-ReformationPiety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, 78-90. 
__________________. 2002. Art in a Time of Danger: Urban VIII's Rome and the Plague of 1629-1634 

Christine M. Boeckl Giorgio Vasari's "San Rocco Altarpiece": Tradition and Innovation in Plague Iconography. Artibus et Historiae.  Vol. 22, No. 43 (2001), pp. 29-40  

 James Crump. 1995.  (Dis)regarding plague art : current strategies for representing AIDS.
New art examiner (1985), 1995, 22, 8, Apr

Peter S. Hawkins Naming Names: The Art of Memory and the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt. Critical Inquiry.  Volume 19, Number 4 | Summer, 1993

Hopkins, Andrew. 2005 Combating the plague : devotional paintings, architectural programs, and votive processions in early modern Venice


Todd J. Kowalski, William A. Agger. Art Supports New Plague Science. Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 48, Issue 1, 1 January 2009, Pages 137–138.

Long, Thomas.  Plague of Pariahs: AIDS 'Zines and the Rhetoric of Transgression

Thomas L. Long  Journal of Communication Inquiry.  2000

 Louise Marshall.Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy, Renaissance Quarterly. Autumn 1994 , pp. 485-532

_____________. 2002  Reading the Body of a Plague Saint : Narrative Altarpieces and Devotional Images of St. Sebastian in Renaissance Art. 

 

Millard Meiss   1951.  Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death; The Arts, Religion, and Society in the mid-14th Century  (Princeton University Press) 

Ortega, Jessica, "Pestilence and prayer saints and the art of the plague in italy from 1370 - 1600" (2012). HIM 1990-2015. 1367. 

Peiffer- Smadja, Thomas. [The plague: A disease that is still haunting our collective memory].
 La Revue de Medecine Interne, 27 Apr 2017, 38(6):402-406 (in French) 

Raymond Craxford, P.   Pestilence in Literature and Art 1914 - Oxford: Oxford University Press

Sontag, Susan. AIDS and its Metaphors. Allen Lane (Penguin) 1989  (Preliminary 1988 version in New York Review of Books)

Weisberg, G. (2004). Cholera as Plague and Pestilence in nineteenth-Century Art: Disease as Metaphore in Art and Popular Wisdom. In L. S. Dixon, & G. P. Weisberg (Eds.), In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphore in Art and Popular Wisdom (pp. 82-100). Delaware University press & Associated University.