This 'œambitious and unusual show' traces the links between the ravages of disease, the logic of faith, and the consolations of art, said Christine Temin in The Boston Globe. It brings together 37 works by European artists made as responses to and records of a succession of scourges: cholera, typhus, and, most often, bubonic plague. The works manage to turn 'œeven the grisliest of subjects into beautiful paintings.' In Giovanni Martinelli's Memento Mori (Death Comes to the Dinner Table), wealthy, silk-clad feasters recoil at an ominous skeletal figure entering the scene. The meaning is clear. Others require some knowledge of the visual codes of the time. Arrows, for instance, symbolized the plague. St. Sebastian, who was pierced by multiple arrows by the Romans yet nursed back to health, came to stand for a protector.
The exhibition helps us to see these paintings as people in their time did, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. That is, as 'œdevotional icons rather than as old master monuments.' The image of the Archangel Michael was 'œadopted as a talisman against disease' after Pope Gregory supposedly saw him perched on Hadrian's tomb after a plague that hit Rome in 590. A few artists favored realistic, almost reportorial images. Carlo Coppola's Pestilence of 1656 in Naples reveals 'œa grim scene of bodies being hauled off in hasty, unceremonious trips.'
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