The hats of the doctors grew bigger and bigger, their intentions viler and viler, their noses longer and longer. The commedia dell’arte, carnival and other masquerades emerged into their own art genre, showing humorous fantasies of exuberantly dressed stock characters in all kinds of situations, popular not in the least for their hardly camouflaged erotic caliber. Like their carnival colleagues they are the opposite of what they pretend to be: egotistic and idiotic instead of learned and distinguished. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.Įqually ridiculous are the doctors of the commedia dell’arte. Riding a white horse is a doctor, identifiable by his oversized hat, his book and the sign that reads ‘Doctor’ attached to his robe. In this case, the curist could be worse than the disease itself.ĭetail of Carnival in Rome by Johannes Lingelbach (1650-51). The sight of such an eerie figure could potentially shock patients who were already weakened, leading to a reaction so intense that they were more likely to succumb. Many physicians and health authorities advised against the use of full-face masks by doctors though. These masks could be crafted from materials like waxed cloth or leather, incorporating eye-holes. Hired corpse carriers and volunteers reportedly wore face masks as well. When it comes to plague, the people that did tie a cloth to their face were those engaged in hands-on tasks, like corpse collectors, who were often convict laborers. But wearing a mask constantly was found bothersome, which may sound familiar to some of us, and life expectancy was not yet the issue that it is today. Nicholas Roze directing the removal of bodies during the Great Plague of Marseille, 1720.Ĭovering the nose and mouth comes natural in any profession where people have to cope with stench, dust, smoke or poisonous vapors. Similarly, the absence of masks doesn’t necessarily mean that people didn’t commonly shield their faces in huge numbers. Therefore, the presence of a person wearing a protective mask in an artwork shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an accurate portrayal of a historic event. On the flip side, the foul smell that came with the disease was so unpleasant that it’s probable that many more people wore cloths, soaked in vinegar or otherwise, wrapped around their heads than what these artworks show, the artist only having left them out for aesthetic considerations. In general, these people are extras such as carriers or corpse collectors and not the VIPs. Nonetheless, the subject needed to be recognizable, and to this end a set of visual elements – symbols, gestures, personifications – developed through time, the presence of a few people with a cloth tied to their face being one of them. Such a level of realism was deemed too repulsive, where art was meant to exude beauty, or the view of miserable and dying people would spoil the effect when the purpose of a painting was to glorify the triumph over the epidemic. However, these works of art rarely depict the disease itself, i.e. Countless paintings and prints remind us of the times when the plague was everywhere.
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