The plague

Marcantonio Raimondi, often called simply Marcantonio (c. 1470-1482– 1534), was an Italian engraver, known for being the first important printmaker, whose body of work consists largely of prints copying paintings. He is therefore a key figure in the rise of the reproductive print. He also systematised a technique of engraving that became dominant in Italy and elsewhere. His collaboration with Raphael greatly helped his career, and he continued to exploit Raphael's works after the painter's death in 1520, playing a large part in spreading High Renaissance styles across Europe. Much of the biographical information we have comes from his life, the only one of a printmaker, in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Around 300 engravings are attributed to him. After years of great success, his career ran in to trouble in the mid-1520s; he was imprisoned for a time in Rome over his role in the series of erotic prints I Modi and then, according to Vasari, lost all his money in the Sack of Rome in 1527, after which none of his work can be securely dated.

This Marcantonio engraving is based on a mirror image of an original drawing by Raphael, reflecting both artists' common work practice. It is a dramatic and tragic scene but its compositional structure, following Raphael's strict classicising symmetry, makes it immediately intelligible. In the right foreground lies a dead woman with a child clutching her. There is an acrid smell. The man is holding his nose as he tries to push the child away. If it is to live, this child must not drink its mother’s milk. A divine light floods into the otherwise dark room through the window on the left. If you have faith, there is hope. As Christine Boeckl explains in her book Images of Plague and Pestilence, the effect of the print is to heighten emphasis on the victims, and to reinforce Virgil's description of the devastating effects of plague discussed below. The engraving itself probably dates from the early 1520s, when the disease continued to pose a real threat to Europe.

As well as Raphael, the engraving is also based on a literary influence, one almost certainly known by the highly literate Marcantonio. In Virgil’s great poem The Aeneid, the story is told of the ten-year-long war between Greeks and Trojans. The Aeneid relates how the surviving Trojans had very skilfully adapted to their new surroundings on the Asian side of the Dardanelles. They had just started building the city of Pergamea: “…when suddenly the air was poisoned, and a terrible, insidious sickness took possession of human bodies, the leaves on the trees and the seeds in the field and led to a devastating failure of the crops". Raphael’s drawing of The Plague in Phrygia, c. 1512, along with the other drawings that Marcantonio took as models for his print, came at a time when images of the plague were still uncommon in visual art. The popularity that portrayals of the plague achieved in succeeding centuries was perhaps due to the fact that many people could recognise their own experiences in the recurrent outbreaks of the disease.

See:

Christine Boeckel, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology  (Kirksville, MO, 2000)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcantonio_Raimondi

http://www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk/en/collections/work/E1936

Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art         February 2017