NOT TO BE GLOOMY, but the 2020 pandemic touches on just about everything—including the life of painters. Not a few art association meetings, show receptions, workshops, and calls for artists have been postponed, put in limbo, or cancelled. One group of 2-D artists I’m associated with has our paintings quarantined, so to speak, in the House of Delegates office building at the Maryland Statehouse in Annapolis.
Small potatoes, let’s admit.
We will have to wait and see, but this current viral outbreak is unlikely to surpass the effects on visual culture that took place in 1348, the summer of the Black Death, or bubonic plague. The plague hit particularly hard in Florence and Siena, urban seats of the budding Italian Renaissance, and thus altered art history.
The virus was transmitted from Central Asia by rats on merchant ships. The rats hosted fleas that harbored the pestilence. In Florence, the city of 90,000 was reduced to 45,000. Siena fell from 42,000 citizens to 15,000, perhaps a record in percentages of lives lost to a plague.
A couple decades before the catastrophe, a painter named Giotto had revolutionize painting. He led the break from medieval and Byzantine tradition by attempting a naturalistic approach, what we now call realism. Giotto died in 1337 in Florence, and his successors were earnestly expanding his approach, at least until their world was turned upside down.
According to records of that time, some of his followers lamented that painting was getting “worse,” losing the Giottoesque warmth and realism. Although it would be obvious that a plague would affect every sector of life in urban Italy, art historians have wondered why Giotto’s disciples turned so pessimistic about the direction of painting itself.
The best answer comes from the late Renaissance art historian Millard Meiss, presented in detail in his Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (1951). Not everyone has agreed with the Meiss thesis. But few doubt its validity. Put simply, Meiss said the Black Death changed painting styles in Italy between Giotto (1266-1337) and Massacio (1402-1428), the Florentine painter who rekindled painterly realism in the last two years of his life.
Due to the Black Death, said Meiss, painting became “anti-Giottesque [and] profoundly opposed to the art of the earlier fourteenth century.” It moved “from narrative to ritual” with more “conflict between the planar and spatial aspects of compositions.” Human figures were typified by “the inflexible masks, the dispersed glances, the halted action.” For the painters emerging from the 1350s and 1360s, the universal joy of Giotto was gone, replaced by awkward particularity.
One reviewer of Meiss stated the thesis succinctly: “Interest in human expression, plastic design, spatial illusion and realistic narrative made way for a greater emphasis on the ritualistic, the supernatural, the religious—in short for abstract values.” The art of the thirteenth century, known as the Dugento, had returned. “Or, to put it another way, there was a revival of Byzantium.”
This is not an astonishing conclusion, given the horrors of 1438. But it was the detective work of Meiss that made it plain. Art historians, up to the mid-twentieth century, have typically looked for an evolutionary process in Western art styles. So the Meiss question was: Why was this evolution broken between Giotto and Massacio? The answer: The cultural and psychological impact of the Black Death.
I mention the mid-twentieth century because, after that, art history tried to become more empirical—researching more and more about less and less. A step further, it then went postmodernist, denying the empirical role of cause and effect (the evolution of styles), rejecting our “controlling narratives” of art as being only the bias of “power structures.” The postmodernist, in short, may be suspicious of the Meiss theory.
Perhaps more people will die of the 2020 caronavirus than in Florence or Siena. But surely the 2020 casualties will be no match for the exceedingly high proportion of loss in those Renaissance cities. Today’s painting styles are so plural, meanwhile, that even a once-in-a-century pandemic is not going to create an art-historical rift. Still, it will be interesting to see how our modern plague will be memorialized in art.