Now, more than ever before, as we face a crisis confronting the
whole world, it is brought home to us that we are all in this together, that we
need to fight COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the world together. Philanthropist
Melinda Gates said in a recent interview, “What we haven’t realised in a global
community is that we are a global community.”
While our power to affect and infect each other is at its peak
right now, it is worth our while to take a look at how art brings home the
universality of the human experience in its own unique way.
Humanity is no stranger to plagues and epidemics. The
devastating Black Death or Bubonic Plague that struck Europe in 1347 killed
over 20 million people in Europe—almost
one-third of the continent’s population over five years.
Art has the ability to breathe life into numbers, serving as a
tool to document, record and in some cases, soothe and inspire.
In 2005, the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts held a
remarkable exhibition titled ‘Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a
Time of Plague, 1500-1800’, to examine the response of visual art to
the plague. The thematically based exhibit explored the ways in which Italian
society responded to the shattering series of plagues that haunted them over
300 years. While the invisible enemy of the plague, exactly like the novel
coronavirus today generated fear, anxiety and horror, the images in art that
emerged provided some perspective, offering glimpses of hope and
courage. As French historian Emil Male said, “From these catastrophes that
terrified mankind, there remains today a bit of beauty.” The exhibition
presented some stunning masterpieces, originals and copies, of mainly
Italian Baroque artists including painter Guido Reni and Carlo Coppola. It also
included the works of the leading Flemish Baroque artist Anthony Van Dyck,
who spent most of the mid-1620s working in Genoa, Italy, after fleeing
Palermo, where he was working when an outbreak of the plague forced him to
flee. He left behind an unfinished altarpiece, the ’Madonna of the
Rosary’, which was sent to him to be completed in Genoa.
While we seem to have come a long way from the
1500s, we are again dealing with the fear of contagion by disease and once
again art can continue to inspire and give us some perspective into the
universality of the human condition. Death from the plague was a common
occurrence and an enduring theme in art.
Some great artists, probably including German painter, Hans
Holbein the Younger, best known for his stunning portraits and the very
humanist painting ‘The Body of Christ in the Tomb’, died of the
plague. While the plague raged in Venice, Titian, considered the most important
member of the 16th Century Venetian School, died of a fever in 1576.
Meanwhile others tried to prevail with art like the notable Italian painter
Tintoretto. He painted his greatest works and multiple images of healing in the
Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, a building dedicated to St Roch, believed
to protect against plague. In 1918, major Austrian figurative artist Egon
Schiele died from the Spanish Flu three days after his wife died of
it. One of his most famous works, ‘The Family’, was
unfinished at the time of Schiele’s death and initially was titled ’Squatting
Couple’. It was one of his last paintings and depicts the artist, his wife
and their unborn child.
Norwegian expressionist artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) survived
the Spanish Flu and painted his experience of it in ‘Self Portrait
after the Spanish Flu’ (1919) where he appears looking gaunt and
haggard, wrapped in a dressing gown and blanket. He is best known
for ‘The Scream’ (1893), which has become one of the most
iconic images of world art. According to Munch, he was out walking at sunset,
when he “heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature”. The artist’s felt
sensation and the resultant image find particular resonance amongst us today.
Closer to home, between 1918-1920, when the Spanish Flu claimed
between 50 -100 million lives worldwide, and India was hit particularly hard,
the famous Hindi poet Suryankant Tripathi, better known as Nirala, wrote in his
memoirs of how “the Ganga was swollen with dead bodies”. The poet lost half his
family to the disease. Of the wonderful painter Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941),
who spent her initial years studying art in Paris, her artist-nephew Vivan
Sundaram says, “She lived during a period of great political and social
turmoil in Paris. It was the age of disease, economic depression and rise of
Fascism. When she returned to India, it was this melancholy that got transferred
to her canvas.”
Looking back into our past, peppered with these periods of
disease and peril, and at this international tapestry of rich imagery, both in
art and literature, that has emerged from it, we are reminded once again that
our current crisis shall also pass. Art does prevail… and survive.
We are once again reminded that we have been through this
before… and humanity has survived. We will come through it again.
