Plague and pestilence in literature and art — A Closer Reading

The Archer and the Serpent: Recurring Emblems

Crawfurd opens with Apollo, whose bow and mouse on a bronze coin of Alexandria Troas (c. 250 BCE) epitomize the ancient link between divine archery and pestilence. He then juxtaposes this with the brazen serpent—a healing symbol that also recalls the plague sent among the Israelites. The same dual function appears in Christian art: Saint Sebastian, shot with arrows, becomes a plague intercessor. Crawfurd traces this emblem across media, from a medallion of Antoninus Pius to a Wittenberg pest-thaler (1528) that combines Christ on the Cross with the brazen serpent. The effect is to show how a single image can carry opposite meanings—infliction and cure—depending on context.

The plates reinforce this: Plate I displays four objects side by side, forcing the reader to see continuity where conventional history sees rupture. Crawfurd’s method is associative rather than linear, and the reader must follow the thread of the arrow from pagan coin to Renaissance altarpiece.

Juxtaposition as Narrative Device

Crawfurd identifies a recurring structural pattern: writers set plague horrors against scenes of revelry or calm. He cites Thucydides placing Pericles’ funeral oration beside the Athenian plague, Boccaccio prefacing the Decameron’s frivolous tales with “the horrors of the plague-stricken city,” and Manzoni doing the same in I Promessi Sposi. This “jarring juxtaposition,” as Crawfurd calls it, is not merely dramatic but analytical: it forces the reader to measure human behavior under extreme conditions.

The same device appears in visual art. Crawfurd describes Cigoli’s painting of the Compagnia della Misericordia gathering dead and dying at the foot of Giotto’s Tower—a scene of grim labor set against Florence’s architectural beauty. He notes that the brotherhood’s red robes (now black) and masked faces persist into modern ambulances, a visual continuity that links past and present.

Movement Between City and Text

Crawfurd’s own prose moves restlessly between locations: Florence, Athens, Basle, Rome. He describes the Dance of Death at Basle, a fresco cycle that literalizes plague’s leveling power, then shifts to a fresco in S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, where plague saints intercede. This geographic sweep mirrors the movement of epidemics themselves—along trade routes, between ports.

Within individual descriptions, Crawfurd zooms from wide cityscapes to intimate details: the hand-litters and sedans of Cigoli’s picture, later “slung on wheels and sanctified to modern use with the addition of a motor ambulance.” Such details ground abstract mortality in material culture. The reader is asked to see plague not as a single event but as a pattern that reshapes urban space, social ritual, and even transportation.

The Limits of Inference: What the Excerpts Leave Unsaid

The excerpts cover only the preface, list of plates, and a few pages on Florence. Crawfurd’s argument about the Antonine plague’s effect on Roman literature is mentioned but not developed; his claim that Petrarch “perceived unerringly” the poverty of vernacular material is stated without the evidence that presumably follows. The reader cannot know how Crawfurd treats non-European plagues, or whether he addresses the 1918 influenza pandemic (the book was published in 1914).

What is clear: Crawfurd values pattern over narrative, emblem over event. He is more interested in how artists and writers frame pestilence than in the disease itself. The preface warns that “the desire to explain superseded the endeavour to understand,” suggesting a self-aware, interpretive stance. Readers should expect a work of synthesis, not a chronicle.

Crawfurd’s study rewards readers who attend to its plates and captions as closely as its prose. The 18 sections are best read with the list of plates at hand, since the argument often hinges on visual comparisons across centuries. Because the book ends at 1800, it offers a pre-modern lens on pandemic representation—useful for anyone tracing how earlier cultures made meaning out of mass death without germ theory or epidemiology.

I found myself thinking about Apollo’s distant arrows, and how Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art lingers on those moments of frivolity beside death. That strange contrast reminded me, oddly, of the quiet diligence in Works of John Bunyan — Volume 01 — A Reader’s Guide. Both feel like watching someone walk steadily through a dark valley, not glancing away, just noting the flowers underfoot.