Two Sixteenth-Century Venetian Plague Images

This article analyses the effects of the plague epidemic of 1575–77 on the visual culture of Early Modern Venice. To this end, two plague images, i.e. Palma Giovane’s Doge Alvise Mocenigo Intercedes with Christ the Redeemer for Plague Victims and Jacopo Bassano’s St Roch Visits the Plague Victims, are compared to explore how each artist responded to the crisis through visual symbolism, narrative structures, and pictorial details. This approach highlights how the visual strategies employed in the fight against the plague also reflected a deeper social divide – between the elite’s preference for an iconography associated with the theme of redemption and the popolani’s identification with the iconography of St Roch.