The inevitability of the “Black Death”: Böcklin’s “The plague” of 1898

By art historian Eva-Bettina Krems

The pitch-black wings are spread wide, cutting horizontally through the picture and destroying the idyll of a city bathed in sunlight. The monstrous dragon-like creature moves through the narrow alleyway directly towards the viewer, its long neck turned down to the left. From its wide open throat emanates a blueish-white breath, which has accumulated behind the creature to form a threatening cloud that envelopes the actual main figure in the painting like an aureole. On the back of the creature rides Death, a corpse brandishing a scythe and covered sparsely with grey-green flesh and a translucent short black robe. With its deep dark eye sockets and bared teeth, Death’s head is turned in the direction of flight, as if it were fixing its next victims in the distance. The consequences of the deadly rage are dramatically staged in the alley, which narrows sharply towards the back: people, mostly dressed in black or red, try to flee into the houses, writhe in agony, are overtaken by the shadow of death, or prostrate themselves on the top step of the stairs in the background before the glistening breath of plague. The drama of human suffering and dying culminates in the immediate foreground, where a dead female body lies stretched out on the irregular stone slabs, tilting far forward in perspective; her white robe, a well-known symbol of purity and innocence, and her white skin have not yet been caught by the shadow of Death, but its inexorable forward movement from the depths of the painting is already anticipated by the red-robed figure with long black hair pouring over the young dead woman. On the left above this scene is a niche with a wayside shrine in the wall of a house. A Madonna and Child can be seen in silhouette. Fresh flowers bear witness to the hope of protection and salvation, suddenly destroyed by triumphant Death. A white-haired and bearded old man, struck by Death’s breath, sinks to the wall of the house, his outline, incarnate parts, and clothing merging in colour with the wall.

With its strong contrasts of light and colour and its daring perspective, this powerful painting was created in 1898 by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), who entitled it “The plague”. Böcklin himself was already 71 years old and suffering from serious illnesses. His last work of art, “The plague” remained unfinished. However, the occasion was not, as one might assume, a current outbreak of the plague. At the end of the 19th century, the plague had not been seen in Europe for almost 200 years, in contrast to the diseases cholera and typhoid fever, which had been raging for decades and had visited great suffering on Böcklin’s family: his first son died of cholera in 1854, and another of typhoid fever in 1858. A good 20 years earlier, in 1876, Böcklin had also dealt artistically with cholera, capturing Death in drawings in the same way as in “The plague” – sitting astride a dragon-like beast and mowing people down with a scythe. Böcklin took up this motif again in 1898 and moved the events to an almost indeterminable place, which is perhaps most reminiscent of Italian alleys (Böcklin had lived in a small Tuscan village for years). The artist also provides no concrete temporal reference: the clothing remains mostly unspecific, just as there are no street lighting or other elements of a temporally definable infrastructure. This spatial and temporal unclarity lends the events depicted a timeless character. Böcklin thus did not create a historical painting of the plague, unlike Jules Elie Delaunay, who in his very successful 1869 work “The Plague in Rome” refers in the juxtaposition of paganism and Christianity to the Legenda Aurea of James de Voragine and the story of Saint Sebastian (see Matthias Sandberg’s contribution in this dossier). Böcklin certainly drew on a long iconography, one that had been used again and again in the 19th century and that the educated public will have known well in one variant or another: Holbein’s “Dance of Death”, Dürer’s “Apocalyptic Horseman”, or Death riding on a horse, which Böcklin himself had already brought to mind in his painting “War” from 1896. This motif of Death riding a horse, which was always closely associated with the plague, became famous in the 19th century in Alfred Rethel’s cycle “A Dance of Death of the Year 1848”. Published in a large number of illustrated books, Rethel’s cycle referred to the current political events of the 1848 revolution.

Böcklin’s “The plague” of 1898 is neither a history nor a painting influenced by current political or pandemic events. Referring to a disease that, although at the time no longer an acute danger was still present in the collective memory as a highly destructive disease, Böcklin stages the “Black Death” as a symbol of the fundamental threat to human existence. Finally, in his paintings in portrait format, Böcklin also draws on the numerous plague votive paintings of earlier centuries, which, as an Italian by choice, he probably knew, and which also used the motif of the Grim Reaper. But with one important difference: the personification of Death usually appears in the background, while the actual centre of the painting is occupied by the figures of saints on clouds or the Mother of God in an aureole, successfully fighting the epidemic, to express the hope of protection and redemption. Böcklin reverses this pictorially pragmatic expectation in a way that is almost cruel. The focus is no longer on the saint successfully battling against disaster, but on disaster itself, backed by an aureole of plague and dust, and thus by a pictorial formula that no longer stands for salvation: Black Death rushing forward astride the dragon-like creature in the middle of the picture symbolizes in an existential way the inferiority of humans in the face of the invisible opponent; even the wayside shrine on the wall, and thus religion, is powerless. Böcklin’s painting is a peculiarly pessimistic work that seems to stage the inevitability and cruelty of fate in human existence.