Awards
2005 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
Sheila Barker, “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine” (December 2004)
Sheila Barker
Published in the December 2004 issue of The Art Bulletin, “Poussin, Plague, and Early Modern Medicine,” Sheila Barker’s essay on Nicolas Poussin’s important historical painting The Plague of Ashdod (1630–31), exemplifies the increasingly multidisciplinary methodology of our field. Drawing on an impressive variety of visual and written scientific sources, many rarely considered by art historians, the author shows how deeply Poussin’s depiction of the biblical plague was informed by contemporary understandings of epidemics, specifically, the plague of 1630 that ravaged Italy. She suggests that in its composition, iconography, and expressive powers this picture is tied to beliefs that contemplating horrific images of physical symptoms and emotional suffering could immunize viewers against the disease. Barker brings together many strands of seventeenth-century ideas and behaviors, as well as classical and Renaissance philosophy and literature, including Aristotle’s principle of tragic catharsis, and weaves them into her analysis of The Plague of Ashdod with rigor and grace. Along with her erudite handling of medical and scientific discourse, her vivid characterization of the work of art enables the reader to respond to Poussin’s mingling of horror and beauty in his compelling vision of the plague.
The challenge of examining such a canonical artist as Poussin from a fresh and even radical viewpoint is daunting. This article should provoke questions about Poussin and even about basic concepts of Baroque art; it should change the way we look at this period. Barker’s work offers insights into the nature of human responses to pictures well beyond the particular situation of Poussin’s own period, and posits ideas about the effects of art on bodies and minds that will be worth pursuing in other art-historical contexts. The combination of imagination and critical analysis in this essay parallels the author’s thesis that for Poussin the visual spectacle exerted a mystical power beyond rational explanation. Both subject and methodology of this article broaden our perspective on the potential of representational art.
Committee: Alison Hilton, Georgetown University, chair; Jacqueline E. Jung, University of California, Berkeley; Jonathan Reynolds, University of Southern California.
