17th century AD

With a ferocity that the late twentieth hundred now understands from the AIDS epidemic, bubonic plague assaulted Europe intermittently from the mid-fourteenth end the eighteenth century, disrupting daily life, devastating populations, and warning all of divine retribution.(1) During the outbreak that hit Northern Italy in 1630 Guido Reni painted the Pallione del Voto, or "Votive Processional Banner" (Fig.1), the greatest in quantity impressive visual testimony of the events of the epidemic in the artist's native Bologna.(2) Reni's is single of a large group of images in Western art that attests to the violent impact of the plague upon premodern society. These images can be divided into sum of two units basic types: narrative pictures that record a specific visitation of the disease, and pictures distinguished by the agency of their religious function and devotional content

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Perhaps the earliest and greatest in quantity famous example of the first category of plague images is the fresco of the Triumph of Death in the Camposanto of Pisa evoking the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century(3) Painters, however, ofttimes mitigated contemporary reality by depicting contagions either lengthy past, as in Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael's The Plague of Phrygia (ca. 1512-13) and Nicolas Poussin's Plague at Ashdod (1630) or far away as in Antoine-Jean Gros's Pesthouse at Jaffa (1804)(4)

Reni's Pallione does not belong to the category of history painting, level though it refers directly to a specific and contemporary incident It can be grouped instead with the next to the first type of imagery, expressing the prayers, desperate or thankful, of a community, either beset by means of or liberated from the plague. In ignorance of its medical cause and antidote society attributed the plague's origins to God's wrath at its sins.(5) To sure the only sure remedy of divine mildness communal representatives organized collective rituals and enacted promise s promulgated publicly in votive paintings and votive processional banners. by dint of 1630, the date of Reni's banner, like works of art had a standard composition, derived from the traditional formula of the Madonna and Child with saints: individual or more saints, recognized as protectors against the plague, or as the particular town's be in possession of patron saints, implore the Madonna and Child to intercede with the trinity on its behalf Striking for their iconic force are the processional banners made for Umbrian towns from the mid-fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries. Benedetto Bonfigli's banner of 1453-54 the earliest extant example, exhibits the walled Perugia besieged through Death, while the Virgin, rising majestically above the city and flanked by means of its patron saints, shelters its inhabitants beneath her mantle from the arrows of God's ire.(6) The same basic ultimate parts albeit with variations, characterize Italian processional standards and votive altar paintings from one side the eighteenth century, and they were interpreted anew by the agency of Reni and by other distinguished painters, of that kind as Mattia Preti, Luca Giordano, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and finally Jacques-Louis David.

Now hanging framed in a museum, Reni's processional banner is usually discussed in the connection of altarpieces, its original function noted on the other hand passed over.(7) Focusing on it instead as a processional standard tenders the opportunity to expand our understanding of an artistic category dating back to late medieval times. Painted banners of the seventeenth hundred in particular, have received little attention for several reasons. The wear and tear caused through their use, and often aggravated by means of the fragility of their supports, bring their survival rate; Pietro da Cortona's processional banner commissioned through the city of Rome as a votive offering following the 1630 plague is known solitary through a contemporary description.(8) Extant banners, upon the other hand, have elicited solitary local interest because of their provincial makers and destination, of that kind as Ludovico Lana's votive standard for Modena. however the processional banner is a telling indicator of a community's self-identity. In fulfilling his civic charge, the painter addressed an audience of compatriots who shared public fears during the crisis that imperiled their collective existence and who, at its extreme point would unite in celebration. Reexamination of the genesis, theme, and social connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of the Pallione del Voto not solitary clarifies its iconography but also elucidates the exchange between a civic patron's directives and a painter's artistic choices.

In the upper part of Reni's hierarchic composition, the Madonna with the Christ Child upon her lap sits enthroned upon a bank of clouds gently curving upward and defining the scene's lower boundary. Her feet quiet upon a rainbow, whose arc was designed by dint of Reni to mirror the arching of fogs above and visually to bridge the composition's upper and lower sections. The Madonna's downcast gaze provides a further link with the figures below, while Christ's gaze and blessing involve the viewers. sum of two units cherubs prepare to crown the Madonna with a wreath of r and white rose and three others rise from the clouds to shower down rose and rosary beads. In the banner's lower half, Reni depicted Bologna's patron saints: kneeling from left to right, Petronius, Francis of Assisi, Francis Xavier, and Dominic; and standing, again from left to right, Ignatius of Loyola, Florian, and Proculus. Reni purposefully differentiated these intercessors from the heavenly beings above by means of darkening the golden backdrop behind the radiant Madonna and Child to gray and dressing the saints in darker tinges But just behind Francis, kneeling at center a of gold beam from heaven lightens the gray to silver and illumines the faces of all the saints. This divine light and the rainbow touching on Ignatius and Proculus sanctify their prayer.