Artwork of the Week: February 24
Pedestrians, street sellers, and animals crowd a city square in Vienna, Austria. To the right, an extravagant monument commemorating a plague that decimated Vienna in 1679 appears almost as an afterthought. Obscured by dense urban conditions that helped spread disease in the first place, plague columns like this spread throughout Europe in the wake of devastating outbreaks. Though difficult to see here, Vienna’s plague column (die Pestsäule) features the Holy Trinity, Emperor Leopold I, and gruesome imagery of bodies in agony.
This print would have resonated with American viewers in 1893. By then, a respiratory virus had caused a global pandemic that eventually killed around a million people across the U.S., Europe, Central Asia, and Russia between 1889 and 1894. In 2020, this Plague Column became a renewed site of supplication and mourning in Vienna during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For further reading, see Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2000); Patrick Berche, “The Enigma of the 1889 Russian Flu Pandemic: A Coronavirus?,” La Presse Médicale 51, no. 3 (September 2022): 104111; and Allison C. Meier, “How to Memorialize a Plague,” JSTOR Daily, May 1, 2020, https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-memorialize-a-plague/.
This work is currently on view in Crossing the Divide: American Art from the Permanent Collection.
