17th century AD

With a ferocity that the late twentieth century now understands from the AIDS epidemic, bubonic plague assaulted Europe intermittently from the mid-fourteenth through 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 most impressive visual testimony of the effects of the epidemic in the artist's native Bologna.(2) Reni's is one of a large group of images in Western art that attests to the violent impact of the plague on premodern society. These images can be divided into two basic types: narrative pictures that record a specific visitation of the disease, and pictures distinguished by their religious function and devotional content.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Perhaps the earliest and most 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, often mitigated contemporary reality by depicting contagions either long 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, even though it refers directly to a specific and contemporary event. It can be grouped instead with the second type of imagery, expressing the prayers, desperate or thankful, of a community, either beset by or liberated from the plague. In ignorance of its medical cause and cure, society attributed the plague's origins to God's wrath at its sins.(5) To secure the only sure remedy of divine clemency, communal representatives organized collective rituals and enacted vows, promulgated publicly in votive paintings and votive processional banners. By 1630, the date of Reni's banner, such works of art had a standard composition, derived from the traditional formula of the Madonna and Child with saints: one or more saints, recognized as protectors against the plague, or as the particular town's own patron saints, implore the Madonna and Child to intercede with God 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, shows the walled Perugia besieged by Death, while the Virgin, rising majestically above the city and flanked by its patron saints, shelters its inhabitants under her mantle from the arrows of God's ire.(6) The same basic elements, albeit with variations, characterize Italian processional standards and votive altar paintings through the eighteenth century, and they were interpreted anew by Reni and by other distinguished painters, such 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 context of altarpieces, its original function noted but passed over.(7) Focusing on it instead as a processional standard offers the opportunity to expand our understanding of an artistic category dating back to late medieval times. Painted banners of the seventeenth century, in particular, have received little attention for several reasons. The wear and tear caused by their use, and often aggravated by the fragility of their supports, reduce their survival rate; Pietro da Cortona's processional banner commissioned by the city of Rome as a votive offering following the 1630 plague is known only through a contemporary description.(8) Extant banners, on the other hand, have elicited only local interest because of their provincial makers and destination, such as Ludovico Lana's votive standard for Modena. Yet 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 common fears during the crisis that imperiled their collective existence and who, at its end, would unite in celebration. Reexamination of the genesis, theme, and social context of the Pallione del Voto not only 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 on her lap sits enthroned on a bank of clouds gently curving upward and defining the scene's lower boundary. Her feet rest upon a rainbow, whose arc was designed by Reni to mirror the arching of clouds 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. Two cherubs prepare to crown the Madonna with a wreath of red and white roses, and three others emerge from the clouds to shower down roses 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 darkening the golden backdrop behind the radiant Madonna and Child to gray and dressing the saints in darker hues. But just behind Francis, kneeling at center, a golden beam from heaven lightens the gray to silver and illumines the faces of all the saints. This divine light and the rainbow touching upon Ignatius and Proculus sanctify their prayer.