Together these disparate factors supported an increase in the production of numerous small-scale works for private contemplation and prayer. These social and economic changes further accelerated trends already underway toward a more personalized approach to religious devotion. Higher wages for labour also contributed to a redistribution of wealth, status, and, consequently, the ability to commission art. While governments, formerly major patrons of large art and architectural projects, directed their resources to more pressing economic problems, some charitable and religious institutions acquired new wealth from the bequests of the dead, some of which they invested in artistic commissions. Art historians generally agree that the reduction in the population overall, as well as its social consequences, did impact the art produced after the Black Death, although not in the ways or for the reasons Meiss hypothesized. Historians confirm that European social structure was also substantially affected by the drastic changes in population. The greatest and most long-lasting damage appears to have been the loss of population, from which Europe did not recover until the 16th century. Comparable linkages of plague and artistic style have not been applied to northern European art.Īccording to historians, overall political and economic disturbances were eventually resolved. Paralleling the variations in the impact of the Black Death, Meiss’s theory of post-plague art has been invoked primarily in reference to Italian art. Modern scholars’ estimates of the death toll in Europe, however, identify variations from region to region from less than half of the population in England and Germany to a much higher percentage in Italy, Spain, and southern France, depending partly on the duration of the disease and population density in those regions. Some of the most famous of these accounts appear in literature by Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, and in chronicles by the Sienese Agnolo di Tura and Neri di Donato, and the French Jean Froissart. Numerous medieval writers all over Europe invoked apocalyptic imagery as they described the atmosphere of fear in a world where medical knowledge could neither explain nor counter disfiguring symptoms, high mortality rate, and rapid spread of the disease.

The Black Death is thought to have originated in China, spread along the Silk Route, and then throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, a region already weakened by severe famine ( 1315–17), ongoing wars, and substantial economic difficulties. Art-historical scholarship now tends to focus on the specific circumstances of a medieval work’s patronage, production, and purpose, and generally discard notions of a generalized cultural mindset caused by the plague. Re-evaluation of Meiss’s theory was also fuelled by discoveries of new documents that re-date to the pre–Black Death period a few of his central examples. Numerous subsequent studies confirm that such qualities as frontality and flatness were case-specific, used for example in non-narrative images intended to replicate earlier venerated icons, or in works made for burial contexts. Questions arose early on from specialists who disagreed with Meiss’s characterization of the post-plague artistic style as uniformly anti-naturalistic. Although Meiss’s theory is often still invoked, many art historians now question the viability of this argument. For many decades the theory proposed by Millard Meiss in Painting in Florence and Siena After the Black Death ( 1951)-that the Black Death triggered a cultural response of ‘guilt, penance, and religious rapture’ that expressed itself in art in the form of regressively abstract style and conservative iconography-dominated thinking about art produced in the second half of the 14th century, particularly in Italy. The influence that the Black Death may have had on art also has been debated, especially since the mid-20th century. The impact of the Black Death of 1348 (also called ‘the Great Pestilence’, ‘the Great Plague’, and ‘the Great Mortality’ in its own time) on medieval European culture continues to be investigated by social, economic, demographic, and medical historians.

Public Art, Land Art, and Environmental Art Installation Art, Mixed-Media, and Assemblage Collecting, Patronage, and Display of Art

Black death medieval manuscripts