Steinschnittrelief: Pestszene

Stadtmuseum Ingolstadt

Description

For Nuremberg citizens, plague was part of their everyday life during the early modern era. The "great mortality" afflicted the rich trading town at intervals of about twelve years. The Nuremberg City Council made every effort to control the problematic epidemic through the adoption of measures such as medical policing: it issued plague regulations, erected plague hospitals and employed plague doctors. The people also set their hopes in the help of faith. The figure of Saint Rochus in a side altar of Saint Lawrence comforted and gave hope, since the saint had himself survived the plague. A large, darkly set bubo on the thigh of the statue was clearly visible.

The creator of this small scene carved in stone from 1596, however, did not capture so much the image of the disease but rather its social impact. He depicted a man, a woman and a child – probably a small family – who had already been killed by the plague. In the woman's arm sits another toddler whose face is turned away from his mother towards the viewer. The child is still alive. An onlooker, resting against the wall above the scene, holds his nose shut. This may be read as an indication of the then widespread belief in a "plague breeze" transmitting the disease or simply as an illustration of the fact that there was a "stink like the plague".

Author

Marion Maria Ruisinger