Currently not on view
The Pestilence of 1656
Carlo Coppola, Italian, active ca. 1635–1672
y1963-36
Coppola’s The Pestilence of 1656 is an exceptionally grim portrayal of Naples’s most devastating bout with the black death. The narrative unfolds in a metaphorical battlefield covered with bodies and devoid of any suggestion of divine intercession in aid of the sick. Poignant details include an infant nursing from his dead mother’s breast and a figure whose face is covered with a cloth—speaking to the odor of the decaying bodies as well as the fear of contracting the plague through putrid air, a false but widespread contemporary belief.
More About This Object
Information
Title
The Pestilence of 1656
Maker
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
76 × 99 cm (29 15/16 × 39 in.)
frame: 96.8 × 119.7 × 5.4 cm (38 1/8 × 47 1/8 × 2 1/8 in.)
Credit Line
Museum purchase, Caroline G. Mather Fund
Object Number
y1963-36
Place Made
Europe, Naples
Signatures
Interlocking Cs-representing the artist's initials on right rear haunch of bullock.
Culture
Period
Type
Mirell Gallery, Miami (in 1963; sold to Princeton University Art Museum).
- "Summary of Acquisitions, 1963," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, vol. 23, no. 1 (1964): p. 29-31., p. 31
- B. B. Fredericksen and F. Zeri, Census of pre-nineteenth-century Italian paintings in North American collections, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972)., p. 99
- Gauvin A Bailey; Sheila Barker, Hope and Healing, Paintings in Italy in a Time of Plague 1500-1800, (Worcester, MA: Worchester Art Museum, 2005)., p. 249, no. 36; p. 248 (illus.)
