In Italy, painting the plague in a lovely light

WORCESTER -- In the minds of Italians of the Baroque era, the bubonic plague that repeatedly decimated their population was both caused and cured by God. The panic-stricken faithful believed that a painting depicting saints interceding with the Almighty on their behalf might stop the outbreaks and spare their lives. And when the scourge abated, they erected churches in thanks.

This perceived connection between disease, art, architecture, and salvation is the subject of ''Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague 1500-1800," an ambitious and unusual show at the Worcester Art Museum. The exhibition is a collaboration with two other Worcester institutions, Clark University and the College of the Holy Cross, and it has as much to say about medicine, theology, and history as it does about art.

There aren't many instantly identifiable, iconic paintings here, and occasionally an oil sketch of a subject stands in for the finished painting. But it is nonetheless impressive that Worcester was able to obtain loans from distinguished collections including the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The majority of the painters in the exhibition are Italian. The occasional works by artists from other countries -- Anthony Van Dyck, Michael Sweerts -- were obviously selected for their Italianate reverence for beauty. Northern European treatments of plague subjects leaned more toward the gruesome and gory, but Italian artists turned even the grisliest subjects into beautiful paintings. And so the plague victims are often exquisitely dressed and set against lush backdrops. Giovanni Martinelli's ''Memento Mori (Death Comes to the Dinner Table)" is an example. Several wealthy young people clad in silks and satins, feasting on a lavish array of foods, are horrified by the entrance of a skeleton at the right. Their time has come.

Occasionally a work is so lovely, so brimming with health, that you wonder what its plague reference is. Francesco de Mura's ''Allegory of Maternal Love" is a case in point. A voluptuous young woman is caring for a trio of robust, healthy infants, all about the same age. (Maybe their own mothers have died?) One of the babes suckles at her breast. This allegory of charity is made even more appealing by de Mura's warm, blond palette. Nearby, a pelican feeds its young in a somewhat more sacrificial style, by pecking its own breast to produce blood the baby birds drink. In art, the pelican is a symbol of the crucifixion.

Giovanni Andrea Sirani's ''St. Michael the Archangel Overcoming Satan" presents a male equivalent of the de Mura. In this splendid painting composed on a sharp diagonal that adds to its drama, a handsome, muscular, armor-clad Michael lifts his sword to plunge it into Satan, whose head he is already stepping on. Here is the virile warrior side of Christianity.

Contemporary viewers might find a whiff of humor in some paintings here. In a couple of depictions of St. Sebastian with the customary arrows piercing his flesh, he is notably unperturbed as he converses with the Madonna and other influential figures on behalf of mortals suffering from the plague. In Gian Domenico Ferretti's ''The Brazen Serpent," the snake that God ordered Moses to wind around a pole so that all who gazed at the snake would be cured also prefigures the death of Christ on a wooden cross. But here, as the wall label points out, the image can also be read as a reference to Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing. The artist left interpretations open, probably with the any-port-in-a-storm idea.

The Met's Van Dyck painting of ''Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-Stricken of Palermo" is a gem combining the artist's bravura brushwork with a genuineness of feeling and a dazzling composition. The saint is borne on a cloud surrounded by hyperactive putti. She looks upward, pleading with God to have mercy on the city, which, seen far below, seems remote.

Saint Rosalie was a 12th-century holy woman who spent the latter part of her life in solitary prayer on a mountain near Palermo. Her persona was reinvented by Van Dyck, whose arrival in Palermo coincided with a series of outbreaks of plague. ''Van Dyck almost single-handedly created the iconography of Rosalie as a plague saint," the exhibition's fine catalog points out. It was the great 17th-century painter of the good and the glamorous who revived interest in an obscure saint from half a millennium before.

There is occasional grimness in the show. Consider Domenico Tintoretto's sketch for ''The Virgin Supplicating Christ for Plague-Stricken Venice," made in 1630-'31, at the height of the terrifying outbreak that city suffered in those years. The artist, son of the more famous Jacopo Tintoretto, painted spooky corpses, undertakers carting off the dead, and, even more chillingly, a boarded-up house where no one lived anymore. The catalog notes that ''plague imagery tended to shy away from the macabre," which makes this design all the more horrifying.

Among the last works in the show is Luca Carlevarijs's 1720 ''The Feast of Santa Maria della Salute." While it's not a great painting, it's an informative one: a look at the annual procession of Venetians to the Salute, the majestic church the city erected to thank God after the end of a particularly virulent episode of the plague nearly a century before.

Carlevarijs tempers the sense of relief, though, with a yellow-gray cloud sweeping through the sky, the ''miasma" associated with the polluted air thought to bear disease. The plague, the artist tells us, will come again.

Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs on Wednesdays.