Sermons on St. Sebastian after the Black Death (1348–ca. 1500) (original) (raw)

This essay investigates the ways in which concepts of the sacred were shaped and mobilised in a series of fresco cycles to promote the cult of a new plague saint in Renaissance Italy. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, veneration of the French pilgrim Roch as a plague protector was a late-fifteenth century novelty, documented first in central and northern Italy in the 1460s and 70s, then spreading with astonishing rapidity throughout Europe in the succeeding decades. According to his earliest biography, composed and published in 1479, Roch healed plague victims, was himself stricken with the disease, endured it patiently and was cured by divine fiat. Resuming his travels, he was imprisoned as a spy, was a model prisoner, and on his deathbed was rewarded with the power to preserve against the plague. My focus is a series of little-studied early narrative cycles of Roch’s life and miracles, dating from the 1480s to the 1540s and found in an arc across Northern Italy, from Piedmont and Lombardy to the Trentino and Veneto. Most are partly or wholly unpublished, due to their location in remote rural and mountainous regions and to the fact that they are painted by unknown or ‘minor’ masters who have not been the subject of detailed scholarly attention. The present study is thus the first to analyse the Italian cycles as a coherent corpus, which can shed light on the diffusion and reception of the new saint’s cult.