Reconstructing Contagion, Chronic Infirmity, and Healing in Early Modern Italy: Art and Architecture of Mal Francese in the Ambit of the Ospedali degli Incurabili Network

Abstract

This dissertation investigates art and architecture surrounding the early modern outbreak of what is commonly understood to be syphilis, focusing predominantly on the Italian peninsula and Sicily. Adopting the early modern term mal francese, I consider the processes through which contemporary notions of health and healing reconciled the identification and management of a novel contagion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More specifically, prioritizing historical perspectives of disease and intersecting socioeconomic factors, the cross-disciplinary approach of my dissertation demonstrates the cultural impact of the mal francese outbreak through art and architecture that framed the emerging contagion as a chronic infirmity.Primary accounts or literature, together with art, architecture, and urban space yield crucial insights for understanding how past cultures reconciled health crises. Despite its conspicuous symptoms and prevalence during the early modern period, mal francese has received markedly less attention in art historical scholarship compared to plague or leprosy. My dissertation takes advantage of this lacuna in the scholarship in order to examine how the epidemic outbreak was encountered and interpreted. The framework of my dissertation responds to intellectual traditions in the history of science and medicine, relying on early modern concepts of infirmity to analyze the art and architecture of mal francese in the ambit of the Ospedale degli Incurabili network. My Introduction (Chapter 1) examines the emergence of mal francese from the perspective of early modern medical theory. In addition to a review of scholarship, I establish context for studying representations of infirmity and healing, and charitable healthcare reform during the period. Chapter 2 investigates representations of mal francese across media during the long sixteenth century. My discussion considers diverse examples based on descriptive primary accounts of evolving symptoms to discern how the visual arts registered combined social and medical perceptions of the infirmity. I assert that these collective works disclosed recognition about the nature of mal francese as a chronic infirmity, which disproportionately impacted vulnerable members of society despite the realities of its indiscriminate transmission. In Chapter 3, I elucidate the implementation of medical care for mal francese though visual and material culture. Although deemed incurable, contemporary medical practice held that symptoms of mal francese could at least be managed in individuals. In this chapter, I examine art that supported adaptions in traditional therapeutic interventions and the introduction of novel remedies for the contagion. Chapter 4 draws a connecting thread through the dissertation regarding the broader impact of the outbreak on public health measures. I consider parallel developments in healing environments for mal francese relative to ongoing reforms for institutional models of charitable assistance. In particular, I discuss the form and function of the Ospedali degli Incurabili branches in Venice (1522), Naples (1519), and Palermo (1533). The demographic features and dynamics of those centers, as port cities, presented unique challenges for public health and welfare following the mal francese outbreak. Despite compelling links, and contrasts, my study is the first to examine the healing environments of these Incurabili hospital branches together. Founded during the sixteenth century, I examine how the hospitals ensured long term shelter and specialized care for the sick poor afflicted with mal francese. The dissertation then concludes with a brief Coda to synthesize key observations about the impact of mal francese in early modern art and architecture. This dissertation contributes to the field in three main ways. First, I demonstrate that representations of mal francese were highly context-dependent due to formal and iconographic affinities to other infirmities, and with respect to contexts of production and reception. The emphasis on depicted signs or symptoms shifted to convey visual information while providing reassurance, creating distance, or identifying those at the center of a health and welfare crisis as symbols of charitable assistance and subjects of medical care. Second, healing imagery associated with the infirmity didn’t depict mal francese patients recovering from illness, but rather focused on the means for managing its symptoms. In particular, the introduction of guaiacum as a foreign specific used to treat mal francese prompted inventive representational strategies to frame the remedy as a medical innovation and miraculous cure. Finally, access to that therapeutic regimen varied with respect to the medical marketplace, due to issues of cost and functional space. However, new charitable institutions began to facilitate treatment for the growing numbers of sick poor. The Ospedali degli Incurabili were the greatest consumers of guaiacum in the Italian peninsula and Sicily. Each of the branches I discuss developed to support greater accommodations for a growing patient population, facilities that offered specialized treatment for mal francese, and urban renovations guided by contemporary public health goals. This reflected a continuation of earlier models in healthcare reform towards greater medicalization and capacity, but the trend appeared to hasten in these centers following the foundation of the Ospedali degli Incurabili.