Depictions of Disease in Art History
From the plague to polio, depictions of disease have a long and compelling history in visual art. By giving form to unseen maladies, artists memorialize suffering, warn against contagion, and unravel mysteries of the body and mind.
Among the most iconic artworks born from widespread disease is The Triumph of Death (c.1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This apocalyptic painting depicts the Black Death devastating a panicked populace, with indiscriminate skeletons dragging victims to their doom. The haunting image reflects the gravity of an outbreak that killed over 30% of Europe’s population in the 14th century.
Later artistic representations show how attitudes towards disease evolved with medical understanding. Many realist painting Cholera Patient in 19th century elicits sympathy for a sick people, humanizing the victims of a mysterious scourge. This contrasts earlier associations of cholera with immorality used to blame the poor.
During the Renaissance, increased medical interest coincided with more clinical illustrations of afflictions like syphilis. Albrecht Dürer’s 15th century engraving Syphilis meticulously documents the disease’s disfiguring symptoms on the human form. However, by the 19th century Romantic era, ailments like tuberculosis had become glamorized and aestheticized. The pale, luminous “consumptive look” was prized in portraits, seen as marker of artistic sensitivity.
The tuberculosis epidemics of the 1800s gave rise to the consumptive “artistic type” in Romanticized depictions. In portraiture, the tubercular look became fashionable, with figures like Dante Gabriel Rossetti fetishizing his lover Elizabeth Siddal’s pallor and languid air as markers of sensitivity. John Singer Sargent’s infamous portrait Madame X (1884) epitomizes this allure, depicting a socialite’s provocative, haughty expression against ghostly skin.
Later artistic movements continued mining disease as subject matter in increasingly raw form. Edvard Munch’s Expressionist masterpiece The Sick Child (1907) externalizes his grief over his sister’s death through anguished brushstrokes. Frida Kahlo unrelentingly depicted her physical and mental pain in surrealist self-portraits like The Broken Column (1944) featuring her shattered spine as an Ionic column.
Polio similarly gripped the public imagination in the early 20th century before mass immunization. Dorothea Lange’s photos of children immobilized in iron lungs or leg braces humanized the suffering polio inflicted and stirred support for the Sister Kenny Foundation. Lange highlighted her subjects’ resilience without sentimentalizing their hardship.
1935
More recent artists have harnessed the power of abstraction to articulate ineffable experiences of disease. The bold streaks of clashing color in Brian Finn’s Intruder series (1990s) evoke creeping numbness and chaos wrought by his multiple sclerosis, translating loss of bodily control into visual energy.
The Family” (1918) represents one of Egon Schiele’s final paintings before his untimely death from the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918. The work depicts a posthumous portrait of the artist with his wife Edith and their unborn child, who both tragically died from influenza. Edith was six months pregnant at the time of her death. Schiele poignantly created this painting just three days after losing his spouse and child, memorializing his shattered family. Through this intimate portrait imbued with sadness, Schiele gave form to the devastation of the Spanish flu’s deadly toll. The painting stands as a powerful artistic testament to the deep personal loss inflicted by one of the 20th century’s worst epidemics.
Today, artwork responding to AIDS and COVID-19 underscores the continued role of art in processing and de-stigmatizing disease. Conceptual artist Mary Jordan’s Biosafety Level 4 installation uses spacesuit sculpture to communicate scientific information about viruses. Such works render the invisible visible, using metaphor to make sense of medicine.
From Bruegel’s apocalyptic visions to Lange’s humane documentary photos, art has proven a vital tool for conveying public health struggles. Masterworks across eras remind us of art’s unique power to crystallize widespread loss and suffering into tangible form — making the unshareable shareable. Through artistic representations emerging even from times of tragedy, humans convey resilience and hope that life and beauty persist.
Here are some of the major diseases that have been documented or depicted extensively in artworks throughout history:
- Black Death/Bubonic Plague — Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting The Triumph of Death (c.1562) captures the horrors of the plague pandemic that devastated medieval Europe.
- Leprosy — Leprosy patients were common subjects in medieval and Renaissance art. Works like St. Giles and the Sufferings of the World (1460s) by Follower of Vincenzo Foppa depict the disfigurements of leprosy.
- Syphilis — Albrecht Dürer’s famous engraving Syphilis (1496) is an early medical illustration of this disease and its ravaging symptoms.
- Tuberculosis — Also called consumption, TB was glamorized in portrayals like Alexander Dumas fils’ 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias about a courtesan dying of TB.
- Cholera — Pavel Fedotov’s painting shows a death from cholera in the mid-19th century.
- Polio — Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos of children in iron lungs and leg braces document the polio epidemic of the 1930s-40s.
- Influenza — Works like Egon Schiele’s Death and the Maiden (1915) reference the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed over 50 million people.
- Frida Kahlo channeled a lifetime of physical and emotional pain into iconic self-portraits that offered an unflinching look at her suffering. Works like “The Broken Column” (1944) externalize her shattered spine and endless agony after a trolley accident through revealing her fractured body pierced by a Classical column. Her bold use of surrealist symbolism and Mexican folk motifs viscerally convey her ceaseless anguish.
- Cancer — Jo Spence’s photography series Cancer Shock (1982) intimately documents the artist’s own battle with breast cancer.
- AIDS — Artists like David Wojnarowicz created highly influential works addressing the AIDS crisis beginning in the 1980s.
- COVID-19 — Numerous contemporary artists have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, like Mary Jordan’s sculptural installations about viruses.
Overall, depictions of infectious disease in art tend to reflect societal attitudes and understanding during different historical periods. It evolved from moralizing to glamorizing, then more clinical portrayals arose alongside science and medicine.
