Venetian born Baldassare Longhena had every reason to be feeling relaxed and optimistic in 1629. He was young, just 31 years old. Healthy, in an age where rumours and news of plague were increasing, especially in a much visited, bustling port city like Venice. And he was talented, already recognised for his architectural brilliance which had won him several important commissions.
There were, however, some clouds on the Venetian horizon, among them slowly emerging reports of plague in England where another brilliant young man — William Shakespeare — somehow had eluded the pestilence which raged through London in July 1606. Modern scholars, tracking Shakespeare’s probable movements at that time, have theorised he must have spent much time indoors writing — a kind of seventeenth century social distancing and self-isolation. But Shakespeare, so goes a counter argument, can’t have been thoroughly isolated and distanced because it was an unavoidably busy time for a man of the theatre: Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Shakespeare’s own King Lear and Macbeth were all playing until the plague forced The King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, to cease performing and the Globe theatre was closed.
The precaution was understandable. Only two years earlier a bubonic outbreak had killed 30,000 in London alone. In measures now sadly familiar in 2020, theatres were closed once the number of weekly deaths exceeded 30, later 40, but because actors and the theatre world itself were so economically vulnerable, actors, understandably intent on earning a living, soon legally or otherwise cut themselves some slack by taking liberties with the rules governing performances and quarantine — again, a phenomenon that is now, against all previous odds, familiar to people of 2020.
Statistics are scarce, but a remark in a 1608 play called Ram Alley by a knockabout writer named Lording Barry (when he wasn’t writing drama he was a pirate on the high seas) seems to suggest that things were tough for actors when theatres were closed if the death rate exceeded 40 per week: one of Lording’s characters in Ram Alley says, ‘I dwindle as a new player does at a plague bill certified 40’. The phenomenon of actors, drama and the arts generally ‘dwindling’ in face of the virus is now, like so much else in the world of COVID-19, part of our everyday life.
The plague that Shakespeare one way or another avoided and through which, it seems, he continued to write, made its way catastrophically to Venice. In 1630, 46,000 Venetians in a population of 140,000 died as bubonic plague swept through northern Italy. Similar thousands died in Milan, Verona, Bologna and Florence.
In Venice, a kind of quarantine attempt was made on a small island called Lazzaretto Vecchio in the Venetian Lagoon not all that far from Piazza San Marco. Modern building excavations on the island were suspended when workers uncovered ancient mass graves of bubonic plague victims revealing more than 1,500 corpses with an estimated thousands of skeletons remaining ‘buried beneath every meadow in Lazzaretto Vecchio.’
'Our "plague" defies quick or facile remedy. Each day reports from one afflicted centre or another are more devastating and unstoppably sweep up more lives and innocents. Which makes it the more mysterious to wonder why did so many apparently intelligent and powerful people all over the world take so much convincing?'
Effectively a quarantine, Lazzaretto Vecchio was possibly the world’s first lazaret — a colony devoted to quarantine and the prevention of disease transmission. And to some extent it worked: the dead were collected and thrown ‘in the graves all day without a break. Often the dying ones and the ones too sick to move or talk were taken for dead and thrown on the piled corpses.’ In this way, Venetians were able to curb the damage just a little as the plague struck Europe again and again.
Like Shakespeare, Baldasarre Longhena worked diligently through the dangers of the pestilence and survived. When the ferocity of the plague seemed to be abating — a favour attributed to the benign intervention of the Blessed Virgin Mary — Venetians offered thanks for their miraculous salvation from the bubonic terrors that had devastated so many families. They commissioned a splendid cathedral — Santa Maria della Saluté, Our Lady of Health — overlooking the entrance to the Grand Canal and dominating one of Venice’s most pleasant peaceful precincts, Dorsoduro. The Saluté was Longhena’s design and personal achievement.
The plague of course raged on elsewhere in Italy. Even in 2020, despite infinitely more sophisticated and effective medical resources, our ‘plague’ defies quick or facile remedy. Each day reports from one afflicted centre or another are more devastating and unstoppably sweep up more lives and innocents. Which makes it the more mysterious to wonder why did so many apparently intelligent and powerful people all over the world take so much convincing?
In Australia you would think they would know better, people like the Prime Minister, who nominated with some determination and, at the time, apparent certainty, the end of COVID-19 by Christmas. The Treasurer with his confected passion attacking Premier Dan Andrews at the most critical point of Victoria’s now successful resistance to the second wave, and all those ‘throw open the borders’ warriors in the height of the lockdowns. Apparently they don’t understand that COVID is a killer, and that, like all of history’s thorough-going plagues, it can make you agonisingly sick before it kills you?
‘It looked like hell,’ wrote the 16th-century Venetian chronicler Rocco Benedetti, describing the sick, the dying, the bereaved. It still does and mere bravado won’t stop it.
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.
Image credit: Illustration by Chris Johnston