연대와 협력의 네트워크: 서유럽 페스트 시대 미술의 위로

Abstract

There was a long-standing tradition in Christianity to emphasize mutual support and solidarity among community members in a time of pestilence. It had great resonance in visual culture as well-particularly between the late fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the bubonic plague constantly broke out in Western Europe. The images thematizing neighborly love and solidarity urged their viewers to offer a helping hand to fellow human beings. Simultaneously, they also reminded the viewers of the presence of the supporting community, often impalpable in the middle of a crisis. In so doing, the images offered relief and hope to those who suffered from the plague. While the key message remained the same, the thematic focus and visual strategies of those images changed over the course of time. In late medieval art, for example, communal penance to appease God’s anger or the charitable act to be rewarded by future salvation played a central role. Meanwhile, the concept of solidarity rooted in emotional bond between ordinary individuals in everyday life came to the foreground in sixteenth-century Lutheran visual culture. In the Roman Catholic church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, heroic representations of the saints, who dedicated themselves to attending the sick, moved and motivated the viewers to help the plague-stricken.