PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 Between Horror and Sadness: The Plague Paintings of Poussin, Sweerts, and Mignard M ATTHEW S ENIOR O BERLIN C OLLEGE Fig. 1. Nicolas Poussin, Nicolas Poussin worked to complete The Plague of Ashdod (1630) in Rome, even as bubonic plague threatened the eternal city and reduced its inhabitants to frightened prisoners of quarantine. The Great Plague of Milan (1629-31), although largely sparing Rome, killed over 280,00 people in Milan, Verona, Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 8 Parma, Venice, Bologna, and Florence, a death toll of near 35% of the population of these cities. 1 Poussin’s response to the plague outbreaks was a carefully staged, highly erudite recreation of a scene from the Old Testament, a plague inflicted on the Philistines for the theft of the Ark of the Covenant. Although created in Rome and probably intended for purchase by a member of Rome’s Congregazione della Sanità, whose members were trying to combat the spread of the disease, the 58 x 78-inch oil painting was eventually purchased by Richelieu and now hangs in the Louvre. 2 In the upper left quadrant of the canvas, a statue of Dagon, a deity worshipped by the Philistines, lies headless and shattered on the ground, while in the foreground, the pale body of a recently deceased young woman lies on the ground between her two infant children, one of them already dead and the other pushed away from the mother’s breast by a man holding his nose to ward off contagion and the stench of the plague. There is a degree of sensuality, if not erotic voyeurism, in the body of the young woman. Her idealized body, although pale in death, shares traits with the goddesses, nymphs, and Madeleines found in Poussin’s paintings. Michael Sweert’s Plague in an Ancient City (1652) was similarly created against the backdrop of a plague that raged through parts of Italy. The Plague of Naples (1656-1658) killed as many as 1.25 million people, including 23,000 deaths in Rome, nearly 9% of the population. Like Poussin’s painting, Sweert’s work represents a plague from the distant past—an outbreak that struck Rome between 361-63 CE, during the reign of Julian the Apostate. 3 Similar to the Ashdod painting, the foci of trauma and emotion in the painting are the bodies of two young women, lying with their breasts exposed. A particularly unsettling detail in Sweert’s painting is the gaze of one of the dead women, whose sightless eyes stare out from the painting. None of the clinical markers of the plague—the swollen buboes or the telltale dark blotches—appear on the bodies of the women in Poussin’s and Sweert’s paintings. Clearly, there is a desire to respect classical decorum, to sanitize and idealize the bodies of the dead women. There could also be medical reasons for the lack of plague symptoms in the women. There are 1 Hays, J. N., Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impacts on Human History (London: Bloomsbury, 2005) 103. 2 See Hipp, Elisabeth, “Poussin’s The Plague of Ashdod: A Work of Art in Multiple Contexts,” in Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, eds. (Kirksville MO: Truman State University Press, 2007) 204-213. 3 See Mormando, Frank, “Pestilence, Apostasy, and Heresy in Seventeenth-Century Rome: Deciphering Michael Sweert’s Plague in an Ancient City,” in Piety and Plague, 237-311. Between Horror and Sadness PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 9 three forms of the plague: the bubonic form, spread by fleas jumping from rats and marked by swellings of the lymph glands, and two more virulent forms of the plague: the pneumonic and septicemic forms spread by inhalation of the plague bacillus or direct contact with the blood through breaks in the skin. The last two forms of the plague were known to kill unsuspecting victims very quickly, with little or no warning or symptoms. A third work, Pierre Mignard’s Plague of Aegina (1657), is also a projection into the past of a contemporary plague. All three paintings are layered, erudite compositions combining biblical, Greco-Roman, and contemporary artistic references. They are restrained and ordered works that negotiate between the abject horror and despair unleashed by outbreaks of bubonic plague in a city and the filtering of such horrors through aesthetic conventions and references. Fig. 2. Line engraving by J. Fittler after Plague in an Ancient City, ca. 1652-54, Michael Sweerts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Wikimedia Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 10 Fig. 3. Pierre Mignard, Plague in Aegina, 1657, engraving by Gérard Audran, Classic Image / Alamy The Horror of the Plague Eye-witness accounts from cities struck by the deadly disease during the Black Death, or second plague pandemic (1331-1855), present terrifying details of mass death in squalid conditions, the breakdown of social order, and the loss of compassion and human dignity in terms much more shocking than those represented in the works of Poussin, Sweerts, and Mignard. The disease is described in gruesome detail by Boccaccio: “In men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits … after a while, the fashion of the contagion began to change into black or livid blotches, which showed themselves first on the arms and about the thighs and spread to every other part of the person.” 4 Daniel Defoe, in his account of the “visitation” that struck London in 1665, describes the same “tokens” of the plague on the body and the unbearable pain caused by buboes. “The pain of the swelling was in particular 4 Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Decameron, trans. Wayne Rebhorn (London: Norton Critical Editions, 2016) 6. Between Horror and Sadness PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 11 very violent, and to some intolerable; the physicians and surgeons may be said to have tortured many poor creatures even to death. The swellings in some grew hard, and they applied violent drawing-plasters or poultices to break them, and if these did not do, they cut and scarified them in a terrible manner.” 5 Solidarity and the social rituals accompanying death disappeared quickly. “Many breathed their last in the open street, whilst many others who died in their houses made it known to the neighbors that they were dead rather by the stench of their rotting bodies.” 6 In this respect, the plague outbreaks depicted by Poussin, Sweerts, and Mignard are very public events, with masses of people dying in the streets. During our own pandemic, most deaths occurred in hospital settings and homes, and our visualizations of the trauma and death caused by COVID largely happened in front of television and computer screens. In emergency rooms and nursing homes, relatives often said their last goodbyes to loved ones via iPads. 7 Fig. 4. A nurse assists a Covid-19 patient during a Zoom video call at Stamford Hospital ICU in Stamford, Connecticut, on April 24. John Moore/ Getty Images The intimate bonds of the family were destroyed by the plague: “[B]rother forsook brother, uncle nephew, and sister brother, and oftentimes wife 5 Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year (London: Norton Critical Editions, 1992) 69. 6 Boccaccio, 10 7 “They couldn’t say goodbye in person, so ICU patients are using tablets instead,” CNN online, December 6, 2020, https: / / www.cnn.com/ 2020/ 12/ 06/ health/ icutablet-pandemic-trnd Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 12 husband; nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well-nigh incredible) fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children.” 8 In several passages, Defoe, like Poussin, Sweerts, and Mignard, focuses on the particular pathos surrounding the deaths of mothers and children. Citing the Bible— “Woe be to those who are with child, and to those which give suck in that day”—Defoe reports cases of infants who died of starvation for lack of milk because their mothers perished from the plague. The author of Robinson Crusoe highlights particular incidents that compounded such grief and suffering: a mother or nurse infected with the plague passes on the disease to a child through her milk; a mother’s child dies of starvation and then she herself dies; a mother receives into her arms from a nurse a child she knows is infected with plague. Defoe’s narrative reaches maximum pathos in this instance. “[A] child was brought home to its parents from a nurse that had died of the plague, yet the tender mother would not refuse to take in her child, and laid it in her bosom, by which she was infected; and died with the child in her arms dead also. It would make the hardest heart move at the instances that were frequently found of tender mothers tending and watching with their dear children, and even dying before them, and sometimes taking the distemper from them and dying, when the child for whom the affectionate heart had been sacrificed has got over it and escaped.” 9 The stench and filth of the plague are recorded in an eyewitness account of conditions inside a lazaretto during an outbreak in Genoa in 1575 by Father Antero Maria: “The sick within the lazaretto stank horribly—so much so that a single patient could render a room uninhabitable. [Father Maria] wrote that individuals in the lazarettos fled the company of others because of the smell and confessed himself to having to hesitate many times before entering the room—not, he says, for fear of infection, but because the smell was so foul, made worse by the vomiting brought on by the illness.” 10 Such visceral details are muted in our three classical paintings; they are there, but sanitized and filtered through classicizing aesthetic references and compositions. In Poussin and Sweerts, there are no buboes or tokens on the near perfect bodies of the dead women in their paintings. There are, however, men holding their noses to indicate the terrible smells of bodies infected with the plague. There is the pathos of women dying with their babies, but the women and their babies are carefully posed, highly idealized, and based on elevated classical models. In Mignard, there are buboes, and one can see the lancing of the swollen lymph glands—a common medical practice of the day—but the rendering is 8 Boccaccio, 8. 9 Defoe, 97. 10 Qtd. in Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) 46. Between Horror and Sadness PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 13 restrained and bloodless, not the brutal operation it must have been without anesthesia. Instead of a direct representation of the actual plagues striking Naples, Milan, Rome and other cities, the three artists displace their plague scenes back into Antiquity. The Plague of Ashdod The biblical text upon which Poussin based his painting is as dramatic as scenes reported by Boccaccio and Defoe, if not as explicit and detailed. The book of Samuel records a plague visited upon the Philistines for having stolen the Ark of the Covenant and placed the Ark in their own temple, next to a statue of their god Dagon. After the Philistines had captured the ark of God, they took it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. Then they carried the ark into Dagon’s temple and set it beside Dagon. When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! They took Dagon and put him back in his place. But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained. That is why to this day neither the priests of Dagon nor any others who enter Dagon’s temple at Ashdod step on the threshold. The Lord’s hand was heavy on the people of Ashdod and its vicinity; he brought devastation on them and afflicted them with tumors. 11 The Latin Vulgate that Poussin would have consulted describes the tumors as located in the secret parts of the genitals [percussit in secretiori parte natium]. 12 One interpretation of the plague of Ashdod was thus that the Philistines were stricken with a venereal disease. Commentators on this passage from Patristic times until Poussin’s day were not in agreement in interpreting the plague of Ashdod as bubonic plague. Commenting on this passage, Bede wrote “[T]hey [the Philistines] are smitten in the hindquarters and their lands destroyed by mice’ (in posterioribus feriuntur, eorumque a muribus terra demolitur). 13 The 11 1 Samuel 5.6, The Holy Bible, New International Version, 1973. 12 Latin text from the Vulgate, 1 Kings 5.6: “Aggravata est autem manus Domini super Azotios, et demolitus est eos: et percussit in secretiori parte natium Azotum, et fines ejus. Et ebullierunt villæ et agri in medio regionis illius, et nati sunt mures et facta est confusio mortis magnæ in civitate.” English translation from the Douay-Rheims edition: “And the hand of the Lord was heavy upon the Azotians, and he destroyed them, and afflicted Azotus and the coasts thereof with emerods. And in the villages and fields in the midst of that country, there came forth a multitude of mice, and there was the confusion of a great mortality in the city.” 13 Bede Venerabilis, Allegorica Expositio in Lib. I SAM. CAP. V 411. Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 14 disease visited upon the city could have been any number of infectious diseases; one authority argued that it was a special plague, never seen again, created by God specifically to punish the Philistines. 14 Another detail visible in Poussin’s painting, gleaned from the Vulgate, also alluded to by Bede, but not mentioned in the Hebrew text, was the addition of mice or rats running through the city as part of the divine punishment: “There came forth a multitude of mice, and there was the confusion of a great mortality in the city.” 15 To appease the angry God of the Israelites, the Hebrew bible does mention that the Philistines must pay a guilt offering of five gold tumors and five gold rats. The bible passages do not present in detail the effects of the plague upon the population of Ashdod, which is the focus of Poussin’s painting. There is no compassion in the biblical text for the suffering of the Philistines, no drama or pathos over the deaths of mothers and children, only the judgment of God and the clear moral sense that the enemies of Israel merit their punishment. “Why do you harden your hearts as the Egyptian and Pharoah did? When Israel’s god dealt harshly with them, did they not send the Israelites out so they could go their way? ” 16 As we will see when we discuss in detail the classical references present in Poussin’s painting, there is compassion and identification with the Philistine victims of the plague in his 1630 painting. Visual Quotations and Classical Stagings Art critics and historians in Poussin’s day and in the present have recognized, with varying degrees of certainty and consensus, images and motifs borrowed from prior sources. First among such references is the Morbetto (1515-16), an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, based on a painting by Raphael, which represents a scene from the Aeneid. In this episode in Virgil, Aeneas has traveled to Crete, where the Trojan leader and his followers disembark and begin raising the walls of a new city he names Pergamum. The plan is interrupted, however, as a plague suddenly strikes the Trojans, and Aeneas is told in a dream by his household gods, the Penates, to leave Crete and sail for Italy. Virgil’s text does not describe in detail the death of any particular Trojans. Raphael, however, created an image containing several motifs Poussin borrowed: the dead mother and her child, a man, probably the father, holding his nose and pushing the child away from the 14 See Hipp, op. cit. 15 Vulgate, Samuel 1: 5, 6. 16 Samuel 1: 6, 6. Between Horror and Sadness PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 15 mother, a man covering his head with his hands in despair. In the upper quarter of the engraving, Aeneas lies in bed, as the Penates appear to him in a dream. Fig. 5. Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, The Morbetto or The Plague of Phrygia, 1515-16, Wikimedia Another painting by Raphael provided Poussin with several other topoi. The Fire in the Borgo represents a catastrophic fire engulfing the Borgo, a district of Rome, in the year 847 CE, during the pontificate of Pope Leo IV. In a tri-partite composition Poussin will copy, with Corinthian columns on the left and a group of dramatically gesturing women and children in the foreground, a raging fire engulfs the inhabitants of the city, who flee for their lives. Far at the back and center of the painting, the small figure of Pope Leo makes the sign of the cross, thereby causing, according to legend, the immediate extinguishing of the flames. In the left foreground of the painting, a man carries his father on his back, as Aeneas had carried Anchises out of fiery Troy, as if the eternal reference for a city destroyed by fire would remain the burning of Troy recounted by Homer and Virgil. Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 16 Fig. 6. Raphael, The Fire in the Borgo, ca. 1514-17, Stanze di Raffaelo/ Vatican Palace, Scala / Art Resource, NY Other sources and inspirations for the idealized maternal bodies in Poussin include: the allegorical figure of Charity by Cesare Ripa and other painters, who is always represented as a young mother nursing her children. The athletic, eroticized bodies of dying Amazons and Niobids are also referenced in the Ashdod painting. Fig. 7. Cesare Ripa, “Charity,” 1603, Fig. 8. Guido Reni, Charity, 1630, © The Wikimedia Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Between Horror and Sadness PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 17 Fig. 9. Dead Amazon, Museo Archeologico Fig. 10. Dying Niobid, Museo Nazionale, Naples, Art Resource, NY Nazionale Romano, © Vanni Archive / Art Ressource, NY Another important element in Poussin’s painting is the architectural backdrop for his scene, the tragic stage setting from Sebastian Serlio, based on the description of the three stage types by Vitruvius. In his writings, Poussin explained his belief that a painting, like a musical composition, should be based on one of several modes, such as the Dorian mode for matières graves, the Phrygian mode for passions véhémentes and sujets de guerre, the Lydian mode for sentiments tristes, and the Hypolydian mode for sentiments doux et agreeables. 17 The architectural setting, the light, the color scheme, and the emotions expressed by characters in the painting should all be conceived according to the same mode. The appropriate stage setting for The Plague in Ashdod is thus Serlio’s tragic stage, and the proper mode for the painting is the Phrygian mode. 17 Poussin, Nicolas, Collection de lettres (Paris: Firmin, 1824) 278. Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 18 Fig. 11. Stage setting for tragic theatre, Sebastian Serlio, 1545, Wikimedia The tragic scene limits time and space and focuses attention on a few individual characters. It compresses the narrative of events to create dramatic tension and sudden reversals, the peripeteia discussed in Aristotle’s Poetics. In Poussin’s painting, the narrative is compressed to a dramatic breaking point, the moment of peripeteia, when the conquering Philistines’ god is toppled, and plague devastates their city. The mute timelessness of the columns and walls of the city contrast with the vulnerable human bodies of plague victims dying in the city. The dramatic element of agnoreisis, or tragic recognition, is present in the scene as well, as the distraught citizens in the left of the composition realize that it was a terrible error to place the ark in the temple of Dagon. At the front of the tragic stage, the central female character has collapsed and died as a result of the transgression hanging over the city, as in the Thebes of Oedipus at the beginning of the play. The theatrical sense of the scene is heightened by the presence of spectators within the painting, watching the drama unfold from their balconies. There is also an epic dimension to the painting, as a throng of people, a crowd of citizens of Ashdod, and by extension the entire nation of the Philistines, is threatened with instantaneous death and the eradication of their race. Between Horror and Sadness PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 19 City Laments Classical literary references to collective traumas and tragedy hang over Poussin’s city. One later dramatic expression of the motif of the destruction of an entire city and its people by fire comes to mind: two verses pronounced by Andromaque, from Racine’s play by the same name. Evoking the burning of Troy, Hector’s widow addresses her servant Céphise: Songe, songe, Céphise, à cette nuit cruelle Qui fut pour tout un peuple une nuit éternelle. 18 [Remember C phise, remember that cruel night That was an eternal night for an entire people.] Another biblical text suffused with the tragic affect found in Poussin’s painting comes from the book of Lamentations. In passages from this text, which biblical scholars refer to as a “city lament,” the prophet Jeremiah mourns the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE. 19 Aleph. How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! How is the mistress of the Gentiles become as a widow: the princes of provinces made tributary! Beth. Weeping she hath wept in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: there is none to comfort her among all them that were dear to her: all her friends have despised her, and are become her enemies. Ghimel. Juda hath removed her dwelling place because of her affliction, and the greatness of her bondage: she hath dwelt among the nations, and she hath found no rest: all her persecutors have taken her in the midst of straits. Daleth. The ways of Sion mourn, because there are none that come to the solemn feast: all her gates are broken down: her priests sigh: her virgins are in affliction, and she is oppressed with bitterness. 20 Some of the pathos of this text lies in the bare letters of the Hebrew alphabet, chanted at the beginning of each verse when sung during Tenebrae ceremonies during Holy Week. Perhaps the breakdown of words into the letters of the 18 Racine, Jean, Œuvres complètes, I, Théâtre - Poésie, ed. Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », 1999) 233. Andromaque, Act III, Scene 8, v. 1001-02. 19 Hayes, John H, “The Songs of Israel,” in McKenzie, Steven L., Graham, Matt Patrick (eds.), The Hebrew Bible Today: An Introduction to Critical Issues (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998) 168. 20 Book of Lamentations. There are many renditions of the Tenebrae online; they reveal the degree to which these powerful verses echo the sorrow and abandonment felt during the pandemic and other recent catastrophes. They also reflect widespread popular interest in medieval fantasies, as seen in Game of Thrones, Vikings and other television and media phenomena. Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 20 Hebrew alphabet best evoke sorrow, as if complete words and sentences cannot represent the reality of the catastrophe. Perhaps the letters represent the stones that remain after the destruction of the walls of the city. Of note also, for Jeremiah, Jerusalem is a fallen and sorrowful woman, a weeping woman. Both Poussin and Sweerts similarly personify the destruction of ancient cities in the form of women’s bodies. Racine also recounts the burning of Troy through the eyes of a woman, in the verses cited earlier. Poussin would later create another city lament in his painting of the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 CE. Although classically composed and restrained, this painting contains the decapitated bodies of unarmed men. Fig. 12. Nicolas Poussin, The Conquest of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus, 1635, © KHM-Museumsverband, Vienna Between Horror and Sadness The Plague of Ashdod was discussed according to prevailing classical theories of the emotions by members of the Académie Royale de peinture et de Sculpture. In a session led by Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne on March 1, 1670, the Ashdod painting was praised for evoking in spectators the same horror as that experienced by plague victims themselves. “Ce savant homme [Poussin] l’a si naturellement représentée que la vue de cet ouvrage fait Between Horror and Sadness PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 21 renaitre dans les esprits l’horreur qu’elle cause parmi ces peuples qui se voyaient détruits par leur propre victoire” [This learned man has so well depicted it [the plague] that the viewing of this work causes the same horror of the event to be reborn in the minds of viewers as that experienced by these people who saw themselves destroyed by their own victory]. 21 Charles Le Brun, in the same session of the Académie, toned down the idea that the painting produces horreur, and substituted instead the word tristesse. “Ainsi, dans le tableau que nous examinons, ayant traité la maladie contagieuse et la désolation des Philistins, il en avait établi le caractère lugubre par une lumière faible, par des tentes sombres et par une langueur qui paressait dans le mouvement de chaque figure. Par cette pratique judicieuse, il inspirait la tristesse dans l’âme des spectateurs, comme il leur avaient inspiré la joie à l’aspect du tableau de Rébecca [Thus, in the painting we are examining, dealing with the contagious disease and the desolation of the Philistines, he [Poussin] established the lugubrious nature of the painting by means of faint light, somber tones, and a lethargy evident in the movement of each character. By this judicious technique, he inspired sadness in the souls of viewers, just as he had inspired joy in his painting of Rebecca]. 22 The academicians praised Poussin for the exquisite lightness and expressiveness of the bodies of his characters and the chasteté with which the painter represented the disease of the Philistines. In the choice of tristesse over horreur by Le Brun, one is reminded of Racine’s description of the pleasure derived from tragedy, “cette tristesse majestueuse qui fait tout le plaisir de la tragédie” [the majestic sadness that constitutes all of the pleasure of tragedy]. 23 Between Trauma and Pleasure The delicate balance between the horror of the thing represented and the sublimated aesthetic pleasure derived from the contemplation of a great work of art brings to mind two contemporary theories about the representation of violent and disturbing events. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud laid the foundation for modern trauma theory. The founder of psychoanalysis discusses the cases of traumatized World War I veterans and railroad accident victims who dream repeatedly of the terrible events that injured them and who experience flashbacks in waking life. Such punishing dreams contradicted Freud’s prior belief that dreams always reflect the pleasure principle. 21 Fontaine, André, Conférences Inédites de L’Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris: Albert Fontemoing) 112, my emphasis. 22 Ibid, 117, my emphasis. 23 Racine, Jean, Préface de Bérénice, in Œuvres complètes, G. Forestier (ed.), 450. Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 22 If dreams are always about pleasure, in some way, why would an accident victim relive the terrible trauma they suffered and wake up in a fright? Why would such thoughts and images intrude, unsolicited, into waking life? Freud concluded that sufferers of what we now call PTSD repeated in dreams past traumatic events in an attempt to replay such moments in order to create the appropriate amount of fright and terror they hadn’t had time to experience when they were surprised and injured by the original event. In a long speculative journey through evolutionary biology back to the very origins of life at the cellular level, Freud argued in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that traumatic dreams are evidence of a death drive—a primordial biological instinct to return from a state of organic life to a prior inorganic state. Human beings, from the cellular level, all the way to the deepest psychological level, constantly perform a contrapuntal symphony of the life and death drives, beginning with the first “awakening” of organic chemicals into the state of life, followed by the opposing drives to either reproduce and sustain the chemical state of life, or the opposite drive to return to the prior inorganic state. 24 Of interest to our discussion of the balance between horror, compassion, and catharsis when contemplating a traumatic painting such as Poussin’s Plague of Ashdod are Freud’s remarks in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that repetition operates in service of varying psychic aims. Freud observes that tragic theatre inflicts “the most painful experiences” upon its audiences in repeated performances of a play. However, by means of aesthetic pleasure, such spectacles are experienced as “highly enjoyable” and “under the dominance of the pleasure principle.” 25 This idea resonates with the recognition of both horreur and tristesse In Poussin’s work by Le Brun and the academicians. Freud’s instinctual dualism also makes room for an expansive range of artistic repetitions and representations. Classical, restrained repetitions provide aesthetic pleasure; other more violent and compulsive performances are closer to the symptoms of PTSD patients. Either individually or collectively, societies produce a varied repertoire of repetitions and reenactments of traumas from the past. Some responses to the plague, such as the self-punishment of the Flagellants, the Danse Macabre, or the gruesome display of symptoms of the plague, in paintings and the texts of Boccaccio and Defoe, are similar to the traumatic dreams analyzed by Freud. Other, more restrained, classical representations provoke both horror and aesthetic pleasure. 24 For commentary on life as “awakening” in Freud, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 66-67. 25 Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 10, 17. Between Horror and Sadness PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 23 Between the Abject and the Sublime Another contemporary theory that negotiates between horror and aesthetic pleasure is Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the Parisian literary critic characterizes the abject as a visceral reaction to disgusting and unclean things: diseased bodies, excrement, blood, certain animals, and, par excellence, the corpse. Psychologically, the abject is a violent return to the pre-subjective and pre-objective world of early childhood, a repetition and a return to the child’s reaction to the traumatic separation from the mother’s body. The abject “simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject. . . . It draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.” 26 The world of the abject is both an infantile paradise of non-objectival confusion and identity with the mother, a world of boundless, borderless pleasure, but also a world of deep fears resulting from the threat to life itself posed by total dependency on the mother for food and care. An existence with no clear separation between subject and object, based, rather, on partial objects and blind impulses, a world of pre-objects, chief among them the maternal breast, which features prominently in the paintings under review. Like the Unheimlich, this once familiar world is violently shattered by psychological maturation; the child is cast out—abjected—from this world and its partial objects. Such elements (milk, excrement, the maternal breast and blood) become objects of taboo and disgust. To summarize, one could say, in the encounter with the abject, one loses the subject, the object, and meaning, but recovers, to quote Kristeva, “the twisted braid of affects and thoughts.” The abject returns, however, across time and at the highest level of psychological idealization, as a state of potential bliss, especially in Christianity. Many of the taboos of the Old Testament are lifted. Suffering, illness, and bodily impurity become opportunities to share in the suffering of Christ and earn grace. The bodies of saints and parts of their bodies are venerated. The body of the mother, heavily controlled and constrained by Old Testament taboos and purification rituals, is glorified and sanctified in the figure of the Virgin Mary. The body of Christ, the willing victim of all manner of abjection and defilement, becomes the ultimate source of loss of the self and fusion with the sacred Other. The dead mothers in the paintings of Poussin, Sweerts, and Mignard are incarnations of the ambivalent role of the mother. According to the art historian Oskar Bätschmann, in Poussin’s paintings of the Holy Family, the 26 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 5, 2, 1. Matthew Senior PFSCL LIII, 104 DOI 10.24053/ PFSCL-LIII-001 24 mother remains a figure of bliss tying together the worlds of myth, history, and religion. “Poussin’s Holy Families, painted between 1648 and 1658, are variations on the reconciliation of the two separate genres of mythology and history painting. Since myth and history are defined as two succeeding periods, they reveal the end of history as the reconstitution of mythical happiness by overcoming the divisions of history.” 27 27 Bätschmann, Oskar, Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting, trans. Marko Daniel (London: Reaktion Books, 1990) 82.