{"id":10594,"date":"2020-04-19T15:19:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-19T22:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10594"},"modified":"2020-04-24T15:24:45","modified_gmt":"2020-04-24T22:24:45","slug":"covid-reads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/04\/19\/covid-reads\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID Reads"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The Millions<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Pandemic and Literature<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

by <\/a>Ed Simon<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Less than a century after the Black Death descended into Europe and killed 75 million people\u2014as much as 60 percent of the population (90% in some places) dead in the five years after 1347\u2014an anonymous Alsatian engraver with the fantastic appellation of \u201cMaster of the Playing Cards\u201d saw fit to depict\u00a0St. Sebastian<\/strong>: the patron saint of plague victims.\u00a0Making his name, literally, from the series of playing cards he produced at the moment when the pastime first became popular in Germany, the engraver decorated his suits with bears and wolves, lions and birds, flowers and woodwoses. The Master of Playing Cards\u2019s largest engraving, however, was the aforementioned depiction of the unfortunate third-century martyr who suffered by order of the\u00a0Emperor Diocletian<\/strong>. A violent image, but even several generations after the worst of the Black Death, and Sebastian still resonated with the populace, who remembered that \u201cTo many Europeans, the pestilence seemed to be the punishment of a wrathful Creator,\u201d as\u00a0John Kelly<\/strong>\u00a0notes in\u00a0The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of all Time<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cult of Sebastian had grown in the years between the Black Death and the engraving, and during that interim the ancient martyr had become associated with plague victims. His suffering reminded people of their own lot\u2014the sense that more hardship was inevitable, that the appearance of purpled buboes looked like arrows pulled from Sebastian\u2019s eviscerated flesh after his attempted execution, and most of all the indiscrimination of which portion of bruised skin would be arrow-pierced seeming as random as who should die from plague. Produced roughly around 1440, when any direct memory of the greatest bubonic plague had long-since passed (even while smaller reoccurrences occurred for centuries), the Master of the Playing Cards presents a serene Sebastian, tied to a short tree while four archers pummel him with said arrows. Unlike more popular depictions of the saint, such as\u00a0Andrea Mantegna<\/strong>\u2019s painting made only four decades later, or\u00a0El Greco<\/strong>and\u00a0Peter Paul Reubens<\/strong>\u2019s explicitly lithe and beautiful Sebastians made in respectively the 16th and 17th centuries, the engraver gives us a calm, almost bemused, martyr. He has an accepting smile on his face. Two arrows protrude from his puckered flesh. More are clearly coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at MM<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Millions On Pandemic and Literature by Ed Simon Less than a century after the Black Death descended into Europe and killed 75 million people\u2014as much as 60 percent of the population (90% in some places) dead in the five years after 1347\u2014an anonymous Alsatian engraver with the fantastic appellation of \u201cMaster of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}