Picturing the pox in Italian popular prints, 1550-1650☆

The disease commonly known as the 'pox' or the 'French Disease' ravaged the European continent following its initial appearance circa 1495. Its devastating physical effects and sensory assaults, ranging from stinking sores to baldness and collapsed noses, invited both a social and medical evaluation of what was quickly recognized to be a sexually transmitted disease. Despite the prevalence and visibility of the pox in sixteenth-century Europe, its visual language has not been studied in much depth. This essay examines how cheap narrative prints issued between 1550 and 1650 helped construct the iconography of pox and disseminate medical information about it in late Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a group of best-selling Venetian and Roman prints, the essay argues that multimedial picture stories combining text and image provided one of the many sources of vernacular information by which Italians learned to read the body. In recounting stories of diseased prostitutes and their clients in vivid detail, these prints expanded vernacular health literacy and provided a ready-made language of disease. The prints analysed here enjoyed enormous social reach as components of a new health-promoting, communicative object - the hand-held paper fan - whose popularity cemented visual and epistemic connections between pox and prostitution.