Pandemic Art: How the Virus Has Revolutionized Art Today

Abstract

“At times of great crisis, it is natural to look to the past for precedents,” the historian Tom Holland wrote in The Sunday Times at the start of the Covid 19 lockdowns in March 2020 (Cornwell 2020). The way artists from earlier centuries have portrayed epidemics and pandemics testifies to the anxieties raised during these events. If we look at their history we can find many real and symbolic methods used by which communities grappled with an invisible enemy. Many of the symbols used during those times still exist, and they give an insight into the ways in which artists perceived life-threatening instances, the horrors of disease and death, financial crises, the haunting despair that ensued, and what the human reactions to epidemics were. Looking into the past, at the way in which the plague was represented, we can understand how artists had come to adopt a religious framework to perceive and understand the onslaught of the epidemic. Many felt the affliction was divine retribution for communal sins.