n the 2005 Worcester Art Museum exhibition catalogue , Franco Mormando notes how early modern painters did not explicitly document the horrors and devastation of the disease they endured, but rather created art that was to be “an instrument of healing and encouragement, a mirror and a channel of society’s search for solace and cure from the heavens.” Whether directly or indirectly, recurring episodes of the plague on the peninsula made an indelible impact on the art of the period. Artists engaged with alternative iconography, and traditional
