The Brooklyn Rail

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many art historians have reframed their work to address issues of health and medicine. For others, the attendant isolation and lack of mobility associated with this crisis have led them to reexamine their intellectual approaches. Authored by five leading art historians who have published on the subjects of art, medicine, and health, the responses that follow reflect on the questions: How have we attempted to make sense of the pandemic experience with a view to the histories we study? In what ways might the recent health crisis be better framed in terms of the tribulations of health and medicine of the past?

Frances Gage:

Prior to the pandemic, I had studied the role of art objects within early modern medical regimens for both preventive and therapeutic ends, investigating how early moderns constructed galleries within domestic settings for conjoined physical and mental exercise. These galleries, originally constructed for the purpose of walking, were increasingly adapted to picture galleries adorned with paintings and sculpture over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While walking in galleries for daily exercise, especially when weather prevented perambulation outdoors, early moderns exercised the eye and mind by observing the art, particularly landscapes, adorning the walls. When the pandemic forced us to retreat, I reflected on this precedent, putting into practice a regimen of walking and beholding reproductions of art as a source of solace and stimulation, confirming first-hand how the study of early modern art and healing illuminates varied approaches to integrating art into preventive and therapeutic practices today.

Keren Hammerschlag:

In January 2020, I gave birth to my son, Noah Hammerschlag Bronstein. At the time we thought he was a “bushfire baby” (Australia was in the grips of one of the worst bushfire seasons on record, and Canberra, where I live, was suffocating in smoke). Turns out he was a “COVID baby.” For me, as for many others, the global onset of COVID was characterized by months spent at home. I was halfway through writing a book when Canberra went into lockdown. My book has little to do with medicine, health, and illness, but its production was impacted by all three. Because this book is about British art, and I was unable to travel—Australia’s borders were tightly shut and I had no desire to leave the island anyway—I had to adapt. I had to rely on my memories of paintings seen many years earlier, on digitized sources, and on the generosity of librarians and archivists to photograph, scan, and send me texts and images. My next book, I think, is going to be about Long COVID and representations of convalescence. 

Christian Kleinbub:

When COVID arrived in the United States, I had just published a book detailing Michelangelo’s use of competing theories about how bodily organs like the liver, heart, and brain processed images, inspiring contemplation, love, and even violence. It was not a project about medicine or health, but my research caused me to confront situations wherein the artist, when ill, wavered between trust in divine help and appreciation of his doctor’s art. I learned that, in the sixteenth century, prayer and medicine were understood to offer different but complementary benefits. There was a ready awareness of the limits of medicine and a holistic idea of health, including the patient’s mental and spiritual concerns. The shock came from recognizing American culture’s ambivalence about medicine and enthusiasm for holistic remedies in Michelangelo’s own.

Elizabeth Lee:

At the start of the COVID pandemic, I was completing a book manuscript on the connections between American art, disease, and health in the Gilded Age. Throughout the project, it was easy to see the distance between our current hi-tech model of healthcare and nineteenth-century medicine, which struggled to accept germ theory as a causal explanation of disease, and lacked effective treatment tools until the antibiotic revolution after World War II. That distance collapsed in a flash as medical science struggled to understand how COVID-19 spread, how to prevent it, and how to treat and cure those who contracted it—the same essential questions taken up by nineteenth-century physicians charged with responding to epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and tuberculosis. Like those of the artists at the center of my study who turned to nature as a revitalizing force and left dense urban centers to avoid contagion, many of our responses to the COVID pandemic mirrored Gilded-Age tendencies.

Naomi Slipp:

My research considers how the fields of medicine and art jointly professionalized in the US in the 1800s. There was significant collaboration between the two disciplines around understanding, studying, and visualizing the human body and anatomy. The cultural history of the body and medicine in the US reveals how medical care and medical science—indeed, who has access to care, who shapes knowledge about the body, how that knowledge is visually presented, and who is the subject of such study—is almost always based upon different forms of privilege. The COVID-19 pandemic presented a number of salient illustrations of how inequity around medical care, the treatment of the dead, and public skepticism about allopathic medicine remains culturally ingrained. These issues are rooted in the history of medicine; yet we, as a society, seem troublingly unable to move past them.