WORCESTER, Mass. — Come to this fine and hilly old industrial city and find a meditation on terror rendered in Renaissance and baroque oils.
There are paintings of babies seeking succor from plague-ridden mothers, of the saintly tending to the mortally ill, and of men and women recoiling from death's touch. Franco Mormando, a soft-spoken former Jesuit, has assembled this exhibit — "Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500 to 1800" — at the Worcester Art Museum, and it features a great many artistic worthies, from Tiepolo to Canaletto to Van Dyck.
But what gives it a haunting and modern resonance is the evocation of contagion and helplessness and the fear that is their handmaiden.
"For 300 years plague hung over the lives of Europeans like an omnipresent cloud," said Mormando, who is an Italian studies professor at Boston College. "I had just begun assembling this exhibit when September 11th came along, and we were living in this state of utter helplessness."
He nodded toward the paintings, arrayed in cool and shadowed halls. "The preoccupations began to feel very familiar."
In an age of subway bombs and anthrax and avian flu, when thousands of Americans pass waking hours trying to manage their fears, Mormando and three fellow curators — from the University of Massachusetts, Clark University and the College of the Holy Cross — have fashioned a strikingly timely exhibit from 37 paintings drawn from European and American collections. One might argue that Renaissance Italy is so distant as to offer little insight into our own anxieties, Mormando acknowledged.
But the corrosive anxiety in these paintings feels current.
"The specter of terrorist-disseminated plagues, the anthrax and smallpox has kept us in a state of collective anxiety, if not panic," Mormando said. "We have come to realize, as they did, that fear is our new reality.
"The question," he continued, "is how this fear forces us to change our reality. For a brief time we had confidence that science would overcome anything. Now we return to something older."
The plague paintings are characteristically Italian, the gruesome nature of the subject never extinguishing the beauty and delicacy of the oils chosen or the artist's appreciation of classical form. A large and handsome canvas by Giovanni Martinelli titled "Memento Mori" ("Remember, you shall die") hangs in the first room of the exhibition. Handsomely attired young dandies and two women make merry around a table when from the dark shadows a skeleton approaches holding an hourglass. A young man, eyes wide, takes on death's gray pallor, and a young woman stares at him with a palpable gasp of horror.