Plague Hospital 1800

Curator: Looking at this painting by Francisco de Goya, "Plague Hospital," dating from 1800, one is immediately struck by its somber mood. Editor: It’s certainly oppressive. The palette is incredibly muted. You can almost feel the dampness of the room, the rough texture of the materials around them. Curator: Indeed. Goya painted this in a period of intense social and political upheaval. Considering the social context, how does this relate to his own anxieties about mortality and societal breakdown? Editor: Precisely. Look at how he’s rendered the bodies—the limited detail suggests the bodies as being less than a person, treated as raw material affected by processes of disease. Even the architecture seems to weigh down on the figures. Curator: Note how light struggles to enter through that high window, a common motif of Romanticism. But more importantly, I feel that this serves as an analogy for Enlightenment values struggling to penetrate the darker realities of disease and societal vulnerability. How does this challenge prevailing power structures and perceptions? Editor: Perhaps by showing the limitations of societal systems in the face of uncontrolled decay. The means of production have utterly failed, creating nothing but death. And note, that's also clear through his technique, in the very facture of the piece. There’s almost no visible brushwork; the paint feels applied almost violently, or, conversely, left to drip and spread. Curator: That's very true. The emotional intensity translates perfectly. And it powerfully captures the isolation, and human cost, not only of disease, but a whole raft of historical abuses and misdeeds against marginalized members of society. How does Goya speak across temporal divides on the issue of public health? Editor: For me, Goya highlights the raw reality, the inescapable physicality of societal collapse and points at labor practices and their inherent violence that lead directly to such devastation. Curator: Understanding its creation, this painting resonates with concerns surrounding our current climate crisis. I see here the potentiality of social breakdown and decay of human kindness through disease. Editor: I agree. “Plague Hospital” speaks to an underlying fear of unseen destructive forces – be they viruses or the hidden, unseen material processes of social production.