Heritage of Disease: The Art and Architectures of Early Modern Hospitals in European Cities

Introduction

After the Black Death of 1348, hospitals were newly designed to face social disease, further plague’s waves, and new illnesses, e.g. syphilis. Social distancing (like recently with an unknown virus) was the main method to avoid all kinds of contagion.

New Concepts in Hospital Design

New spatial and safety concepts were developed to care for and confine the sick and the poor in structures enhancing the visibility of political or religious agendas. While wars and early globalization contributed to spreading pandemics, charitable bodies exploited their roles to gather capital, which they reinvested in art.

The Importance of Art and Architecture

Despite an extensive scholarship on hospitals as social institutions, the question of why art and architecture were so vital for hospitals remains open.

Project Objectives

ARCHIATER tackles this gap, focusing on three objectives:

1. To map hospital visual cultures, agencies, and imaginations in European cities before 1750 along terrestrial and maritime routes and according to hospital typology and networks.
2. To analyse the spaces, forms, themes, and designs of hospital art and architecture as liminal mediators to manage disease and contagion as well as life passages, healing, death, and salvation.
3. To reconstruct transitions and changing values of hospital materiality and develop ways of ‘curating’ the impressive heritage of premodern hospitals.

Methodology

Bringing together art, architecture, history, and curatorial studies, the project looks at these relations in comparative and interconnected ways. It combines geographical and micro-historical investigations, object-based analysis, and a new conceptual questioning on the ‘liminality’ of hospital art and architecture as mediators between spaces, actors, and intentions in the ‘monumentalization’ of disease, which characterizes historical cityscapes.

Conclusion

Addressing these issues will reveal not only why so many artworks in our museums come from hospital contexts, but also how visible artefacts can contribute to the well-being of a society faced with invisible threats.