19 Mar Pestilences and epidemics in art: Death in Venice

The situation our Country is going through is serious and the thing we can do is staying home and ensure contagion does not spread any further. We can use this time as a new resource, the opportunity to do all those things we never had time to do. For centuries, in art, contagion has inspired works and masterpieces which delve deep into the human spirit. .

One of the greatest authors of the 20th century, Thomas Mann, was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1929, “mainly for his great novels Budden brooks and The Magic Mountain”, published in 1901 and 1924 respectively.

Exactly in between these two works, he wrote a shorter but extremely powerful novel: “Death In Venice”, on which in 1971 Luchino Visconti based the second chapter of his “German trilogy” (in the picture), a turbulent chess game between eros and thanatos, on the backdrop of the beaches and canals of the city on water during the very first days of the cholera epidemic. The main character will be the one the pay to price for not listening to good sense and the warnings of those who recommended he go back home