Boccaccio and Florentines Fleeing the Plague

What it is

This is a manuscript miniature in a painted border, attributed to the Bruges Master of 1482 and dated to around 1485. Its title, in the Commons record, is Giovanni Boccaccio and Florentines who have fled from the plague. On the left, richly dressed men gather outdoors in a rolling landscape with a walled city, a river and mountains. On the right, women in red and blue gowns stand before a lectern in a stone loggia with a wooden ceiling.

Why it matters

The curator's note links the picture to the plague frame story of the Decameron, in which Florentines flee the 1348 plague. The Decameron was written by Giovanni Boccaccio, and this image was made more than a century after the plague it depicts. It shows how later artists imagined the Black Death and the people who survived it, and how a fourteenth-century book was read and illustrated in the late 1400s.

Look closer

• Who are the men and women in the picture, and how does the artist separate the two groups?
• Does the painted scene show disease or suffering, or does it show a calm and orderly world?
• Why might a painter around 1485 choose to show the plague as a story of people leaving a city rather than as a scene of dying?