The Healing Power of Beauty and Life After Covid

Part 5 in the series, Can Beauty Kill Germs? Trauma, Gratitude, and Memorialization; Attitude and Beauty in the Face of Extreme Odds. 

Anyone looking out from their shelter-in-place and seeing a wall will be touched by O. Henry’s heart-wringing story, The Last Leaf. Set in Greenwich Village during an early-twentieth-century epidemic, the story tells of Johnsy, an ill young woman who believes that, in the progressively barren winter, she will die when the ivy vine outside her window loses its last leaf. 

As the season grows colder the vine gradually sheds its leaves. But one last leaf hangs there long enough for Johnsy to recover her health. It turns out that it had been painted by Johnsy’s old neighbor, the artist Behrman, who longed to produce a masterpiece. Mustering all his artistry for the leaf, Behrman dies of exposure from painting the last leaf. 

Healing from the trauma of this pandemic may be somewhat analogous to healing from wars and dislocation. Despite the ubiquitous computer, and smartphone systems, the prolonged physical distancing may be comparable to isolation encountered in space flight, polar habitation, solo voyaging, and even solitary confinement. It could be that, despite the available technology and medicine, the traumas of solitude and the suspense of “not knowing” are no different from the historical mystery of pestilence and the enigmatic redemption from it known from the Renaissance and Baroque.

Jonathan Jones wrote in the Guardian in February 2012 that those times were “sealed in a kingdom of plague.” Old Masters like Tintoretto (1518–1594) fought the mortal contagion by painting his greatest works under its shadow at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco .in Venice. Hans Holbein (the Younger, 1497–1543) and Titian (1488/90–1576) died of it. Yet the quattro-, cinque-, sei-, and settecento Europeans asserted the glory of life through the treasures and beacons of their incredible civilization.

 

Life between plague and redemption. Entrance to the Grand Canal in Venice by Canaletto, c. 1730
On the left is the Santa Maria della Salute 

Black Death mass grave, Toulouse. ©Archeodunum SAS, Gourvennec

It is as if the outstandingly beautiful monuments to redemption, salvation, and gratitude erected at the dawn of the age of science reflect the idea of the unity of mind and body. They were built before technology and science emerged and the Romantic era separation of body and soul, sent the body to science and the soul back to religion. But that is our world today. We have a Large Hadron Collider—and ISIS.

We can ask tongue in cheek whether beauty can kill germs, but maybe there is some truth to that. Indeed, plague monuments and votive churches from the 1400s to the 1800s are among the most sophisticated and beautiful structures ever built by mankind. They remind us that our new scientific understanding of well-being and immunology indicates that much of the architecture and urban practices employed before 1920 also contributed to human wellbeing. And while we benefit greatly from the techno-medical-health advances, they remind us that, for environmental design, the classical method is still today an exceptionally effective tool. [1]

On the face of it, we are looking at plain superstition wrapped as religion. The architecture and iconography of the beautiful Cappella della Piazza on the Campo in Siena (plague of 1348, built 1352) progress from medieval gargoyles to mythological Renaissance gryphons, considered guardians of divine power. Nearby, the Fonta Gaia celebrates with Christian-themed carvings 1402-1419 the removal of a statue of Venus, which had graced the fountain since early times, because it was blamed for Siena’s recurring plague. The macabre skulls over the entrance to the churchyard of St Olave’s church in London (1658) literally commemorate trauma, and the alleged burial place of Mary Ramsay, believed to have brought the plague to London in 1665.

Plague memorials on the Campo in Siena and London     (left) Fonta de Gaia     (right) Cappella della Piazza  

St. Olave’s, London. Credit: David Ross and Britain

The Graben

Still steeped in medieval-style superstition, Vienna’s Plague Column in the central Graben square (1687) commemorates the end of the 1679 epidemic with extreme Baroque ornamentation and rich iconography of the Trinity, and of Faith overthrowing the Plague. Lieber Augustin, “Dear Augustin—a troubadour who became a symbol of hope after he survived a night in a plague pit after being tossed into it in a drunken stupor—commemorated that plague in a memorial that was removed by the Nazis for its bronze. 

The original
Lieber Augustin fountain 

Controlling the Levant trade, Venice, which together with its glorious merchandise also imported rats, fleas, and plague, witnessed seventy plague epidemics! Plague churches built there include the Scuola di S Rocco. Veronese lies buried in St Sebastian, which he decorated with plague iconography including the Pool of Bethesda. Palladio (1508–1580) built the great Il Redentore, “The Redeemer” (1577–1592), and Baldassare Longhena (1598–1682) built Santa Maria della Salute, “Saint Mary of Health, (1631–1681), after the plague killed nearly a third of the Venetians.

Karlskirche Interior  

If the deaths of our forebearers were not in vain, the beautiful Baroque work memorializing the horrors and losses they endured must inspire our survival and redemption today. The beauty of the votive churches must serve as a cultural wake up call to consider our cities and environments more aspirationally—and less as problems to solve. Covid reminds us that we need to relearn to seek balances of planning for town and country.

 

• To make streets that inspire in people the thoughts and intuitions that help in their healing.
• To build durably using the shapes and proportions that best suit human biometrics, perception, and comfort, thereby likely helping fortify immune response. 
• That spirituality—embodied in beauty—is not attainable in the machine aesthetic or by means of machine virtuality. 
• That beautiful buildings represent the political and cultural institutions of democracy.
• That cloisters and pointed arches symbolize education and the parliamentary tradition.
• That the pandemic creates an opportunity to triage our dependence on apps and automation in favor of people-centric community life. 
• That we should move away from sealed buildings and towards better ventilation and openable windows. 
• That without the knowledge of well-building, our predecessors would not have the cues for well-being and well-thinking that helped them drive the advances in society, science, and health that are getting us through Covid-19.

Karlskirche Facade

Modernity induces us to see these monuments to salvation and gratitude in a new light. In their construction, the Baroque monuments reeled in the survivors from their trauma to normalcy. These beautiful memorials to survival and redemption are breadcrumbs for us to follow, tips for how to experience what we are going through now, and ideas of what to think next. Looking at the plague monuments we claim them again today as cues to our own consciousness.

In the marvelously rich nexus of mind, body, perception, and place is the collective intelligence of how to build holistic and beautiful environments. Olmsted and Vaux expressed this understanding in their 1860s vision for Bethesda Terrace and Fountain, overlooking the lake and woodland Ramble in Central Park. The experiential apex of the park, Bethesda Fountain includes the only originally commissioned major sculpture for the park. It was designed by Emma Stebbins (1815–1882), the first woman to be publicly commissioned for a major work of art in New York City. 

A great artist, Stebbins’ sensibilities were informed by 500 years of art depicting deliverance from epidemics. Bethesda Fountain celebrates the Croton Aqueduct, which had saved New York City from a cholera epidemic. Linked to the passage in John 5:2–4 on Jesus’ healing at the Pool of Bethesda, the eight-foot bronze winged Angel of the Waters (1873) holds a lily in one hand for purity, while blessing the water below with the other. The putti supporting the top basin below her, represent Peace, Health, Purity, and Temperance.

Bethesda Fountain at Central Park. © Nir Buras

The humanistic attitude that such monuments express speaks to our ongoing cycle of trauma, salvation, gratitude, and memorialization. But the “meta-message” of such beautiful structures is different for every generation. In the harsh light of our sudden mortality, the “cool factor” of Modernism appears very thin. The upshot of Covid-19 should not be “contactless pathways,” “life lived by smartphone,” broad, uninhabited sidewalks, and streets with metal and plastic dividers, as charming as cattle corrals.  

Could it be that people are getting by at this time despite stress-inducing Modernist design and dysfunctional urban intervention? O. Henry may have taken this matter to the maximum, but we know now—and we didn’t know this twenty years ago—that the visual stimuli of traditional and classical architecture are de-facto cues to well-being. 

We now understand that Modernist designs cause the release of serotonin and that traditional designs that of dopamine. We know now that Post-Covid some dystopias projected by planners and media may be considered not progressive but part of what impeded survival and healing. 

Indeed, beauty may not kill germs like an antibiotic can, but knowing what we know today from biometrics and neuroscience about beauty, it may not be wrong to suggest that its presence may impact human immune systems. Is it also possible that the stress-reducing qualities of traditional design may actually contribute to the community resilience in healing from epidemiological trauma?

[1] The term “well-building” is a technical, Vitruvian classical design term that bears no relation to any for-profit or non-profit organizations, or certifications issued by them, that use that term or others similar to it.


Contributed by © Nir Buras, 200423 v.20