ERC Advanced Grant · 2022
Heritage of Disease: The Art and Architectures of Early Modern Hospitals in European Cities
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 spatial and safety concepts were developed to care 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. Despite an extensive scholarship on hospitals as social institutions, the question of why art and architecture were so vital…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.