Saint Roch and the Virgin Interceding with Christ on Behalf of Plague Victims

Sante Peranda · n.d.

Medium

Pen and brown ink with brush and gray-brown wash, over black chalk, on tan laid paper; later additions of white gouache

Original size

41.5 × 26.9 cm (16 3/8 × 10 5/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

This devotional composition captures one of the most urgent spiritual transactions in Counter-Reformation art — the desperate plea of the sick for divine mercy, channelled through two of heaven's most trusted intercessors. Sante Peranda was a Venetian painter working in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period when Venice was repeatedly devastated by plague. Trained under Palma il Giovane, he absorbed that master's fluid draftsmanship and his instinct for crowded, emotionally charged religious scenes. This work on paper — pen and brown ink over black chalk, with subtle gray-brown wash — reveals Peranda thinking through a composition in real time, the line work confident but alive with revision, the wash giving weight and shadow to figures that might otherwise float. Saint Roch, traditionally shown with the wound on his thigh and his faithful dog, was Venice's particular plague saint, and works depicting his intercession multiplied sharply whenever epidemic threatened the city. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Peranda's intimate, paper-based study into a medium with its own warmth and permanence, preserving the compositional energy of the original while giving the figures a physical presence the drawing — by its nature — could only suggest.