Can a single disease shape a collective imagination that moves across centuries? Can one image alter how we understand the body, death, and power?

This is the question that emerges when we encounter Plague, Image, and Imagination, a book that opens a wide window onto the history of epidemics as they have been formed within art and human consciousness. In this work, Christos Lynteris revisits an old story through a cultural lens, revealing the depth of representations that the plague has inscribed into human memory.

An Entry into the World of Image and Disease

Plague, Image, and Imagination invites the reader to reconsider illness not as a purely biological event but as a cultural condition that has shaped the contours of human fear. The book demonstrates how images of the plague in the Middle Ages became reflections of collective terror in the face of the Black Death, and how the epidemic was entangled with myth, religion, and politics. Here, the book revives an enduring question concerning the power of images to shape consciousness, while offering a flexible yet coherent visual history of disease, tracing its trajectory from the era of Justinian to the modern age.

The Plague in Religious and Artistic Imagination

The book emphasizes that the plague was often interpreted as divine punishment, and it reveals the role of Gothic art in portraying death as a heavy shadow accompanying human existence. Religious paintings capture moments in which collective fear is transformed into spiritual certainty. During the Renaissance, however, visual representation shifted toward a more human-centered perspective, where the victim was no longer an abstract symbol but a body and a memory. Plague, Image, and Imagination presents this transition as a decisive moment in humanity’s evolving relationship with death.

The Colonial Image of Disease

Lynteris moves to the period of the third plague pandemic to examine the emergence of photography as a documentary tool. The book explains how the camera was used to construct a colonial vision of disease in regions such as India and Java. Images of hospitals and infected homes transformed the diseased body into an element of political and social discourse. In this context, the image becomes an instrument of power, producing a visual regime that recalls symbolic modes of representation familiar from literary traditions.

The Plague as a Visual Icon

The book argues that images associated with epidemics were never neutral. Rather, they functioned as tools through which societies understood themselves and articulated structures of authority. These visual forms helped imagine the plague as an existential threat, while gradually shaping social consciousness. Lynteris analyzes how the visual icon became embedded within collective awareness, linking this process to human perceptions of the body, its limits, and its fears. The importance of the artistic dimension stands out here, existing alongside historical analysis in a productive tension.

Imagination as a Form of Resistance

The book concludes by asserting that the plague was not merely a disease but a major human event that reshaped medical, political, and religious practices. It shows how images played a crucial role in defining humanity’s relationship with the sacred and in raising questions of freedom, authority, and obligation. It also highlights the role of visual culture in producing new forms of knowledge about contagion. Ultimately, Lynteris demonstrates that the plague, as mediated through images, has become an indelible collective memory, offering a compelling example of how human imagination responds to moments of profound crisis.