“He Seeks Cadavers To Devour“

A devil, a thief, a scavenger, a bringer of disease. So would a doctor put on a raven mask to protect himself against the plague? If we are to believe the prints that depict this curious plague doctor, then yes. But, believers, were they even meant to be credible? Paulus Fürst essentially reveals it in the very first line of his poem, when he refers to the fabulous nature of the depicted personage.
This room examines the connections between the raven and the plague within the context of the religious oppositions that were at play in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In doing so, we aim to shed light on the symbolism of Fürst’s iconic Doctor Schnabel. *

Real plague doctors often had a poor reputation. It was difficult to find people willing to fulfill this dangerous task, so cities rewarded them with substantial salaries. Often they were second rate surgeons or barbers, and some lacked any medical training at all. Moreover, they could profit from their position in other ways. Patients who did not want to be placed in isolation—because this would mean losing income—paid bribes in exchange for a false diagnosis. The doctors also sold medicines clandestinely at high prices. And in the worst cases, they shamelessly lined their pockets with whatever they could find in the homes of the sick and the dead, knowing that no one else dared venture so close to the sources of infection. The comparison with the scavenging raven thus arose almost naturally.

Carrion-picking ravens were an everyday sight. They had always been attracted to dead animals. But the human bodies that hung on the gallows fields also received visits from the dark bird. And in times of plague, when there were so many dead that they could not be buried in time, the ravens could indulge in a veritable feast. Paulus Fürst also points out this resemblance between plague doctors and ravens, where he writes: He seeks cadavers to devour / like the raven on the dung heap.

The raven’s lifestyle, combined with its foreboding appearance, has given it countless negative associations—from its frequently depicted friendship with the devil and death to sayings such as “stealing like the ravens.” With the expression “To the ravens!” people in ancient Athens wished someone to hell or damnation. Comparable is the German curse “Das dich die Raben fressen,” which appears paraphrased in the poem on Fürst’s Doctor Schnabel.
A raven was even suspected of having set off a plague epidemic. One folk tale recounts how, in Siena, a raven fell dead from the sky, after which children took its feathers—said to carry the poison of the disease—home with them, thereby causing a devastating outbreak.

Its most important role in this context, however, is in the biblical story of the Flood. Noah first sent out a raven to find out whether the waters had receded. They had not, but the raven continued to fly back and forth, feeding on the many corpses floating everywhere. The dove sent out afterward did return, carrying an olive branch as proof that the waters had subsided. The raven and the dove thus came to form an opposing pair: death, faithlessness, and the evil of the black raven versus life, faithfulness, and the good of the white dove. This contrast is all the more fitting because the plague, like the Flood, was seen as a punishment imposed by God, and the human response could resemble that of the raven—a selfish scavenger—or that of the dove: faithful to the ark, in which one can recognize the Church or the true faith.

For Paulus Fürst, the unreliable, cowardly and money-hungry opportunist aligned perfectly with the Protestant view of the Catholic Church. That resemblance already existed for over a hundred years. Around 1530, Martin Luther had written:

‘”They [catholics] are truly ravens, for they live on carrion and screech dolefully while they sit on it. These characteristics fit the papists and the ravens well.”**

The greed of the Catholic Church was, of course, expressed most clearly in the sale of indulgences—the very abuse against which the beginning of the Reformation had been directed. We find hints of that abuse in the last lines of the poem, where a pouch full of gold and a soul-snatching black devil are brought forth.

That Rome was struck by the plague would surely have been seen as fitting in Fürst’s hometown, thoroughly Protestant Nuremberg. This does not mean that Germany was never visited by the plague. Such circumstances, however, were precisely the occasion to prove one’s faith. When a doctor fled while being concerned solely with personal gain, this could hardly have been seen as deserving of mercy from a Protestant perspective. We find this disapproving attitude reflected in a famous text, Martin Luther’s Whether One May Flee from the Plague, published in 1527.
Luther argues that officials such as mayors and judges have the duty to remain, but he does not blame ordinary citizens for fleeing. Regarding doctors he stated:

“But whoever serves the sick for the sake of God’s gracious promise, though he may accept a suitable reward to which he is entitled, inasmuch as every laborer is worthy of his hire—whoever does so has the great assurance that he shall in turn be cared for. God himself shall be his attendant and his physician, too. What an attendant he is! What a physician! Friend, what are all the physicians, apothecaries, and attendants in comparison to God? Should that not encourage one to go and serve a sick person, even though he might have as many contagious boils on him as hairs on his body, and though he might be bent double carrying a hundred plague-ridden bodies! What do all kinds of pestilence or devils mean over against God, who binds and obliges himself to be our attendant and physician? Shame and more shame on you, you out-and-out unbeliever, for despising such great comfort and letting yourself become more frightened by some small boil or some uncertain danger than emboldened by such sure and faithful promises of God!”***

Doctor Schnabel from Rome does flee, as shown by his placement with the city in the background and as we also read in the line “der fugit die Contagion.” In this same vein, the wearing of “clothing against death” (Kleydung wider den Todt) was interpreted as a ridiculous display of a lack of faith—something that only a papist could have come up with. No wonder his appearance caused such a stir in the predominantly Protestant German speaking parts of Europe.

That the creator of the print associates himself with the true faith can be inferred from the signature. At the bottom center, the name “I. Columbina” can be read. However, no artist by that name has ever been identified. Columba is Latin for “dove.” Just as the poem contains allusions to the harmful practices of the Catholic Church, this fictitious name is yet another pun emphasizing the parallel between the raven and Catholicism.

One problem with the above is that the inventor of the plague doctor image prototype is unknown. The original was most likely a satire already, referring to the reputation of plague doctors as profiteers. Moreover, since many popular prints have not survived the ages, we may presume that there are still links missing. There is no doubt, however, that Paulus Fürst made the motif his own, and that his elaborate version is largely responsible for the current ubiquity—and thus for maintaining the belief in the authenticity—of the ravenous doctor.

It may seem curious that the symbolism of the raven and Rome, and of plague and Flood, was more or less handed to Fürst on a platter. Yet this course of events has a precedent that also unfolds against the backdrop of the same religious conflict.
After a flooding of the Tiber in 1495, rumours arose in Rome that a monster had washed ashore. It had the head of a donkey, the breasts of a woman, a scaled body, and the limbs of various animals. The earliest known depiction was created by Wenzel von Olmütz just before 1500. When the print came to the attention of Luther’s wing man Philipp Melanchthon, he gave it an anti-papal twist, in which the donkey’s head in particular lent itself perfectly to his admonishing interpretation. The print was copied by Lucas Cranach the Elder and included in no fewer than four different pamphlets by Melanchthon and Luther, which continued to be reprinted well into the seventeenth century.
The similarity to what happened with the beaky doctor is striking: a print of an exceptional phenomenon in Rome falls into Protestant hands, is copied by a skilled artist and harnessed to an anti-papal agenda—and acquires iconic status. And it is not only the copying history that shows parallels to Doctor Schnabel; the print itself also bears some resemblance: a single figure set against a backdrop of Rome and the Tiber, as well as the title: The Pope-Ass of Rome (Der Bapstesel zu Rom).

Reality did not matter in either case. Whether true or not, the monster became a vehicle for the anti-papal tirades of Melanchthon and Luther, just as the plague doctor became one for Fürst’s inventive satire of Protestant versus Catholic, faith versus flight, dove versus raven.

* This is a simplified adaptation of an article by H.J. Mattie that appeared in Nuncius, Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science.

** Pelikan, J.J. (ed.), Luther’s Works. Lectures on Genesis, chapter 6-14, vol. 2 (Saint-Louis: Concordia, 1960), 160-161.

*** Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Gustav K. Wiencke, vol. 43 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 122.