History & The Arts
Napoleonic paintings
...religion.) The composition, with its colonnades, recalls paintings of Christ healing the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda (see Figure 6); there is even a blind man groping his way forward at the right as if hoping for a miraculous cure. Nor do the religious resonances stop here; the naked figures of the plague-stricken resemble the damned in hell, cut off as they are...