The Appearance of the Angel to Saint Roch

Saint Roch was the saint people prayed to against plague. In his legend he nursed plague victims in the hospitals of Piacenza, and one night, as he rested, an angel appeared to warn him that he would catch the same disease himself. That is the moment Gaspar Dias painted here, around the 1580s, for a chapel in the church of São Roque in Lisbon, a church run by a brotherhood devoted to protecting the city from epidemics. Dias, one of the finest Portuguese painters of his day, worked in a polished Italian Mannerist manner learned from Rome and Parma. Behind the figures he set a grand classical hall, imagined as Solomon's Temple, copied from a print by the Flemish designer Hans Vredeman de Vries. The angel points upward as Roch starts up from his bed.