Plague banners of less importance are those by Bonfigli at Civitella Benazzone, by Sinibaldo Ibi in the convent of S. Ubaldo at Gubbio, dated A.D. 1503, by Giannicola Manni in the church of S. Dominico at Perugia, dated A.D. 1525, and by Berto di Giovanni in Perugia Cathedral, dated A.D. 1526. There they will be seen for the most part as framed altar-pieces.
Perugia’s greatest painter, Pietro Vannucci, better known as Perugino, perished in the course of one of his city’s plagues. Tradition has it that he died denying the Saviour and Madonna, whom his art had done so much to glorify, and that his body was thrown into a desolate grave beside a wayside oak. His sons searched diligently for their father’s body, to lay it in the church of S. Agostino, but in vain, among so many that had perished of the plague. It is, said, however, that a priest found it and buried it under the walls of his church at Fontignano.
The humbler _Pestblätter_ seem to have played much the same part in the devotional activities of the individual as did the _gonfaloni_ in those of the multitude. They were not exclusively German, but were issued also from the presses of Flanders, the Netherlands, Italy, and more rarely of France as well. Pictorial _Pestblätter_ are mostly rough woodcuts or copper-plate engravings, crudely coloured by hand in some cases, and belong chiefly to the last two-thirds of the fifteenth and the first third of the sixteenth centuries. In the character of their subjects they are usually simply devotional, and represent some act of expiation or intercession on behalf of mankind. The three leading types correspond closely to the three types of _gonfaloni_ in their subjects:
1. Christ, the suffering Redeemer, on the cross. 2. Intercession by the Virgin Mary or by Christ. 3. Memorials of the martyrdom of special plague saints, such as St. Sebastian, St. Roch, and St. Antony.
4. Intercession by these special plague saints, or by other saints whose association with plague was more fortuitous and less widely recognized: such were St. Quirinus, St. Adrian, and St. Valentine.
Many of these forms have attached to them some appropriate prayer or invocation. Sometimes the religious element is supplemented by an exposition of hygienic precautions or of remedial measures. Thus a devotional cut comes to be blended with injunctions, usually in verse, as to how to stave off pestilence by isolation, fumigation, washing, or dietary; or how to cure it by such measures as bleeding, or plasters to hasten maturation of the buboes.