During 2020, the year characterized by the Covid-19 pandemic, many remembered the plagues humanity endured in the past. During an epidemic in which so many people die despite medical advances, "you no longer know which saint to turn to." This verbal expression from the Italian language indicates an ancient tradition in the church, that of the patron saints the faithful rely on and ask for help from various life situations.
Among the various "anti-plague" saints, the most famous and most invoked is Saint Roch. He was a fourteenth century French man from Montpellier who left his father's house to become a pilgrim. He went to Rome and then to other Italian cities
where he healed plague patients simply with the sign of the cross. He himself then fell ill with the plague and miraculously was healed. Later he died in prison, not recognized by his own family members.
His body is now in Venice, Italy, preserved in a church totally dedicated to him, together with the adjacent building Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Both are decorated especially by Jacopo Robusti (1518/19-1594) better known as Tintoretto, a
painter of the Venetian school of the Mannerist period.
In Italy alone, there are at least three thousand churches dedicated to the saint. It is therefore easy to find him represented in many paintings, altarpieces, frescoes and statues. But how may one recognize him? This article introduces the figure of Saint Roch, his iconographic attributes (such as the dog with the bread, the bubo on the thigh, and the angel) and how he is represented in Venetian figurative art of the 1500s by the great artist Tintoretto.
