Is Titian’s ‘Pietà’ the Best Artwork Ever Created About a Pandemic?

How can artists creatively respond to a health crisis? Many are pondering this question right now amid a coronavirus pandemic, though it’s one that’s been asked for centuries. Titian, one of the High Renaissance’s greatest masters, was among the artists to mull it, and he did so as he made his final work, Pietà (ca. 1576), while Venice was ravaged by a bubonic plague outbreak.
“The picture becomes an artistic testament of sorts in that sense, something that he inte