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Biography

Short Description

Saint Roch (known in Italian as San Rocco, in Spanish and Portuguese as San Roque or São Roque, and sometimes in English as Saint Rock) is a Christian saint widely venerated in the Catholic Church, especially as a protector against plague and other epidemic diseases. Virtually all biographical particulars about him come from hagiographical literature written a century or more after the lifetime traditionally assigned to him. The most influential early written account is a Latin life composed in 1478–1479 by Francesco Diedo, a Venetian who was then serving as podestà of Brescia; this text and subsequent French and Italian versions shaped the standard legend. No document from the fourteenth century has been securely identified as a contemporary witness to Roch. According to the received story he was born in Montpellier in Languedoc to a family of local importance. His father is usually called Jean (John) and is sometimes described as a governor or leading magistrate of the city; his mother is named Libère or a similar form. Legend adds that he was born with a red, cross-shaped mark upon his breast. After his parents died, while he was still a young man, he is said to have distributed his inheritance to the poor and to have departed as a pilgrim for Rome.

The narrative places this pilgrimage in a time of severe pestilence in Italy. Roch is described as remaining in a succession of towns—including Acquapendente, Cesena, Rimini, and Rome—where he cared for the sick in hospitals and public places and was reputed to heal plague victims by tracing the sign of the cross. He then contracted the disease himself, developing a conspicuous sore or bubo, which later art almost always shows on the thigh. To avoid infecting others he withdrew into a forest or wilderness in the region of Piacenza. A celebrated episode, endlessly repeated in painting and sculpture, relates that a dog brought him bread taken from the table of a nearby nobleman, commonly named Gothard or Gottardo Pallastrelli, and licked his wounds. The nobleman discovered the sick pilgrim, assisted him, and in some versions became his disciple. After Roch recovered he resumed his journey.

Traditions concerning his death do not agree. A French strand of the legend holds that he returned toward Montpellier, was arrested as a spy or unknown vagrant, and died in prison there after a period of unrecognized confinement, his identity being revealed only after death by the birthmark or by a miraculous writing. A strong Italian tradition, which became important for the later cult, locates the imprisonment and death at Voghera in Lombardy. In 1485 what were believed to be his relics were solemnly translated to Venice. They are enshrined in the Church of San Rocco, adjacent to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a major confraternity founded in the later fifteenth century in the context of plague and thereafter a centre of his devotion; the scuola’s halls were later decorated with a famous cycle of paintings by Tintoretto. From that period onward veneration of Roch spread rapidly through Catholic Europe and, later, through Spanish and Portuguese overseas territories. He was frequently paired with Saint Sebastian as a saint against the plague and was depicted as a young pilgrim in hat and cloak, pointing to the sore on his leg, accompanied by a dog carrying bread.

The chronology of his life is not historically settled. Older Catholic encyclopedias and liturgical manuals, following Diedo’s statement that he died at about the age of thirty-two, commonly assigned a birth around 1295 and a death in 1327. Other scholars have observed that the plague setting of the legend corresponds more readily to the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century and to later outbreaks than to the 1320s, and they have therefore preferred a floruit in the 1340s to 1370s. Because the earliest substantial sources are late and legendary, neither set of dates can be regarded as demonstrated. Roch did not undergo the later, centralized papal process of canonization; his cult arose by popular devotion and local ecclesiastical approval and was in time registered in the Roman Martyrology. His principal feast is kept on 16 August. He is invoked against plague, cholera, and epidemics, against skin diseases and disorders of the knees, and as patron of dogs, pilgrims, invalids and the sick, surgeons, apothecaries, gravediggers, bachelors, prisoners, and persons who have been falsely accused. Among many places that claim him, Montpellier and Venice are especially prominent.

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