Scenes of Contagion (Poussin, ca. 1630; Soderbergh 2011)

This vignette circulates between scenes of contagion in early modern visual culture and in Steven Soderbergh pandemic thriller Contagion (2011). When he paints touch and contagion, Nicolas Poussin gives us to see tears in the fabric of a social world. When Soderbergh films disembodied touch and cough, he alludes to the deceitfulness of surfaces and empty spaces that are never as innocent or clean as they seem to be, and thus to invisible modes of transmission.