Julia, a rich courtesan, arrives in Florence. A cardinal fears that her beauty could rival the church's power, and orders inquiries to be made about her Christian beliefs. Cesare, the city's ruler, and Lorenzo both fall madly in love with her. A mob, led by Lorenzo, storms the palace where Julia is about to be tortured. Lorenzo kills Cesare, his father, and rescues her. Lust and excess overtake the city. Even Medardus, a hermit, is overcome by her beauty, and he also is driven to commit sacrilegious acts. Florence's fine buildings are turned into dens of sexual debauchery. Excess and manslaughter continue uninterrupted until the arrival of a ragged female figure personifying the Plague, who infects the whole city with her deadly disease and plays the fiddle while the population dies in droves.
The production company was Eric Pommer's Decla Film-Gesellschaft, the German branch of the French Éclair company. It didn't become Decla-Bioskop until 1920, after merging with Deutsche Bioskop. The latter company was originally formed by Jules Greenbaum in 1899, sold to Carl Moritz Schleussner in 1908, and moved to the Babelsberg studios in 1911. The imposing, crowd-filled, exterior sets of mediaeval Florentine architecture including the Medici Palace were designed by the architect Franz Jaffe, previously royal buildings advisor to the King of Prussia. Some of the more intimate interior scenes were filmed at the Weissensee Studios on 9 Franz Josef-Straße, Weissensee, Berlin, a glasshouse studio built in 1914 for the Continental-Kunstfilm production company. The cameramen Willy Hameister and Emil Schünemann had previously filmed Continental's In Nacht und Eis, the first feature film about the sinking of the : one of the stars in that film was Otto Rippert, who then went on to direct some further ten films for Continental in 1912 and 1913, most of which are considered lost. See alsoList of films made by Continental-Kunstfilm. Cameraman Hameister had also previously worked on the hugely successful film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released earlier that year. Director Rippert had earlier that year directed Fritz Lang's screenplay Dance of Death.
Performances
The film received its première at the Marmorhaus cinema in Berlin, but the music specially composed by Bruno Gellert wasn't finished in time, and wasn't played until several days later.
