Witch-Hunting and Women in the Art of the Renaissance

The European witchcraze stands as a clear example of the dynamic power of a cultural myth, the myth than an earthly alliance of Satan’s minions (most of them female) had conspired to destroy Christendom. The fantasy usually fed upon fear; myth became reality when the terrible life-denying sorcery of the stereotyped witch could be made to explain unpredictable or catastrophic misfortune. For example, witchcraft might explain shipwreck, sexual impotency, or an outbreak of the plague. In each case, belief in witches assumed the efficacy of an occult system of malevolent, supernatural powers.

An important aspect of this system was the belief that the stars fatefully influenced human life and history. Medieval writers, following Arabic texts, assigned characteristic traits to certain types of people over whom the planets were supposed to “preside”. The presumed influence of the planet Saturn is of special interest here, for under Saturn sign’s were born those of a typically “melancholy” visage or constitution. The crafts of the “melancholic” included those of the conjurer and magician, and since all harmful magic belonged to Saturn too, the black arts of witchcraft and sorcery were assigned to the planet’s spell.  

Northern painters such as Lucas Cranach certainly linked witchcraft, a Saturnine practice, with melancholy, the attitude or disposition of the Saturnine person. Cranach’s panel of 1528 portrays Melancholy , in Renaissance fashion, as a single female figure – in this case as a contemporary German maiden whose fashionable dress and airy surroundings suggest the life of a young woman born to comfort and security. On an open terrace with her are four Italianate putti frolicking with a dog, their innocent play an apparently joyous distraction for the girl. But a horrible apparition overshadows the otherwise tranquil, idealised scene: out of a billowing dark cloud above rides the Prince of Darkness, Sabbath-bound on a flying stallion, leading a wild charge of naked witches, almost all of them women. Equally disturbing is Melancholy’s own activity. She peels a twig, the stick on which, according to one German tradition, the witch was supposed to swear allegiance to the Devil.

In Cranach’s painting artistic convention and artistic imagination combine to provide a window of sorts into the mentality of the painter’s class and age. Originally court painter (after 1505) to Frederick the Wise of Saxony, Cranach became a prosperous businessman (apothecary, printer and book-seller) and member of the Wittenberg city council during the first two decades of the Lutheran reformation. His Melancholy of 1528 expressed one of the cultural assumptions of the sober burgomaster’s world , that the behaviour or disposition of some persons, especially some women, suggested “melancholia” and therefore a suspicious connection with the devilish and the occult. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the great French jurist, Jean Bodin, argued that, physiologically, women could not be melancholics; but on the evidence of this painting, Cranach and his contemporaries certainly believed some melancholics to be females inherently capable of practising witchcraft and sorcery.

In the engravings of the planets which were so popular after 1550, some artists concentrated on Saturn as the patron of witches in particular. Typical of these is an engraving by Henri Leroy in which the dragons of time pull Saturn (personified as the Roman deity) in his chariot above a wild landscape dotted by people of despised or lowly occupations. Among the “children of Saturn” are numerous witches grouped systematically according to the fantastic practices attributed to them at their Sabbath: flight and orgiastic dancing here, necromancy and cannibalism there.

Such beliefs very much preoccupied Hans Baldung Grien, the illustrator of the first German-language treatise on witchcraft, Die Emeis , by Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg (Strassburg, 1517). Although Baldung Grien was probably the first great artist to represent and imagined Sabbath, his chiaroscuro woodcut of four witches, dated 1510, essentially gave visual form to stereotype of the witch already well developed in the questions put to suspects by lay and ecclesiastical interrogators on the Continent. In its written form, the stereotype fused elements of three quite distinct systems of belief: the supernatural, damage-doing powers of the pre-Christian strix; the night-flying capabilities of certain female folk spirits; and the orgiastic, cannibalistic infanticide allegedly practiced by sects of devil-worshipping heretics.

Baldung Grien’s print emphasises two sensational aspects of the developed stereotype: the supposedly unrestrained sexual appetites of witches and the flight-inducing power of their magical potions. In a later version of four witches about to depart for the Sabbath (1514), the artist concentrated on the erotic, trance-inducing powers of the witches’ ointment. In the print of 1510, however, he intellectualised the occult source of such power: the cabbalistic devices about the urn suggest his probable interest in the alchemical, astrological and numerological lore of the Renaissance magus. Much of Renaissance science was geared to explaining the unseen forces which, it was assumed, systematically connected spirit and matter, the celestial and terrestrial spheres. The Cabbala, it was believed, encoded a description of this mysterious system.

Pictorially, the streaming vapours of the witches' concoction lead the mind's eye, as it were, from the magical forces of the universe to the startling domains of the sorceress. And what a world it is as advertised by the wild, sexual exhibitionism of four masterless women! The fantasy of the witches' ungovernable lust finds expression too in the aerial goat-demon, sometimes pictured as the obscene object of the witches' attentions, but serving here as the bestial mount of a sabbath-bound recruit. In any case, the backward-flying, leg-kicking, erotic abandon of the airborne witch, as much as the nudity of all four, reinforces one of the stock assumptions of pre-Reformation misogynistic writers: that a woman's sexual nature pushed her reflexively towards sin. Because she was base, inferior, of a lesser nature than the male, she was considered to be less able to resist temptation, especially the temptations of the flesh, and because her desires were thought to be insatiable, she became, in Tertullian's oft-quoted phrase, the “Devil's gate-way”. Perhaps nowhere is this view of the Christian misogynists more pointedly stated than in an anonymous woodcut of a “Demon Lover” illustrating the text of a tract on witchcraft published at Cologne in 1489. Female sexuality is here married to evil, so to speak, evil made manifest in the form of a hideously attentive gentleman-beast.

The myth of feminine evil spawned an allied assumption - that as witches, some women were able to transform themselves into beasts. This was but one manifestation of the contemporary obsession with devils and demons capable of assuming animal form. The accounts of the legendary temptations of St. Anthony provide some good descriptions of such bestial demons. In the original Latin versions of the legend, a “temptation” (from tentatio ) could mean either something to be resisted or a physical trial or ordeal, such as an attack; and since St. Anthony himself is said to have called his temptations his “devils” or demons, artists followed the translators of the legend by portraying the saint's suffering at the hands of “devils which had beat him so much that he had lost his voice and hearing”. Perhaps a wing of Matthias Grünewald's “Temptation of St. Anthony” (part of the Isenheim Altarpiece which he completed in 1515) most vividly captures the disturbingly realistic forms imagined in the texts: “. . . some in likeness of bulls, and other of lions, of dragons, of wolves, of adders, of serpents and scorpions . . . and leopards, tigers and bears . . .”, each of them howling, growling, hissing and wailing in a fearsome manner. Grünewald's devils purposefully threaten a religious vision of life. Evil moves and breathes, his art declares, and like St. Anthony, one must wilfully combat evil's dangerous life-forms.

Sometimes St. Anthony's demons put him to a different test: sometimes he encountered devils in the form of seductive women inciting him to surrender to the sinful temptations of the flesh. In a fantastic version of “The Temptation of St. Anthony”, a detail of the central panel of the triptych he executed about 1500-05, Hieronymous Bosch specifically emphasised the demonic quality of the woman who tempts men so: she is demonic because she is a beast. Bosch unmistakably fixes her demonic nature by giving her a reptilian tail, though her kneeling pose and monastic attire suggest a woman of very different qualities.

In fact, Bosch's lizard-tailed lady is supposed to be the legendary Devil Queen, St. Anthony's chief female protagonist in a group of stories added to the corpus of the legends in 1342. In the most popular of these stories, the Devil Queen plays the part of the archetypal temptress, on one occasion inviting the saint to bathe with her and her nude attendants. When he overcomes the temptation, she dresses and attempts to persuade him of her miraculous powers, especially her extraordinary ability to heal the sick. The first illustrated manuscript version of this story, dated 1420, was produced specifically for the Hospital Order of St. Anthony. To the hospitals of St. Anthony came those who were suffering the torments of St. Anthony's Fire (probably egotism, a widespread ailment in Bosch's day). The hospitallers gave such patients the famous saint vinage - wine which, because it had been poured over the saint's relics, was believed to be a medicine of miraculous curative power. In Bosch's painting, the Devil Queen appears to mock this aspect of the Order's good works by offering her own shallow cup of wine to the seated figure on the right. Moreover, she kneels before an altar, so Bosch seems to be saying her sorcery denies Christ's sacrifice, her demonic magic confounds the faithful.

The art historian Charles Cuttler has established a clear connection between Bosch’s Devil Queen and the witchcraft allegedly practiced in the Netherlands during the late fifteenth century. The artist himself stated this connection in various motifs appearing on the interior wings of the same triptych. In the upper portion of the interior left wing, Bosch painted a fantastic group of aerial demons, one bearing a praying St. Anthony, the other carrying a ship whose curious complement includes an oversized, naked passenger peering between his legs at St. Anthony. Professor Cuttler discovered that in the image of the ship borne aloft by a beast, Bosch combined two familiar artistic and literary motifs of western European popular and learned culture. In medieval bestiaries, errant sailors sometimes beached their vessel on a half-submerged whale, mistaking its sand-covered back for an island. Of course the “island” came to life with disastrous results for both ship and crew. Bosch replaced the whale, which did not fly, with a sawfish, which readers of the bestiaries believed to be capable of flight. Now the bestiaries identified the flying sawfish with the Devil, likening the destructive power of such a monster to the more deceptive but equally destructive power of both Devil and heretic, who, “through their pleasant speaking and the seduction of their savor, tempt the simple and those who are wanting in judgement”.

Bosch's sawfish thus introduces us to the world of pre-Reformation heresy, the alleged heresy of the witches burned after the “vauderie” of 1459 at Arras, near Bosch's homeland. The connection between Bosch's Temptation of St. Anthony Triptych and the witch-hunts at Arras is fixed by an illustration - the only illustration - accompanying the text of a contemporary tract (dated about 1460) attacking the victims of the Arras panic. This miniature shows what the authorities imagined a witches' sabbath to be like - an assembly where the initiates worshipped the Devil in the form of a goat. Bosch carried over part of this illustration (the part showing witches riding aerial demons to the sabbath) to the interior right wing of his triptych, a panel linked thematically to the heretical crew of the ship carried off course by the sawfish-Devil.

In such pictures we are of course still inhabiting a world of stereotypes. An anonymous south German or Swiss pen-and-ink drawing of two “melancholics”, dated about 1530-40, brings us closer to the realities of sixteenth-century life. A ragged and barefoot old man sits on a barrel on the right; his disheveled, tattered female companion stands on the left. The influence of Albrecht Dürer is clearly at work in the figure of the man who holds his head in sad reflection, surrounded by symbols identifying him as a melancholic of the contemplative type. In the case of the old woman, however, our artist, unlike Dürer and Cranach, abandoned the form of Melancholy as an idealised female. Rather, he followed the illustrators of late-medieval almanacs who portrayed the melancholy “children of Saturn” as very realistic social types - peasants, woodsmen, vagabonds, beggars, thieves, cripples, criminals and such like. But unlike the late-medieval illustrators, he invested his melancholies, especially the female one, with new meaning. The old woman warms herself with a brazier, an instrument traditionally carrying occult, magical associations. The suspicion that she practices magic, and demonic magic at that, is confirmed by the parchment, or fragment of paper, at her feet. On it one can see a six-sided star and other devices of the conjurer. The message is clear: like Cranach's melancholic maid, she is a witch.

Of course, like the figure in Cranach's painting, she is also the product of an artistic tradition. But such traditions in art do not exist independent of society. Art is both a product and an indicator of social and cultural change. Unlike the stereotyped witches of imagined sabbaths, this woman could actually represent many of the impoverished women who were accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe. In this sense, the image of her allows us to look at both a mentality and a society, the mentality of those who discovered witches among women of a particular social class. Such images therefore constitute unusual “pieces of history”: they preserve a visual record of the social and intellectual origins of the great European witch-hunts.