Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy

In Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy, Guy Tal presents the first extended study of representations of witchcraft in Renaissance and Baroque Italian art, and it is a delicious read. While there have been previous examinations of artistic representation of witchcraft during the period of the witch hunts—such as those by Linda C. Hults (2005), Claudia Swan (2005), and Charles Zika (2007)—there has been comparatively less attention paid to Italian material, as the vast majority of witchcraft art appeared in Northern Europe. That includes work by leading lights of the Northern Renaissance such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, and Pieter Breugel the Elder, as well as cruder woodcuts and drawings from the lesser-known artists that illustrated witchcraft pamphlets. By contrast, Italian artists, much like their counterparts in the Italian judiciary, were overall far less fixated upon diabolical witchcraft, with the notable exceptions of Salvator Rosa and Dosso Dossi. However, the smaller corpus of Italian witchcraft art, just like the smaller corpus of Italian witchcraft trials, is still of great interest and relevance, particularly the intermingling of native Italian traditions with elite demonological preoccupations. Tal’s great achievements here are to call attention to the variety of ways in which witchcraft in Italian art has been represented, to point out how associations of witchcraft in certain pictures have been overlooked, and, most importantly, to illustrate how artists invoked interpictorial and intertextual associations to invite multiple interpretations. He moves beyond the well-known works by Rosa and Dossi to examine more ambiguous and subtle iconographies, and to articulate how various works of art engage with and negotiate discourses of witchcraft. Tal argues that “images of witchcraft—too intractable and ambiguous to really serve a didactic-moralizing function that either exalts the witches’ deeds or cautions against them—engage the beholder in an emotional and intellectual experience of seeing and interpreting witchcraft” (21).The book consists of five beautifully illustrated chapters, bounded by an introduction and an epilogue. In the introduction, Tal lays out his overall approach, focused upon artistic imitation and innovation, and informed by both reception theory and gender studies; he likewise situates his analysis within the larger context of European and Italian witchcraft scholarship. Chapter 1, “Old Women Under Investigation: The Drab Housewife and the Grotesque Hag,” asks how we are to identify a woman as a witch, whether in art or in life. Through close analysis of two pictures of old women—an engraving by Enea Vico (based on a drawing by Parmigianino) and a drawing by Leonello Spada—Tal demonstrates the slipperiness of witchcraft marks. He argues that Vico’s drab housewife has sinister undertones—literally, since Vico reversed the original drawing to make the figure left-handed—while Spada’s screaming hag is better understood as a supernatural nightmare figure than a human witch. Chapter 2, “Chimerical Procession: The Poetics of Inversion and Monstrosity,” where Tal introduces his ongoing theme of hybridity and monstrosity, tackles the celebrated engraving of a wild ride to the sabbath, Lo Stregozzo (1520s). A detailed analysis of the skeletal chimera and the rump-first male figure are not just fascinating meditations on elements of witchcraft discourse; they also allow Tal to tentatively identify the creator of the original drawing as Giulio Romano.Parmigianino’s delightful Witch Riding on a Phallus (1530s) provides the perfect subject for the central chapter 3, “Priapic Ride: Gigantic Genitals, Penile Theft, and Other Phallic Fantasies,” as the complex history of this etching allows for a dizzying array of interpretive possibilities. Tal’s strategy of privileging multiplicity of meaning is on excellent display here. While he leans toward seeing the picture as satirical, his delineation of four potential avenues of interpretation invite both reader and viewer to explore further. Chapter 4, “Magical Metamorphoses: Variations on the Myths of Circe and Medea,” addresses early modern interpretations of those towering ancient Greek models of the seductive sorceress. While the gendered nature of witchcraft representation has been a focus throughout the book, it is here where Tal delves into the subject most thoroughly. By linking Circe to depictions of delusional Melancholy, and by problematizing Medea’s beneficial magic (specifically, the rejuvenation of Aeson), Tal argues that early modern artists reinscribed the belief that diabolical witchcraft was a uniquely feminine vice. Chapter 5, “A Visit from the Devil: Horror and Liminality in Caravaggesque Paintings” studies a clutch of four seventeenth-century paintings, denoted collectively by Tal as Witch Alarmed by a Devil, linked by their unique iconography of a terrified witch (whether male or female) being menaced by demonic claws that extend from out of frame. Tal argues that the occlusion of the devil not only intensifies the emotion—which, as he notes, will be familiar to any horror film fan—but also participates in contemporary intellectual and theological discussions of demons’ liminal nature. In his epilogue, Tal addresses two pictures by Salvator Rosa, the most prolific Italian producer of witchcraft scenes. He points out that, while Rosa is the most famous, all of the other artists discussed in the preceding chapters drew from both Northern and Italian aesthetics, mixed comedic and horrifying elements, and invited multiple avenues of interpretation in their works, just as Rosa does. Tal concludes by restating the introductory thesis that early modern Italian witchcraft images are “heterogenous, inventive, subtle and sophisticated” (324).The pleasures of this text are many, but I was most struck by the fact that, as Tal elucidates, Italian witchcraft art occupies an intriguingly liminal space, nibbling around the edges of more straightforward discourses of Renaissance humanism, classicism, and the pan-European conspiracy theory of diabolical witchcraft. It’s a great choice to begin the book with a discussion of Parmagianino’s Old Woman with a Distaff (1530s), which the engraver, Enea Vico, deliberately reversed: Tal convincingly argues that Vico invites the viewer to take on the role of Inquisitor, to scrutinize this ordinary-seeming woman for hints of diabolism—which “evokes the difficulty of identifying the witch in the real world” (43). In the real world, during the most intensive and lethal period of the witch hunts (1550–1650), the Roman Inquisition was almost exclusively focused on stamping out Protestantism; secular courts were more willing to entertain charges of sorcery (maleficia) and love magic (an Italian specialty). But overall, the Italian peninsula never saw the extreme death tolls achieved north of the Alps. Indeed, as Tal remarks, the great artistic centers of Florence, Rome, Bologna, Parma, and Genoa saw only a handful of executions. He explains, “since I found no visual evidence in the images themselves to connect them to witch-hunts, I prescinded from imposing any particular ‘context’ on them (whether trials or executions)” (23). Thus, Tal’s focus on Italian artists’ dialectical use of witchcraft scenes as spaces of ambivalence, fantasia, and artistic innovation becomes clear.This focus is especially relevant for his assertion that misogyny is a key element of Italian witchcraft art: Despite the fact that during the Italian witch hunts men were almost as likely to be accused as women (and in Naples, more likely), almost all the visual depictions of witches are female, suggesting that “the witch emerges in these artworks as a cipher for patriarchal anxieties and fantasies about women” (31). Tal consistently returns to the theme of witchcraft as an inversion of divinely ordained hierarchies of gender: Domineering women, monstrous and voracious, enact their wills upon the vulnerable bodies of men, who suffer transformation and emasculation. His analysis of the crouching male nude in Lo Stregozzo is particularly enlightening: Through a close reading of form and iconography, Tal identifies this figure as the Devil. Often presented in literature and theology as the ape of God, this Devil is a striking parody of Michelangelo’s depiction of the holy buttocks in The Creation of Sun, Moon, and Planets (Sistine Chapel). The Devil presents himself to the viewer as if demanding the obscene kiss, but his twisted, vulnerable posture—and the fact that the larger, more muscular hag rides above him—suggests that even the Devil himself is laid low by female wickedness. Even a more satirical depiction of male vulnerability and female mastery, such as Parmigianino’s A Witch Riding on a Phallus, still alludes to the alleged power of witches to steal men’s penises, whether as transportation to the Sabbath or, as the Malleus Maleficarum famously claims, to become pets fed on oats and barley. Occasionally, artists were willing to invite the viewer to feel some sympathy for the witch, as in the four Witch Alarmed by a Devil pictures; however, it is not accidental that two of these paintings depict male witches—one a self-portrait by Pieter van Laer, and the other a possible reference to Marlowe’s tragic Doctor Faustus.Throughout, Tal embeds his analyses in careful and detailed textual and pictorial documentation, not just of early modern material but equally of the classical sources that had such a seismic impact on the artistic and intellectual culture of the period. In a solid study of classical reception, Tal argues that early modern artists used the figures of Circe and Medea to weigh in on contemporary debates about the reality and beneficial aspects of magic. Artists like Alessandro Allori and Giovanni Castiglione painted Circe in the traditional pose of allegorical Melancholy, despite there being no classical evidence for this association. However, witchcraft skeptics theorized that women who confessed to witchcraft were in fact suffering from melancholic delusion. Through this imagery, Allori and others effectively “rob[bed] her of her vaunted supernatural abilities” (199) and placed Circe firmly within medical, rather than mythological, discourse. But why? As Tal points out, even hardline believers in witchcraft’s reality balked at the literal transformation of humans into animals, deeming belief in such powers to be heretical, and artists were therefore inclined to play with more ambiguous theorizations of metamorphosis. Likewise, Medea was subject to early modern diabolic interpretation. While many artistic depictions in this period show her performing one of her few beneficent acts of magic—the rejuvenation of Jason’s father, Aeson—most images imply, with varying degrees of subtlety, her ambivalence and association with the demonic. (A notable exception is Girolamo Macchietti’s Medea Rejuvenating Aeson, in the Palazzo Vecchio studiolo of the alchemy-obsessed Grand Duke Francesco I de’Medici.)It is here, in chapter 4, that I noted my first (and frankly only) quibble with Tal’s analysis. He notes that ancient Greek witches, unlike those of Roman poetry, are presented as young and beautiful, a difference he appears to attribute to cultural preferences (189). However, it is of paramount importance, in the Greek sources, that Circe and Medea are demigoddesses. The Latin literary Canidia and Meroe, by contrast, are resolutely, disgustingly human. While early modern—and, indeed, ancient Roman—anti-witchcraft polemics often lumped Circe and Medea in with human wrongdoers, it is still vital to understand their ancient context as semidivine beings; indeed, Tal himself makes a similar argument, in chapter 1, for reading an image usually labeled a ”witch” as a nonhuman nightmare figure instead. While Tal gestures this way in his discussion of Gioacchino Assereto’s twin pendants of Medea Rejuvenating Aeson and Apollo Flaying Marsyas, I would have enjoyed a more direct linkage of their early modern representations to that of other classical divinities.Other than that minor issue, my only complaint about this book is that I wanted it to be twice as long—not because there was anything lacking, but simply because I so enjoyed reading it. There is much here to delight scholars from the many fields that converge on the subject of witchcraft; Tal articulates the specific methodologies of art history, ably interweaving approaches and insights from other disciplines. In addition, the writing is clear, thoughtful, and quietly witty. I found myself wanting to know what Tal would say about one of the few overt early modern depictions of the witch goddess Hecate (by Francesco Salviati in the Palazzo Vecchio). Likewise, I wondered whether “witches alarmed by devils” could, in their depiction of magic users unnerved by the powers they have called up, exhibit a thematic link to the international tale type of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (ATU 325*), a version of which appears in Lucian’s The Lover of Lies. In sum, this work is a wonderful achievement on multiple levels, and anyone interested in the intersection of early modern art and witchcraft should treat themselves to a copy.

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