The High Renaissance &

Mannerism

     

    

(Renaissance   Art Map)

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

I

Masaccio's classical nobility, Piero della Francesca's elegant geometry, Fra Angelico's enchanting purity, Botticelli's wistfully gracious allegories, Mantegna's hard-edged

monumentality: these are among the most famous images of the Quattrocento (fifteenth century) in Italy. They all use the solemn vet cheerful language of the Renaissance, with

its deliberate rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman art and culture. Whether in the tranquility of private studies, in the lecture halls of universities, or in the most fashionable

courts, artists and writers created one of the deepest and longest-lasting cultural transformations that the world has ever seen. Without lessening their intense religious feelings

(and it was a deeply religious age), the fifteenth-century artists broke loose from medieval shackles. They turned their attention out to the natural world, so often rejected by

medieval men, and took an active role as responsible players in the world and its history. Christopher Columbus' undertaking can be seen almost as the symbolic seal on a century

that fell no fear of the unknown and embraced discovery. But, significantly, Columbus was not trying to discover a new world but to find a new wav to an old one, that of Asia. So,

too, did most Quattrocento scholars and artists attempt to rediscover the lost world of Antiquity. In triumphantly doing so, they created an utterly new world.

It is difficult to avoid the cliched but fascinating comparison between Lorenzo the Magnificent's Florence or the splendid court of Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino with classical

Athens at its zenith under Pericles in the fifth century B.C. The first Greek Humanism, with its belief "Man is the measure of all things" is the key to the Renaissance, a civilization

which also placed human beings at the center of the universe and which exalted culture and art. This was achieved through the creativity of architects, painters, and sculptors who

applied an ideal of perfect geometry to the correct "imitation" of nature. It was also made possible by the passionate and indeed courageous patronage of dukes, bishops,

republics, and cities, prepared to back radical commissions.

If we look at Italian civilization in the fifteenth century, we see something thrilling, not only because of the intellectual attempts to rediscover the classical world. Indeed, the

greatest fascination of the early Renaissance lies in its variety and the continuous contrast between very different forms of expression. This artistic and cultural plurality was

encouraged by the complex political structure in Italy, split between countless city states and principalities. This diversity assumes particular significance when we take into

account the vital role of enlightened patrons in the fifteenth century. Their awareness of the "political" role of the image shaped and conditioned expressive choices and specific-

iconographies. The republics of Venice and Florence, among others, emphasized the part that all citizens had to play in government and administration (even though, in fact, in

both cities aristocratic oligarchies held power). In other centers great and small, the courts of the local princes were experiencing their moments of greatest splendor. Just after the

middle of the century, the Peace of Lodi (1454) confirmed the dominance of five main states (the duchy of Milan, the republics of Venice and Florence, the Papacv in Rome, and the

Kingdom of Naples). But smaller states could still hold the balance between their bigger neighbors and so had potential importance.

   

Raphael

 

 

 

Lorenzo Costa

 

 

 

 

Fifteenth-ccnturv painting in Italy witnessed the flowering of numerous local schools. Each was capable of coming up with

fresh, innovative ideas thanks to their relative freedom of expression and the open dialogue with other cities. In this wav,

a relationship grew up between centers and outlying districts which provided the impetus for all the most important

moments of Italian painting. In concrete terms, this can be seen in the rich, widespread presence of works of art right

across the country. No other century gives such a clear picture of the underlying characteristics of Italian painting and by

which it can be identified. The belief in the intrinsic dignity of human beings led to harmonious spaces, based upon

mathematical laws, into which all figures seem to fit perfectly. Italian painting in the fifteenth century above all breathes

the air of superbly well-calculated proportion. No one aspect of a painting dominates the others, every part is in

relationship to the whole. Even violent expressions and feelings seem to be portrayed with controlled composure. The

"waning of the Middle Ages" merges almost imperceptibly with the dawn of modern humanity.

Trying to condense the main lines of the history of painting, we can hazard the sweeping statement that the first years of

the century's art seems covered in the gold, gems, and precious flowers of International Gothic. Gentile da Fabriano is the

most elegant of those who worked in this vein. He is also someone who reminds us of how frequently fifteenth-century

painters traveled. This, combined with the influx of foreign works and artists, meant that comparisons and modernization

were part of a continuous process. By checking the dates, we can understand how frenetic the pace of innovation must

have been. In 142 3 Gentile da Fabriano painted his masterpiece (Adoration of the Magi for S.Trinita) in Florence. The

following year Masolino and Masaccio started work on the frescos in the Brancacci Chapel at S. Maria del Carmine,

situated on the other side of the Arno. Only a few months and a lew hundred yards separate the most splendid flowering

of International Gothie and the revolutionary, unadorned, terse exaltation of the human figure that Masaccio created.

In Florence, Masaccio's radicalism (at much the same time as Donatcllo was transforming sculpture and Brunelleschi

modernizing architecture) swiftly molded the vocabulary of a new generation of young artists. From the 1430s onwards,

painters such as Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, and Filippo Lippi searched for a personal compromise between Masaccio's

cogent, neo-Giottesquc austerity and the still widespread taste for rich and complex images. One major innovation can be

noticed at once. Gold backgrounds disappeared and were replaced by sweeping landscapes or realistic architectural

backdrops. Similarly, the polyptych was replaced by the "tabula quadra" [square picture] as a single altar-piece in which

all the characters were involved in the same scene. An excellent example of the new formula applied to the Sacra

Conversazione is Domenico Veneziano's Altarpiece of St. Lucy of the Magnolias which is outstanding for its nobility.

Meanwhile, courts in southern and northern Italy alike were exploring the contrasts with art from northern Europe, in

particular Flemish and Provencal painting. This comparison between Italian masters and the influx of work from north of

the Alps was typical of the last period of Gothic art in Naples and Milan. However, it bore different results in the two cities.

Pisanello, one of the greatest painters of the day, traveled constantly between Verona, Mantua, Ferrara, Venice, Milan,

Rome, and Naples. Such movement encouraged the transition of taste in the splendid aristocratic courts away from

International Gothic toward the Renaissance rediscovery of ancient art. While in Florence painters in the earlv fifteenth

century concentrated above all on the human figure and on the quest for an "ideal city," fashioned in clear and pure

architectural forms, in some courts artists still depicted plants and animals, customs and landscapes, feelings and

relationships with highly detailed, intricate craftsmanship. In fact, this type of courtly art complemented the Tuscan

artists' work in defining the rules of three-dimensional vision, which could sometimes become almost too cerebral. It took

the truly universal genius of Leonardo da Vinci to bring the two strands together at the end of the century. On the other

hand, Florence itself was not entirely resistant to the charms of an art rich in detail and narrative content, as shown by

Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco of the The journey of the Magi for the private chapel in the Medici Palace.

In northern Italy, a complete understanding of the rules of perspective was reached when Donatello worked for a time in

Padua. By 1450 this Venetian city had become the most advanced northern center of new creative ideas, although this

advance depended on visiting Tuscan masters as much as the young, talented northern painters working in Padua. This

led to an explosion in differing local styles. An example of this is the odd and highly original painting turned out in Ferrara

by Cosme Tura and Francesco del Cossa (whose frescos in Palazzo Schifanoia provide a fascinating testimony of their

work). Another is the highly decorative refinement of Carlo Crivelli's work in the Marches. Above all, this was the period

that gave us the archeologically accurate but highly dramatic genius of Andrea Mantegna. The Bridal Chamber in Mantua

marks a new era in the style of ltalian courts. Gone is all gorgeous late-Gothic love of ornament. Instead we have solemn

and highly intellectual Renaissance images. The most complete example of a Renaissance court, however, was the Ducal

Palace built by Federico da Montefeltro in the small city of Urbino. With visionary patronage, the Duke brought men of

letters, Renaissances, architects, and painters from all parts of Italy to Urbino. Each made his contribution to an

international dialogue on art on the highest level, but the outstanding figure in Urbino was surely Piero della Francesca.

He produced works, such as the Montefeltro Altarpiece now in the Brera Gallery in Milan, that are unsurpassable models

of how form and color can be blended into mathematical perspective. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, his austere

geometrical art was not widely popular.

By the 1470s knowledge of perspective and how to paint a three-dimensional image had almost certainly penetrated

every corner of Italy. Although the manner differed from place to place, by this date a revolution in painting had already

taken place. In Florence, this was the age of Botticelli. Thanks both to the Medicis' support and the sophisticated

philosophical and esthetic  Neoplatonism of their circle, Botticelli produced huge pagan allegories, such as Spring and the

Birth of Venus marked by powerful, elegant but clear design, not without a Gothic grace. These masterpieces epitomize

the Golden Age of Lorenzo the Magnificent. In 147S, Antonello da Messina arrived in Venice, fresh from contacts both with

Flemish painting, which had pioneered the use of oil paints, and the work of Piero della Francesca. Thanks to Antonello's

time in the city of the lagoons, the Venetian school abandoned the last vestiges of Byzantine art and Gothic tradition and

began their own new, long-lasting and distinctive Renaissance. The main artist in this phase was Giovanni Bellini, who laid

the foundations of Venetian painting and shaped its essence. Giovanni Bellini can, in fact, be credited with being the first

 

 

Giorgione

 

 

Leonardo da Vinci

 

 

artist to depict fully all the subtleties of atmospheric light and shadow. At first his example was only taken up partially by

Vivarini and Carpaccio, not being developed in full until the start of the following century through Giorgione and Titian's

early work.

A true Renaissance school of art also grew up in Milan under the Sforza dukes, thanks initially to the work of Vincenzo

Foppa and Bramante, but they were soon eclipsed by Leonardo da Vinci who, arriving in 1481, effectively created the

Milanese School. After a long period of crisis, when the Popes were either absent or far too busy with political problems to

act as art patrons, Rome also began to reclaim its role as a great cultural center. Pope Sextus IV built the Sistine Chapel

which was decorated around 1480 by artists such as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino. This represented one of the

triumphs of sophisticated but elegant Quattrocento painting, devoid of all harshness. Perugino's sweet and very urbane

style was extremely popular throughout Italy. It was from this high plateau of artistic excellence that Raphael would soon

soar.

There arc two other important factors to bear in mind. The first concerns the technical developments that took place in

painting and in the equipment artists used. At the start of the fifteenth century, monumental painting fell exclusively into

one of two categories: frescos or wood panels. There was a marked preference for polyptychs on a gold background,

framed in richly carved surrounds. These were the most widespread tvpe of late-Gothic painting. The progressive growth

in the acceptance of the view that art should imitate reality led to gold backgrounds being replaced by landscapes and to

the fragmented device of the polyptych being abandoned in favor of large single pictures. An evergrowing number of

patrons, many of whom commissioned work that was no longer exclusively religious in nature, welcomed even further

developments. Equally important after the middle of the centurv, and thanks mainly to Antonello da Messina, the use of

oil as the preferred medium began to gain favor throughout Italy. Within two generations it had replaced traditional color

techniques using tempera (made of egg yolk, quick drving and so ideal for fresco work but less capable of expressing

atmosphere). Oil initially was used for small-scale works such as portraits, but was later used for altarpieces too. Some

artists like Botticelli at times worked in a mixture of the two mediums.

The second factor concerns the role of the artist in societv. In the previous centurv, some masters such as Giotto had

already begun to raise the status of artists, but in the early fifteenth century the social rank of painters remained fairly

low, on a par with specialized craftsmen. Painting was considered one of the "mechanical arts" in which manual dexterity

was the most important consideration. The mechanical arts were contrasted unfavorably with the liberal arts which were

based on writing and the intellect. Artists' studios across Europe in the fifteenth century-were more like workshops or

factories than libraries. Thev turned out not only paintings, but many other products: decorated furniture, costumes,

heraldic shields, the trappings for public holidays, flags and so on. But in Italy the way that artists increasinglv took part

in the cultural and philosophical debate (Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca being two typical examples) led

to major social developments which had almost no parallel in other countries.

During the Renaissance, Italian painters became intellectuals, taking part in dialogues with their patrons and with men of

letters. They did not merely carry out a work but also claimed the right to discuss its underlying ideas. This should be

borne in mind when we consider the perennial greatness and importance of a century in which art above all else

contributed to giving humanity a new horizon, and perspectives hitherto undreamed of. The ideals of fifteenth-century

humanism, seen from a distance of five hundred years, may appear Utopian. Its premises of universal harmony and the

restoration of a civilization governed by serene, rational thought were only partially achieved even at the zenith of the

Renaissance. Nevertheless, through its marvelous accomplishments, it left to humanity one of the few periods in art that

has lastingly exalted the human spirit.

Lucas Cranach

 

 

Titian

 

 

Massys 

 

Correggio

  

II

Fifteenth-century Renaissance art can be seen as a reflection of a calm and stable epoch in search of harmony. The often

grandiose and dramatic art of the Cinquecento (sixteenth century) symbolizes a different century, one torn by wars,

troubled by profound doubts and shaken by new religious movements. While some nation states (Spain, France, England)

consolidated themselves, new routes were opened up by overseas discoveries and whole new worlds were discovered.

Meanwhile Martin Luther's Reformation tore central Europe apart, the Ottoman Empire of Turkey continued its advance

up to the gates of Vienna and the plague recurred again and again. These were events that shook the Continent

politically, economically, and culturally, and changed Europe for ever. It is no coincidence that historians often classify

the fifteenth century as part of the Middle Ages, whereas the sixteenth century is considered the beginning of the Modern

Age. In Italy there could no longer be anv doubt that foreign powers were there to stay (the whole of the South as well as

the former Duchy of Milan fell under Spanish rule and only Venice retained a real independence). At the same time, the

old-established patterns of trade across the Mediterranean seemed threatened by new ocean routes to the East, although

this threat was slow to materialize.

But the century opened splendidly. Its first twenty years are known as the High Renaissance, when Leonardo, Raphael,

Michelangelo, and Titian - bitter rivals but ones who constantly exchanged ideas — produced unprecedented

masterpieces, fulfilling the ideals pursued by artists since Giotto two centuries earlier. Italian art as a whole reached

heights that have never been surpassed, and was confirmed as by far the richest, most varied, and influential school in

Europe. However, Italy's increasingly troubled political situation (it was the chief battle ground for the constantly clashing

armies of France, Spain, and Germany up to 1559) meant that both artists and their works sometimes went abroad, lured

by rich monarchs. They took with them the latest in Italian Renaissance art which spread throughout Europe. Leonardo

moved to France where he died, so bringing the High Renaissance to a still medieval country. Other, lesser painters such

as Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio followed, founding the Fontainebleau school of painting. Great rulers such as the

Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II became Titian's main patrons, partlv supplanting the old-established families of

small Italian courts. At the same time there were already the first signs of the economic and historical decline that would

undermine Italian art in the very long run, although the Seicento (seventeenth century) saw another golden age in the

arts.

The Cinquecento was also a century of self-portraits. The great Italian masters had already acquired the same high

cultural status enjoyed by Renaissance scholars, and were no longer regarded as menial craftsmen. Their interest in self-

portraiture (the cheapest type of portraiture, after all) partlv reflects their new-found status. Leonardo drew his own aging

self in the wrinkled and meditative psychological self-portrait in his Merlin-like drawing done in extreme old age. At the

apex of the High Renaissance, Raphael's self-portrait depicts him at case among scholars and philosophers in "The School

of Athens." Decades later, utterly disillusioned with history and life, Michelangelo produced his self-portrait as St.

Bartholomew, a ragged old beggar with flayed skin in his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. The Mannerist painter

Parmigianino turned his Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror into a prodigious virtuoso exercise. Titian's great series of self-

portraits show a painter physically growing older but whose understanding grew ever more vigorous — an artist ready to

meet eternitv with paintbrush in hand.

Without simplifying art history too much, we can say that in the sixteenth century major changes occurred about every

two decades. Each change was, often deliberately, part of the process of constant renewal, for artists were still keen to

experiment in any way they possibly could, untrammelled by the past. Each period contained an abundance and variety

of art forms without parallel in any other century of art history, save perhaps our own. Up to 1520 the High Renaissance

sparkled with the splendor of its Golden Age. From 1520 to 1540 new religious doubts and questionings on the destiny of

man opened the way to new concepts in painting which later culminated in Michelangelo's Last Judgment. From 1 540 to

1 560 a dichotomy emerged between the hyper-sophisticated Mannerism of Tuscany and Rome and the sensual depiction

of reality of the Venetian and Lombard schools. Between 1560 and 1580 Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese brought

Venetian painting to a triumphant and dramatic climax. The last twenty years of the century were, by comparison, years

of relative stagnation artisticallv until Caravaggio rediscovered the natural world with his revolutionary realism and the

Carracci dynasty revitalized the classical tradition. Michelangelo and Titian were both particularly long-lived. If we

compare the two great masters' early work with that of their old age, we are instantly struck by the chasm between the

generally sunnily optimistic art of the early sixteenth century and the often work tortured of the second half.

Among the key events shaping much of the cultural pattern of the first half of the Cinquccento, some occurred before the

turn of the century. In 1492 Christopher Columbus had inadvertently discovered a new continent. This spelled the end of

the old map of the world, which the fifteenth century had shared with Antiquity. The Earth was found to be bigger than

the supposedly omniscient Greek philosophers had ever guessed. Also Florence, capital of the earlv Renaissance, was in

turmoil after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492, terrified by the admonitory sermons ot Fra Savonarola.

Although four years later the Dominican monk was burned at the stake, his condemnation of the vanities of pleasure-

seeking and paganism shook the conscience of many, including artists. The charming style in which some painters had

worked throughout their long careers (Botticelli, Pcrugino) was now found inadequate.

In the first years of the sixteenth century, Florence was again the center of artistic excitement, as Leonardo and

Michelangelo competed to decorate the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio with huge battle scenes, which impressed all

contemporaries, including the young Raphael. At the same time Michelangelo carved his David, the supreme emblem of

High Renaissance heroism. But it was Rome which was to be the real center of Cinquccento art, as the popes began their

grandiose project of rebuilding St. Peter's. Michelangelo was summoned there in 1505 to build Pope Julius II's tomb — a

gigantic project never to be finished. Instead, in 1508 he began decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with his back-

breaking and breathtaking masterpiece, the fresco cycle of The Creation, where the fall from the Garden of Eden is

portrayed with passionate intensity. The same year saw Raphael start work on another part of the work of the Vatican,

the Stanza della Scgnalura, where he created an enchanted equilibrium. In contrast to the grandiose power to be found in

Michelangelo, the frescos in the Stanze di Raffaello (or Raphael Rooms as they are now often known), show a combination

of majestic grandeur with sweet gracefulness which seemed to incarnate the ideals of the High Renaissance. Plato (a

portrait probably of Leonardo) and Aristotle dispute in the fresco The School of Athens as though they were members of

the papal court — a court which sometimes felt itself more pagan Greek than Christian, but where pagan and Christian

thought united in general harmony. What united both Michelangelo's and Raphael's art was their immense, supremely

assured, grandeur.

The change in style and generation, however, was not felt only in central Italy. Milan was being fought over by the French

and the Spanish when Leonardo returned to put his own seal on the local school. In Venice the narrative and analytical

tradition of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini was replaced, first by the melancholy, poetic dreamy sweetness of Giorgione

and then by Titian's first explosions of color which characterize The Assumption on the high altar of the Venetian church

of the Frari. These new leaders of art were quickly surrounded by schools, assistants, and lesser imitators. They were also

supported by a lively output of writings and treatises on art. These theoretical essays (which culminated in the famous

Lives of the Most Excellent Artists from Cimabue to Michelangelo published by Giorgio Vasari in 1550) began to uncover

an ever-more marked contrast between the supremacy of draughtsmanship venerated in Florence and Rome and the

rich, dramatic love and use of color that the Venetians adored. At the same time a few painters who lived highly

individual lives, such as Lorenzo Lotto, raised the question of whether other, more personalized, ways of painting might

not be possible.

Raphael's death (1 520) coincided with the rapid growth of the Lutheran schism which the highly cultured, peace-loving

Pope Leo X (Lorenzo the Magnificent's son) could not halt. A few years later the Eternal Citv was dealt a seemingly mortal

blow by the Sack of Rome (1527), and the High Renaissance was finally over, except for some artists in Venice. In such a

changed world, painters perceived the urgent need to rethink the forms and rules of their art. The most thoroughgoing

proposals came out of Florence where Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino started by studying and faithfully emulating the

works of Michelangelo and Raphael and ended by violently distorting such traditional forms. Their frozen figures flaunted

wildly contorted poses and nervously melodramatic expressions, far removed from Raphael's serenity. A new movement

was born: Mannerism. During the course of the century this was to become the dominant artistic current in central Italy

and, through the export of works of art and of artists themselves, much of Europe. In northern Italy, however, they had

different ideas. At about the same time, that is to sav around 1 520, provincial artists began working on large-scale

decorative projects. These were much appreciated by the public. Instead of the tormented estheticism of the Tuscan

Mannerists these moving works blended all the elements together in harmonv. The frescos painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari

at Varallo, bv Pordenone in Cremona and above all by Correggio in Parma provide a daring foretaste of the most thrilling

compositions of Baroque art.

There is no doubt, however, that in their respective cities of Rome and Venice it was Michelangelo and Titian who

determined how art developed. After almost 30 years Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel to paint The Last

Judgment, the final and most terrible epic in the history of the human race. By then, Titian was the international artist par

excellence. He painted a host of memorable portraits which captured the faces and characteristics of the most powerful

people in Europe. In 1 545 the two great artists, by then both growing old, met in Rome and failed to agree. Both had

been commissioned by the Farnese Pope Paul III, who also called the Council of Trent at the start of the Counter-

Reformation.

The work of this huge religious council was closely linked to the more strictly political tasks demanded by the Emperor

Charles V and the Diet of Augsburg, which Titian also attended while painting the Emperor. From the middle of the

century, the end of over 30 years of conflict in Germany between Catholics and Protestants meant that the way religious

images had long been used needed to be reassessed. As had happened two centuries earlier after the Black Death of 1

348, the century divided almost into two halves. On the one hand, and especially in Florence and Rome, Mannerism

became ever-more sophisticated and intellectual, striving toward the artificial creation of a new-painting and celebrating

the rule of often despotic dukes. Bronzino's portraits arc a perfect example of this, but they were nonetheless outdone by

the bizarreness of some the richest and most fancilul foreign collectors, such as the Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II who was

Arcimboldo's patron. On the other hand, in the smaller centers, such as Brescia, Bergamo and the Marches, there was a

rediscovery of the human dimension in direct touch with reality. Here we have forerunners of Caravaggio's radical realism

and of the return of simple treatments of religious subjects.

The expansion of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean posed a real threat to Venice whose island empire

was being continually attacked. Not even victory in the Battle of Lepanto (1571) removed the ever-present Turkish

danger. Despite this, in the sixteenth century as a whole Venice put on a glittering display, building classically-inspired

palaces, churches, libraries, and villas designed by Sansovino and Palladio. It also boasted a glittering list of magnificent

painters. Titian had embarked on a solitary and wonderful adventure. In his extreme old age he painted some of the most

striking images ever produced in art, works so unfinished and evanescent that they move almost toward abstraction.

These were not the works which made him famous but they appeal to us now more than ever. Generally, the Venetian

school produced artists who were at ease in any situation, always willing and able to take on decorative cvcles of

enormous size. In the 1560s and 1570s artistic activity in Venice reached levels of the very highest creativity. You can

choose the sunlit, sumptuous, spectacular scenes created bv Paolo Veronese, where no touch of religious controversy

and doubt is permitted to darken scenes of franklv pagan sensuality — but a sensuality transmuted by the power of art to

a higher plane. Or you can choose the intensely spiritual, highly dramatic canvases of Tintoretto, which rival

Michelangelo's greatest works, or turn to Jacopo Bassano's marvelously realistic views of peasant life in the mountains.

Bv the close of the century, however, the great stream ol Iresh geniuses seemed to have dried up. One after another the

greatest painters had died: Michelangelo in 1 564,Titian in 1 576, Veronese in 1588, and Tintoretto in 1594. A new

generation of artists would have to make its mark on a very different artistic landscape. It would also have to stand up to

ever fiercer international competition from new schools of painting, themselves often originallv inspired bv Italy. Little by

little, Italy was destined to lose its central position in the world of European art, although for centuries to come it would

remain a place of artistic pilgrimage. In the seventeenth century artists as different as Rubens and Poussin would visit

Italv, and Poussin, the founder of French classicism, would choose to spend his lite in Rome. Even so, the last years of the

century saw Italian art adrift and directionless. The narrow puritanism of the early Counter-Reformation, with its distrust

of all exuberance and artistic independence, had blighted even the art of Venice. The most luminous period of Italian art

and culture therefore closed on a note of muted tragedy.This is all the more striking because it came after such an

extraordinary era of the human spirit.

The adventurous path pursued by Renaissance man was first trodden in the proud citv of Florence by Dante and Giotto.

They set out to claim a new role for humanity to play in the world ("fatti non foste a viver come bruti/ ma per scguir

virtute c conoscenza" ["you were not made to live like savages/ but to follow virtue and knowledge"). Over the

generations the Renaissance had taken on a scale and depth that could not possibly have been foreseen at the start. At

its zenith, it produced a unique generation of the greatest masters, all of them born between the middle and the end of

the fifteenth century. It was in the centuries of the Renaissance that our own modern wav of living in the world was first

hinted at and shaped. With that came our modern ability to relate to our own history and destiny, our wav of interpreting

the present as a link in the chain between a passionately-studied past and a future that we can face with equanimity.

With the Renaissance came also a new awareness of the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans and with that a slowly

achieved awareness quite lacking in the Middle Ages — that such a world was over and past. The Renaissance also gave

us a new taste for beauty, a new love of nature, and a new passion for life and for art. This, more than the individual

masterpieces of even the greatest painters, is the true inheritance of the Renaissance, ft is undoubtedly something for

Italy to be proud of, but it also has produced an abundance of works of art, many of them of the highest quality, that are

difficult to preserve and to keep intact for the world.

In its dying days the Renaissance gave way to a new attitude toward man, nature, the mysteries of the cosmos, and the

divine mystery. This was the generation of Caravaggio and Galileo. Each in his own way built a telescope to look

fearlessly into the depths of the soul or into the dark of the night. They looked toward a humanity and a universe which, a

century earlier, Leonardo had more joyously been the first to explore.

Stefano Zuffi

 

The High Renaissance &

Mannerism 

    

 

 

Correggio  

Correggio

(b Correggio, ?1489; d Correggio, 5 March 1534).

Italian painter and draughtsman. Apart from his Venetian contemporaries, he was the most important

northern Italian painter of the first half of the 16th century. His best-known works are the illusionistic frescoes

in the domes of S Giovanni Evangelista and the cathedral in Parma, where he worked from 1520 to 1530. The

combination of technical virtuosity and dramatic excitement in these works ensured their importance for later

generations of artists. His altarpieces of the same period are equally original and ally intimacy of feeling with

an ecstatic quality that seems to anticipate the Baroque. In his paintings of mythological subjects, especially

those executed after his return to Correggio around 1530, he created images whose sensuality and abandon

have been seen as foreshadowing the Rococo. Vasari wrote that Correggio was timid and virtuous, that family

responsibilities made him miserly and that he died from a fever after walking in the sun. He left no letters

and, apart from Vasari’s account, nothing is known of his character or personality beyond what can be

deduced from his works. The story that he owned a manuscript of Bonaventura Berlinghieri’s Geographia, as

well as his use of a latinized form of Allegri (Laetus), and his naming of his son after the humanist Pomponius

Laetus, all suggest that he was an educated man by the standards of painters in this period. The intelligence

of his paintings supports this claim. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Correggio was to have an enormous

posthumous reputation. He was revered by Federico Barocci and the Carracci, and throughout the 17th and

18th centuries his reputation rivalled that of Raphael.

 

 

Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John1516

Oil on canvas, 48 x 37 cmMuseo del Prado, Madrid

 

 

 

Portrait of a Gentlewoman1517-19

Oil on canvas, 103 x 87,5 cmThe Hermitage, St. Petersburg

 

 

Madonna with St George1530-32

Oil on canvas, 285 x 190 cmGemaldegalerie, Dresden

 

The Adoration of the Magi1516-18

Oil on canvas, 84 x 108 cmPinacoteca di Brera, Milan

 

The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with Saint Francis1517

Oil on canvas, 123,5 x 106,5 cmGalleria degli Uffizi, Florence

 

Madonna with St. Francis1514

Oil on wood, 299 x 245 cmGemäldegalerie, Dresden

  

Madonna1512-14

Oil on canvasCastello Sforzesco, Milan

 

Martyrdom of Four SaintsGalleria Nazionale, Parma

   

Madonna della CestaNational Gallery, London

 

Allegory of ViceMusee du Louvre, Paris

 

Judith1512-1514Oil on wood

Musee des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg,France

 

Allegory of Virtueabout 1532-34

Oil on canvas, 149 x 88 cmMusee du Louvre, Paris

    

 

Lorenzo Costa

  

 

Lorenzo Costa

born c. 1460, Ferrara, Duchy of Ferrara [Italy]

died March 5, 1535, Mantua, Duchy of Mantua [Italy]

Painter of the school of Ferrara-Bologna, notable as one of the first Ferrarese artists to adopt a soft,

atmospheric style of painting.

Costa was trained at Ferrara, probably under Cosme Tura, who was the first important native-born Ferrarese

painter. From at least 1485 he worked at Bologna in close connection with Francia, the major Bolognese artist

of the period, who led him to soften his style and eliminate his native robustness. His best works are several

altarpieces in the churches of Bologna.

In 1506, soon after the expulsion of the ruling Bentivoglio family from Bologna, he was summoned as court

painter to Mantua to succeed Andrea Mantegna. He had already painted (1504–06) one elaborate allegory for

the Marchesa of Mantua. He spent his last years in the service of the Gonzagas, doing religious and historical

pictures.

  

                 

Portrait of a Lady with a Lap-dogc. 1500

Oil on panel, 45,5 x 35,1 cmRoyal Collection, Windsor

 

 

  

Concert1485-95

Oil on wood, 95,3 x 75,6 cmNational Gallery, London

 

 

Court of Isabella d'Esteafter 1505

Oil on canvas, 164 x 197 cmMusee du Louvre, Paris

 

Madonna and Saints1492Panel

S. Petronio, Bologna 

Madonna and Saints (detail)1492Panel

S. Petronio, Bologna 

   

NativityTempera on wood

Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon 

 

The Reign of Comus(begun by Mantegna, most work done by Costa after Mantegna's death)

Musee du Louvre, Paris

The High Renaissance &

Mannerism 

 

(Renaissance   Art Map)

 

 

See collection:

Hans Baldung

 

 

 

 

Hans Baldung

born c. 1484, Schwabisch Gmünd, Württemberg [Germany]

died 1545, Imperial Free City of Strasbourg [now Strasbourg, Fr.]

painter and graphic artist, one of the most outstanding figures in northern Renaissance art. He served as an

assistant to Albrecht Durer, whose influence is apparent in his early works, although the demonic energy of his

later style is closer to that of Matthias Grunewald.

His work is extensive and varied. It ranges from religious paintings and secular portraits to designs for tapestries

and stained glass. He is noted for representations of the Virgin Mary, in which he combined landscapes, figures,

light, and colour with an almost magical serenity. His portrayals of age, on the other hand, have a sinister

character and a mannered virtuosity. His best known work in painting is the High Altar of the cathedral at Freiburg

im Breisgau, Ger., for which he also designed the stained-glass choir windows.

Baldung-Grien's paintings are equalled in importance by his extensive body of drawings, engravings, and

woodcuts ofan intense vitality. The Totentanz (“dance of death”) and the “death and the maiden” theme occur

frequently in his graphic works. An early supporter of the Reformation, he executed a woodcut in which Martin

Luther is protected by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.

Baldung-Grien was a member of the Strasbourg town council, as well as official painter to the episcopate. His

works also appear in the church at Elzach and the museums of Basel, Karlsruhe, Cologne, Freiburg, and Nurnberg.

 

Baldung-Grien

The Totentanz

(dance of death)

  

                

The Knight, the Young Girl, and Death1505

Oil on wood, 355 x 296 cmMusee du Louvre, Paris

 

Death and the Maiden1518-20

Oil on panel, 31 x 19 cmOffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel

         

   

         

See collection: 

Hans Baldung 

________________________________________________            

 

Hans Baldung Grien:

The Three Stages of Life, with Death

c. 1510

Strange quartet

Rose-Marie, Rainer Hagen

    

Three Ages of the Woman and the Death1510

Oil on limewood,48 x 32,5 cmKunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

        

Three Ages of Man

1539

Museo del Prado, Madrid

In 1510 the artist Hans Baldung, alias Grien, completed a painting enigmatic enough to ensure that its theme has remained

the object of speculation ever since. Who is the young woman, so engrossed in her own reflection: a goddess, the allegory of

Vanity, a whore? The other figures are equally obscure. All that can be said for sure of this Renaissance work is that it

retains no trace of that Christian notion of salvation "which so dominated the art of the Middle Ages. The painting (48 x 33

cm) is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Of the four naked figures in the gloomy landscape, it is the young woman who draws our attention. A pale, attractive figure,

she stands out starkly against the browns and darker hues of the other figures. To her right, a torn creature holds an hourglass

over the young woman's head; a hag enters from the left, a child kneels at the comely blonde's feet.

The work belongs to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, in whose catalogue of 1896 the old woman is described as

Vice, the young woman as Vanity and the child as Amor. In the catalogue of 1938 the painting is entitledAllegory of

Transience, and 20 years later: Death and The Three Ages of Woman, Allegory of the Vanity of all Worldly Things. The

laconic title in a catalogue of works exhibited at the Baldung exhibition of 1959 reads: Beauty and Death.

Dispute has not been confined to the subject of the painting; the authorship, too, remained obscure for many years. Initially

ascribed to Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Altdorfer, the painting was eventually attributed to the hand of Hans Baldung Grien.

Little is known of the artist's life: he was born c. 1485, probably in Schwabisch Gmund. From 1503 to 1507 he was

apprenticed to Albrecht Durer's Nuremberg workshop. He painted the high altar at Freiburg Cathedral, but lived mainly in

Strasbourg, where he died in 1545.

Despite the puzzle presented by the theme, it is nonetheless possible to reconstruct contemporary ideas associated with the

four figures, while throwing light on the historical background of the ideas themselves. Numbers, for example, held a

peculiar significance at the time. They not only served the practical purpose of ordering diverse phenomena, but were

considered things in themselves, pillars of the world order. Numbers possessed a mythical aura that can be retraced to

antiquity and, in particular, to the work of Pythagoras. Though number symbolism had never quite sunk into oblivion during

the Middle Ages, it nonetheless experienced a revival with the rediscovery of antiquity.

Three and four are the numbers most strongly felt in Baldung's picture: the three stages of life, and, as a fourth stage, Death.

Both numbers were highly significant. Four were the points of the compass, four the elements and the humours; there were

four periods of the day and four seasons. The times of day and seasons, too, were frequently associated with periods in life:

spring and morning were childhood, night and winter the final years of a person's life, or death.

                            As a universal number, three was even more significant than four. The Holy Trinity, after all, was at the heart of Christian

theology. In antiquity, the number three — the beginning, middle and end — stood for the totality. Aristotle had used the

number three in his ethics: a bad action derives from an "excess" or a "deficiency", whereas the "just action" lies in the

"mean". The Greek philosopher also applied the number three to the stages of a person's life: youth had too much strength,

courage, anger and desire; old age had too little of these. Only persons in their prime possessed these qualities in due

proportion.

Much thought during Classical antiquity was devoted to the division of life into three, or four (or even seven, or ten), stages,

but these ideas did not find their way into the visual arts. The portrayal of the different stages of a human life in medieval art,

in paintings commissioned by the church, is exceptional, for such distinctions were considered irrelevant in the face of that

still greater division between life before and life after death. It was not until approximately 1500, when worldly patrons

began to influence artistic themes, that the ages of Man were more frequently painted. Hans Baldung made them the theme of

his own work on several occasions.

Eve, the Serpent, and Death

1510

Panel

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

      

  First steps 

   

 

Three Ages of the Woman and the Death (detail)1510 

   

Death and the Maiden

 

It is difficult to judge whether the child at the young woman's feet is a boy or a girl; contours barely visible behind the

veil suggest a boy. The hobby-horse, probably considered a boy's toy at the time, tends to confirm the suspicion.

Conversely, however, if the painting is intended to portray "the three stages", why give childhood a different sex from

that of maturity and old age?

Perhaps the gender of a child was of little importance to contemporary spectators. The difference was, in any case,

rarely emphasized. During the first years of their lives boys and girls wore the same clothes: long frocks or smocks, and

snug caps in winter.

At the same time, less interest was shown in children altogether than is the case in today's nuclear family: bonding

between parents and children did not occur with quite the same intensity. Too many children were born, and too many

died. Only a fraction of those born actually survived; it was better, therefore, safer, not to get too close. Perhaps such

emotional reserve partly also explains why artists paid relatively little attention to children. They perceived the adult

body more accurately than that of a child. This is certainly true of Hans Baldung Grien. Children who are not old enough

to find their balance do not kneel with one leg stretched out in the manner shown in the painting. At least, the position

would be extremely unusual.

The image of the child was determined not only by feelings and social relations, but by a whole superstructure of

theological theory. This included the tenet, prevelant since antiquity, that children were intrinsically innocent. However,

everyday relations with children made very little of the belief in a child's innocence. Children were treated as imperfect

adults. Their special status existed only in theory, characteristically illustrated by a motif in the Bible story of the Garden

of Eden: the bite taken from the forbidden apple, and Man's consequent loss of innocence. Baldung cites the theme in

the shape of the round object on the ground: this could simply be a child's ball, but it could equally be an apple lying

within the child's reach. The child is likely to pick it up before long.

To an educated spectator, the hobbyhorse, too, was more than a toy that happened - by accident, as it were - to be lying

on the ground. Cognoscenti would have linked it, through one of Aesop's fables, to the theme of the different stages of

life. For the Greek writer attributes an animal to each of the three stages: the dog, the ox and the horse. The dog, a

morose creature, friendly only to those who look after it, stands for old age; the ox, a reliable worker, who provides

nourishment for old and young alike, represents life's prime; the horse personifies childhood, since, in this fable at least,

horses are unruly creatures, lacking in self-discipline.

 

Beauty keeps her secret 

   

Three Ages of the Woman and the Death (detail)

1510

 

The star of the painting is the damsel. The other figures seem present solely to make her stand out more starkly. Baldung achieves this effect by arrangement and colour: the

young woman is furthest to the fore, the only figure whose body is not, at least partially, obscured by one of the others. At the same time, her skin is significantly brighter, indeed

nearly white.

In his use of colour, Baldung follows a convention here. His teacher Albrecht Diirer, as well as his contemporaries Albrecht Altdorfer and Lucas Cranach, usually painted the bodies

of women somewhat paler than those of men, and young bodies lighter than older ones. But in so doing, they showed moderation, were less given to extremes. Since, even in

those days, male skin "was probably no darker than that of women, and young skin no paler than old, artists must have been influenced by something other than Nature. Perhaps

pallor was intended to indicate a

certain delicacy. It is more likely, however, that they were painting an ideal aspired to by women themselves. Pale skin was the fashion, at least in circles that could afford it: at

court, or among the wealthy urban middle class.

The special status granted to the young woman may mean that she is intended to represent a special person: the goddess Venus, for example. The child, in that case, would be

Amor. However, contemporary spectators of the painting, exposed to pictures of Venus and Amor more often than we, would have noticed immediately that something was wrong.

Amor, for one thing, has no bow and arrow, his traditional attributes; secondly, since Venus is immortal, the hourglass held over her head is entirely superfluous.

If not a goddess, perhaps the young woman was intended as the allegory of Vanity. There is much in the painting to suggest this. The young woman, apparently absorbed in her

own reflection, brushes back her lovely, long hair with her left hand, while, in her right, she holds a mirror, the symbol of Vanity. The mirror is convex; flat mirrors were difficult to

fabricate, and therefore inordinately expensive. If the young woman is Vanity, then the older woman is a procuress: supporting the mirror with one hand, she probably beckoned

with the other, making sure the young woman did not lack admirers for very long. Death, too, has its place in this picture: anyone setting out to paint the vanity of beauty would

probably also have its ephemerality in mind. This was doctrinaire Christian morality, for which the flesh, an obstacle to the spirit's journey to God, was evil. Outside the church,

too, people were constantly forced to confront death and the ephemerality of life. The average life expectancy was thirty, almost half our own. Many died in their prime, especially

women in childbirth. Hans Baldung Grien painted at least three women who had come under the shadow of Death.

In contrast to the three paintings mentioned, however, Death in the present picture seems merely to be imparting a polite reminder to the young lady that life eventually comes to

a close. The hourglass has not yet run out: Beauty has time enough to regard herself in a mirror. But is she really the allegory of Vanity? The child would certainly be out of place

in such an allegory. Baldung's composition does not comply with any of the many iconographical patterns of his time. Something is always left unexplained.

   

  The body becomes a burden 

   

 

Three Ages of the Woman and the Death (detail)1510

   

Death and the Maiden

Greek and Roman authors, writing of the different periods of life and death, had men in mind. They talked of young men

and old, not of girls and old women. Men, during antiquity, were considered the true representatives of mankind, a

notion which has survived the centuries and, even today, continues to find its way into people's minds.

Painting has often differed in this respect, not least that of Baldung himself. Three of his paintings show Death and a

maiden. A panel in Leipzig shows the Seven Stages of Life, another, in the French town of Rennes, the Three Stages of

Death: in both Baldung paints nude women. Only once does Baldung show Death and a man: the man is fully clothed,

his dress that of a mercenary. Baldung's preference for women may derive from a more general preference for painting

the female nude. But there may also be reasons less personal: women's bodies alter more visibly than men's, making it

easier for the artist to illustrate the different stages of her life. Furthermore, beauty is considered more significant in

woman than in man - more attention is therefore accorded to the passing of her charms.

Baldung's work belongs to a period in the history of art called the Renaissance, an era in which the human body is said

to have been discovered anew. But that is only half the story. The body that "was discovered, celebrated and painted

over and over again was restricted to a single stage of human development: young adulthood, which, like the pale-

skinned woman in the painting, was full of youthful energy. The other periods, age and childhood, were neglected. There

are very few individual portraits of children, or paintings of nudes who are visibly past their prime.

If painted at all, then it was not for their intrinsic qualities, but for purposes of vicarious illustration. Children, for

example, were a part of the traditonal inventory of allegories: as putti, angels or Amor. The bodies of old women, on the

other hand, were generally linked to something revolting or contemptible: witches, for example, or the Fates. One such

work is Durer's famous illustration of parsimony, showing a bare-breasted old hag with narrow eyes in her wrinkled face,

with more gaps between her teeth than teeth in her mouth, and a sack of gold in her lap.

The old woman in Baldung's painting may be intended as a bawd. In contrast to the younger woman, she is portrayed to

her disadvantage, for her bodily proportions are incorrect. The arm with which she wards off Death is too long. Baldung

frequently distorted proportions in this way.

The lack of respect and devotion granted older women at the time, with the exception, perhaps, of portraits like Durer's

charcoal drawing of his mother, together with a pronounced tendency to portray the older female nude as ugly, probably

derive from a peculiarly male perspective. The young woman, the object of male desire, was given a certain appeal;

sexual inclination determined aesthetics. Conversely, an older woman's body was seen as worn out, its erotic properties

dissolved. The male reaction to this was one of disillusionment, perhaps even disappointment. This decided how he

painted.

 

  Dancing to death 

Three Ages of the Woman and the Death (detal)1510

The artist has crowded three figures into the left of the painting, leaving the right to Death. The proportional harmony and figural balance sought by

Durer is lacking here. Instead, the chief effect is one of movement: created, for example, by the old woman striding forcefully towards Death, or by

the veil. The latter begins with the child, flows over the young woman's upper arm, is picked up by Death, finally drifting out of the painting on the

right.

It has been suggested that the pale nude's veil is the badge of a whore, for in cities like Strasbourg at that time, prostitutes were obliged to wear veils.

But then the Virgin was also frequently painted wearing a veil, as were Eve and Venus. It is therefore unlikely that Baldung's contemporaries would

have linked the delicate fabric of the veil with the idea of fornication.

The veil is nonetheless an important feature. Firstly, it fulfils a practical and traditional function in covering the pubic region; secondly, it creates a

link between the child, the young woman and Death. The older woman, warding off Death with one hand and supporting the mirror with her other,

completes the group.

All four are inter-connected. The cycle of figures thus suggests the motion of a dance: a roundel. Dancers often joined by holding a piece of cloth

rather than each others' hands.

Bearing this in mind, it is possible that the contemporary spectator of this painting would not have thought only of Venus and Amor, Vanity and the

bawd, the ages of Woman, beauty and ephemerality, but also of the widespread image of the danse macabre, the dance of death. It was an image often

seen carved on the walls of graveyards and churches: a skeleton, usually playing an instrument, leads representatives of each of the social strata, from

the peasant to the emperor to the pope, into the Hereafter. The message these pictures conveyed was that Death cancelled worldly distinctions; only

God's judgement counted.

This religious and moral exhortation was evidently compounded by the widely held belief in ghosts. Death was not the only figure to haunt the living;

there were also the "undead". People in those days spoke of revived corpses, dead persons taken before their time, the victims of murder, suicide,

accident or war, who, deprived of last rites, roved the surface of the earth like a "tormented army".

One of Baldung's contemporaries, the doctor and philosopher Paracelsus, referred to these revived corpses as "mummies". The term aptly describes

Hans Bal-dung Gricn's figure of Death: no naked skeleton, but a dried-out corpse, whose finger and toe-nails continue to grow, whose parched skin

hangs down in tatters like the dry bark of the nearby tree. But even a superstitious belief in zombies cannot fully account for the four figures in the

painting. There is, at any rate, one thing that all these explanations have in common: the painting contains no reference to the Christian notion of

salvation, not a trace of that doctrine of Divine Supremacy that was acknowledged and celebrated so frequently in medieval painting.

     

See collection: 

Hans Baldung          

________________________________________________ 

 

The Seven Ages of Woman       

    

See collection: 

Hans Baldung     

________________________________________________ 

 

"When Shall We Three Meet Again"

Europe swept by witch-burnings 

        

Two Witches

1523

 

 

Now I come to speak of the greatest of all heresies: of the mischief wrought by witches and fiends. By night they fly through the air on broomsticks, stove forks, cats, goats or

other such things. Witchcraft is the most accursed of all errors - and it must be mercilessly punished by fire.

Mathiasvon Kemnat, Chronicle of Frederick the Victorious of the Palatinate, c.1480;

heading: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1

 

Hell's weather cauldrom, 1489

They concocted devilish ointments of toads' eyes, choke cherries, peppercorns and spiders. They poisoned the air with

powders ground from intestines. They caused cataclysmic deluges to fall from the heavens. Thev set off avalanches and

turned themselves into red-eyed goats. Their favourite food was pickled children. Imagination knew no bounds when it

came to describing the monstrous things done by witches and their evil powers. Some early tales are inadvertently

funny. Witches blew up storms by vigorously fanning them with their slippers or slid down into valleys on the backs of

avalanches, the tails of their scarves flapping in the wind. In early Modern times, however, witches were no laughing

matter. Enlightened bishops — who castigated belief in ghosts, witches and black magic and regarded it as utter

nonsense that represented a revival of pagan practices — were not heeded. Most theologians not only promoted dark

superstition; they were convinced that sorcery was a reality and the result of pacts with the devil. Witchcraft was heresy,

which made it doubly important to prosecute it and to persecute practitioners. In 1487 a compendium of horror stories

was published in Strasbourg, the Hexenhammer(Witches' Hammer), which continued to be read in Europe until the

seventeenth century. Both Protestant and Catholic judges consulted it as a penal code for dealing with witchcraft. One

can imagine King James, famously obsessed with witchcraft, having been sent a copy by his daughter from the

Palatinate. At any rate, the book may be said to have sparked off much of the witch-burning madness of the early

Modern age. Its authors approved of torture, maintaining that women in particular were inclined to the sin of witchcraft.

Of course women who gave themselves up to "lust and carnal desire or even sodomy" were prime targets for

persecution. The German painter Hans Baldung Grien, who from 1509 lived in Strasbourg — where Hexenhammer had

been published not long before — most likely wanted to get in on the act with his Two Witches. Despite the continued

call for moderation and reason, witch-burnings — which had ceased in England by 1685 — were still common practice on

mainland Europe as late as 1749. Trials however continued until 1717 in England, whereas the last recorded trial of a

witch took place in 1793 in Germany.

   

 

   

Burning witches at the stake, 1555

   

Hans Baldung

Witches

 

Witches Sabbath 

 

 

Departing for the Sabbath

 

 

Three Witches

 

 

Sorcieres

 

 

Hexenszene

 

 

Departing for the Sabbath

 

 

Szene 

Witches in art

 

see also:

"Faeries"  by   H. Johnson see also:

"Good faeries & bad faeries"   by   B. Froud

 

 

Witchcraft

 

Main

the exercise or invocation of alleged supernatural powers to control people or events, practices typically involving sorcery or magic. Although defined differently in disparate

historical and cultural contexts, witchcraft has often been seen, especially in the West, as the work of crones who meet secretly at night, indulge in cannibalism and orgiastic rites

with the Devil, and perform black magic. Witchcraft thus defined exists more in the imagination of contemporaries than in any objective reality. Yet this stereotype has a long

history and has constituted for many cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world. The intensity of these beliefs is best represented by the European witch-hunts of the 14th to

18th century, but witchcraft and its associated ideas are never far from the surface of popular consciousness and—sustained by folk tales—find explicit focus from time to time in

popular television and films and in fiction.

Meanings

The modern English word witchcraft has three principal connotations: the practice of magic or sorcery worldwide; the beliefs associated with the Western witch-hunts of the 14th to

the 18th century; and varieties of the modern movement called Wicca, frequently mispronounced “wikka.”

The terms witchcraft and witch derive from Old English wiccecraeft: from wicca (masculine) or wicce (feminine), pronounced “witchah” and “witchuh,” respectively, denoting

someone who practices sorcery; and from craeft meaning “craft” or “skill.” Roughly equivalent words in other European languages—such as sorcellerie (French), Hexerei (German),

stregoneria (Italian), and brujería (Spanish)—have different connotations, and none precisely translates another. The difficulty is even greater with the relevant words in African,

Asian, and other languages. The problem of defining witchcraft is made more difficult because the concepts underlying these words also change according to time and place,

sometimes radically. Moreover, different cultures do not share a coherent pattern of witchcraft beliefs, which often blend other concepts such as magic, sorcery, religion, folklore,

theology, technology, and diabolism. Some societies regard a witch as a person with inherent supernatural powers, but in the West witchcraft has been more commonly believed

to be an ordinary person’s free choice to learn and practice magic with the help of the supernatural. (The terms West and Western in this article refer to European societies

themselves and to post-Columbian societies influenced by European concepts.) The answer to the old question “Are there such things as witches?” therefore depends upon

individual belief and upon definition, and no single definition exists. One thing is certain: the emphasis on the witch in art, literature, theatre, and film has little relation to external

reality.

False ideas about witchcraft and the witch-hunts persist today. First, the witch-hunts did not occur in the Middle Ages but in what historians call the “early modern” period (the late

14th to the early 18th century), the era of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. There was neither a witch-cult nor any cult, either organized or

disorganized, of a “Horned God” or of any “Goddess”; Western “witches” were not members of an ancient pagan religion; and they were not healers or midwives. Moreover, not all

persons accused of witchcraft were women, let alone old women; indeed, there were “witches” of all ages and sexes. Witches were not a persecuted minority, because witches did

not exist: the people hurt or killed in the hunts were not witches but victims forced by their persecutors into a category that in reality included no one. The witch-hunts did not

prosecute, let alone execute, millions; they were not a conspiracy by males, priests, judges, doctors, or inquisitors against members of an old religion or any other real group.

“Black masses” are almost entirely a fantasy of modern writers. “Witch doctors,” whose job it was to release people from evil spells, seldom existed in the West, largely because

even helpful magic was attributed to demons.

 

Painting on the outer wall of Rila Monastery church, Bulgaria

 

Witchcraft

The witch-hunts

Main

the exercise or invocation of alleged supernatural powers to control people or events, practices typically involving sorcery or magic. Although defined differently in disparate

historical and cultural contexts, witchcraft has often been seen, especially in the West, as the work of crones who meet secretly at night, indulge in cannibalism and orgiastic rites

with the Devil, and perform black magic. Witchcraft thus defined exists more in the imagination of contemporaries than in any objective reality. Yet this stereotype has a long

history and has constituted for many cultures a viable explanation of evil in the world. The intensity of these beliefs is best represented by the European witch-hunts of the 14th to

18th century, but witchcraft and its associated ideas are never far from the surface of popular consciousness and—sustained by folk tales—find explicit focus from time to time in

popular television and films and in fiction.

Witches and Monsters

Meanings

The modern English word witchcraft has three principal connotations: the practice of magic or sorcery worldwide; the beliefs associated with the Western witch-hunts of the 14th to

the 18th century; and varieties of the modern movement called Wicca, frequently mispronounced “wikka.”

The terms witchcraft and witch derive from Old English wiccecraeft: from wicca (masculine) or wicce (feminine), pronounced “witchah” and “witchuh,” respectively, denoting

someone who practices sorcery; and from craeft meaning “craft” or “skill.” Roughly equivalent words in other European languages—such as sorcellerie (French), Hexerei (German),

stregoneria (Italian), and brujería (Spanish)—have different connotations, and none precisely translates another. The difficulty is even greater with the relevant words in African,

Asian, and other languages. The problem of defining witchcraft is made more difficult because the concepts underlying these words also change according to time and place,

sometimes radically. Moreover, different cultures do not share a coherent pattern of witchcraft beliefs, which often blend other concepts such as magic, sorcery, religion, folklore,

theology, technology, and diabolism. Some societies regard a witch as a person with inherent supernatural powers, but in the West witchcraft has been more commonly believed

to be an ordinary person’s free choice to learn and practice magic with the help of the supernatural. (The terms West and Western in this article refer to European societies

themselves and to post-Columbian societies influenced by European concepts.) The answer to the old question “Are there such things as witches?” therefore depends upon

individual belief and upon definition, and no single definition exists. One thing is certain: the emphasis on the witch in art, literature, theatre, and film has little relation to external

reality.

False ideas about witchcraft and the witch-hunts persist today. First, the witch-hunts did not occur in the Middle Ages but in what historians call the “early modern” period (the late

14th to the early 18th century), the era of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. There was neither a witch-cult nor any cult, either organized or

disorganized, of a “Horned God” or of any “Goddess”; Western “witches” were not members of an ancient pagan religion; and they were not healers or midwives. Moreover, not all

persons accused of witchcraft were women, let alone old women; indeed, there were “witches” of all ages and sexes. Witches were not a persecuted minority, because witches did

not exist: the people hurt or killed in the hunts were not witches but victims forced by their persecutors into a category that in reality included no one. The witch-hunts did not

prosecute, let alone execute, millions; they were not a conspiracy by males, priests, judges, doctors, or inquisitors against members of an old religion or any other real group.

“Black masses” are almost entirely a fantasy of modern writers. “Witch doctors,” whose job it was to release people from evil spells, seldom existed in the West, largely because

even helpful magic was attributed to demons.

Sorcery

A sorcerer, magician, or “witch” attempts to influence the surrounding world through occult (i.e., hidden, as opposed to open and observable) means. In Western society until the

14th century, “witchcraft” had more in common with sorcery in other cultures—such as those of India or Africa—than it did with the witchcraft of the witch-hunts. Before the 14th

century, witchcraft was much alike in villages from Ireland to Russia and from Sweden to Sicily; however, the similarities derived neither from cultural diffusion nor from any secret

cult but from the age-old human desire to achieve one’s purposes whether by open or occult means. In many ways, like their counterparts worldwide, early Western sorcerers and

witches worked secretly for private ends, as contrasted with the public practice of religion. Witches or sorcerers were usually feared as well as respected, and they used a variety

of means to attempt to achieve their goals, including incantations (formulas or chants invoking evil spirits), divination and oracles (to predict the future), amulets and charms (to

ward off hostile spirits and harmful events), potions or salves, and dolls or other figures (to represent their enemies). Witches sought to gain or preserve health, to acquire or retain

property, to protect against natural disasters or evil spirits, to help friends, and to seek revenge. Sometimes this magic was believed to work through simple causation as a form of

technology. For example, it was believed that a field’s fertility could be increased by ritually slaughtering an animal. Often the magic was instead an effort to construct symbolic

reality. Sorcery was sometimes believed to rely on the power of gods or other spirits, leading to the belief that witches used demons in their work.

Jeffrey Burton Russell

Medical treatment at the witch

 

Witchcraft in Africa and the world

The same dichotomy between sorcery and witchcraft exists (sometimes more ambiguously) in the beliefs of many African and indigenous peoples throughout the world. Again,

witches are typically seen as particularly active after dusk when law-abiding mortals are asleep. The Navajo believe that witches meet at night, wear nothing except a mask and

jewelry, sit among baskets of corpses, and have intercourse with dead women. In some African cultures witches are believed to assemble in cannibal covens, often at graveyards

or around a fire, to feast on the blood, which, like vampires, they extract from their victims. If they take the soul from a victim’s body and keep it in their possession, the victim will

die. Like those in Western society suspected of child abuse and satanism, in the popular imagination, African witches are believed to practice incest and other perversions.

Sometimes, as in the Christian tradition, their malevolent power is believed to derive from a special relationship with an evil spirit with whom they have a “pact,” or they exercise it

through “animal familiars” (assistants or agents) such as dogs, cats, hyenas, owls, or baboons.

In other cases the witch’s power is thought to be based in his or her own body, and no external source is deemed necessary. Among the Zande of the Congo and some other

central African peoples, the source of this evil-working capacity is believed to be located in the witch’s stomach, and its power and range increase with age. It can be activated

merely by wishing someone ill and is thus a kind of unspoken, or implicit, curse. At the same time the Zande believe that evil deeds can be wrought even more effectively by the

manipulation of spells and potions and the use of powerful magic. In anthropological terminology this is technically “sorcery,” and thus, like the “witches” in Shakespeare’s play

Macbeth who dance around a pot stirring potions and muttering spells, the Zande practitioners may more properly be termed “sorcerers” rather than “witches.”

 

Witch Hang

 

In many African cultures witches are believed to act unconsciously; unaware of the ill they cause, they are driven by irrepressible urges to act malevolently. It is thus easy for those

accused of witchcraft, but who are not conscious of wishing anyone ill, to assume that they unknowingly did what is attributed to them. This, along with the effects of suggestion

and torture, in a world where people take the reality of witchcraft for granted, goes far to explain the striking confessions of guilt that are so widely reported in Africa and

elsewhere and that are otherwise hard to comprehend. It is worth noting, however, that if witches believe they are unconscious agents, this is generally not the view of those who

feel victimized by them.

Whatever the basis of their power and the means by which it is exercised, witches (and sorcerers) are regularly credited with causing all manner of disease and disaster. Sickness,

and even death, as well as a host of lesser misfortunes, are routinely laid at their door. In many parts of Africa and Asia, epidemics and natural disasters have been interpreted as

acts of witchcraft. For some unhappy candidates in many less developed countries, the same malign influence is cited to explain (at least in part) failure in examinations, elections,

or difficulties in finding employment. Members of certain Afro-Brazilian cults, for example, believe that job loss is due not to economic conditions or poor performance but to

witchcraft, and they participate in a ritual, the “consultation,” to counter the evil.

However, like their ancient and early modern European counterparts, modern Africans and Asians who believe firmly in the reality of witchcraft do not lack the power of rational

reasoning. To suppose that these are incompatible alternatives is a common mistake. In reality pragmatic and mystical explanations of events usually exist in parallel or

combination but operate in different contexts and at different levels. For example, anthropological research has demonstrated that African farmers who believe in witches do not

expect witchcraft to account for obvious technical failures. If one’s home collapses because it was poorly constructed, no witch is needed to explain this. If a boat sinks because it

has a hole in its bottom or a car breaks down because its battery is dead, witchcraft is not responsible. Witchcraft enters the picture when rational knowledge fails. It explains the

diseases whose causes are unknown, the mystery of death, and, more generally, strange and inexplicable misfortunes.

Devil and Witches

 

There is thus no inconsistency in the actions of the sick African who consults both a medical doctor and a witch doctor. The first treats the external symptoms, while the second

uncovers the hidden causes. Just as the sick African takes preventative measures prescribed by the medical doctor, he or she might also take steps against the supernatural. To

protect against witchcraft, for instance, the patient might wear amulets, take “medicine” or bathe in it, or practice divination. Similarly, the Navajo protect themselves against

witches with “gall medicine” or with sand or pollen paintings. If preventative measures prove ineffective for the Navajo, then the confession of a witch is thought to cure the evil

magic, and torture is sometimes used to extract that confession. Moreover, like ancient and modern Westerners, people in modern Africa and other parts of the world who take the

reality of witchcraft for granted usually also believe in other sources of supernatural power—e.g., divinities and spirits.

Witchcraft explains the problem posed when one seeks to understand why misfortune befalls oneself rather than someone else. It makes sense of the inequalities of life: the fact

that one person’s crops or herds fail while others’ prosper. Equally, witchcraft can be invoked to explain the success of others. In this “limited good” scenario—where there is

implicitly a fixed stock of resources and where life is generally precarious, with little surplus to distribute in time of need—those who succeed too flagrantly are assumed to do so at

the expense of others less fortunate. The “witch,” therefore, is typically someone who selfishly wants more than he or she ostensibly deserves, whose aspirations and desires are

judged excessive and illegitimate.

However, there is a narrow, ambiguous line between good and evil here. Among some African peoples “witchcraft” is intrinsically neither morally good nor bad, and among others

the supernatural activities of “witches” are, according to their perceived effects, divided into good, or protective, and bad, or destructive, witchcraft. Traditional and modern

African leaders sometimes surround themselves with protective “witch doctors,” and are themselves thought to be endowed with supernatural power. This is the positive charisma

of which witchcraft is the negative counterpart. In the colonial period these ideas were extended to Europeans, who, in the Belgian Congo and British Central Africa at the time of

independence, were feared as cannibalistic witches. This was somewhat ironic since colonial regimes, unlike their missionary predecessors, did not believe in witchcraft and made

accusations of witchcraft illegal in most of sub-Saharan Africa—which has been largely reversed by their successor regimes.

This ambiguity between good and evil can also be found among the Mapuche, an indigenous people of Chile. They believe that young women take up sorcery and as old women

become powerful witches who use “bad medicine” to obtain their ends. They are aligned with evil forces and use them to harm or gain advantage over others. Their training and

use of plants and animals in their medicine is similar to that of the shamans who use “good medicine” and other magic against forces of evil.

Devil and Witches

 

The distinctions between good and bad supernatural power are relative and depend on how moral legitimacy is judged. This becomes clear when the spiritual power invoked is

studied more closely. In a number of revealing African cases, the word that denotes the essence of witchcraft (e.g., tsau among the West African Tiv and itonga among the East

African Safwa), the epitome of illegitimate antisocial activity, also describes the righteous wrath of established authority, employed to curse wrongdoers.

This essential ambivalence is particularly evident in Haitian voodoo, where there is a sharp distinction between man-made evil magic powers, connected with zombies (beings

identified as familiars of witches in the beliefs of some African cultures), and benevolent invisible spirits identified with Catholic saints. This antithesis between witchcraft and

religion, however, is always problematic: after his death, the malevolent spirits or powers that an ancestor has used for his personal benefit become accrued by his descendants’

protective spirits (loas). Magic has thus turned into religion (the converse of the more familiar process in which outmoded religions are stigmatized by their successors as magic).

So everything depends on the moral evaluation made by the community of the victims of misfortune: have they received their just deserts or is their plight unjustified? Witchcraft

and sorcery are only involved in the latter case, where they provide a moral philosophy of unmerited misfortune. This is particularly important in religions that lack the concepts of

heaven and hell. Where one cannot take refuge in the reassuring belief that life’s injustices will be adjusted in the hereafter, witchcraft indeed provides a way of shrugging off

responsibility and of coming to terms with an unjust fate. According to these “instant” religions, the just should prosper and the unjust should suffer the consequences of their evil

deeds here on earth.

The psychodynamics here are equally revealing. Those who interpret their misfortunes in terms of witchcraft will often use similar means to discover the source of their woes,

which is often traced to the malice and jealousy of their enemies. In Africa and elsewhere, the bewitched person seeks help from a diviner to establish the evil person responsible.

The diviner, often in a trance, uses a number of different techniques to discover the witch, including throwing dice or opening a Bible or Qur’ān at random. Another form of

divination involves administering poison to a chicken and mentioning the name of a suspected witch. If the chicken dies, then the suspect is a witch. Whatever the process, the

result is always the same, the bewitched “victim” finds the source of his woes among his rivals, typically neighbours, coworkers, or other competitors. Accusations often follow the

lines of community conflict and incompatibility. In Chile, for example, the tensions between the Mapuche and neighbouring Chilean peasants are revealed in accusations that the

Chileans use witchcraft to cheat the Mapuche and conversely that the Mapuche use it to harm the crops or livestock of the Chileans. Among the Navajo, competition over grazing

lands and water rights or between jealous lovers is the source of witchcraft accusations. In some polygynous societies in Africa, these accusations are particularly prevalent

between competing co-wives, but they are by no means always targeted at women. Ultimately, the effect of successful accusations is to call into question or to rupture an

untenable relationship.

Ioan M. Lewis

Mikael Herr.  Les sabbats des sorcières

 

The witch-hunts

Although accusations of witchcraft in contemporary cultures provide a means to express or resolve social tensions, these accusations had different consequences in premodern

Western society where the mixture of irrational fear and a persecuting mentality led to the emergence of the witch-hunts. In the 11th century attitudes toward witchcraft and

sorcery began to change, a process that would radically transform the Western perception of witchcraft and associate it with heresy and the Devil. By the 14th century, fear of

heresy and of Satan had added charges of diabolism to the usual indictment of witches, maleficium (malevolent sorcery). It was this combination of sorcery and its association with

the Devil that made Western witchcraft unique. From the 14th through the 18th century, witches were believed to repudiate Jesus Christ, to worship the Devil and make pacts with

him (selling one’s soul in exchange for Satan’s assistance), to employ demons to accomplish magical deeds, and to desecrate the crucifix and the consecrated bread and wine of

the Eucharist (Holy Communion). It was also believed that they rode through the air at night to “sabbats” (secret meetings), where they engaged in sexual orgies and even had sex

with Satan; that they changed shapes (from human to animal or from one human form to another); that they often had “familiar spirits” in the form of animals; and that they

kidnapped and murdered children for the purpose of eating them or rendering their fat for magical ointments. This fabric of ideas was a fantasy. Although some people

undoubtedly practiced sorcery with the intent to harm, and some may actually have worshiped the Devil, in reality no one ever fit the concept of the “witch.” Nonetheless, the

witch’s crimes were defined in law. The witch-hunts varied enormously in place and in time, but they were united by a common and coherent theological and legal worldview. Local

priests and judges, though seldom experts in either theology or law, were nonetheless part of a culture that believed in the reality of witches as much as modern society believes

in the reality of molecules.

Since 1970 careful research has elucidated law codes and theological treatises from the era of the witch-hunts and uncovered much information about how fear, accusations, and

prosecutions actually occurred in villages, local law courts, and courts of appeal in Roman Catholic and Protestant cultures in western Europe. Charges of maleficium were

prompted by a wide array of suspicions. It might have been as simple as one person blaming his misfortune on another. For example, if something bad happened to John that could

not be readily explained, and if John felt that Richard disliked him, John may have suspected Richard of harming him by occult means. The most common suspicions concerned

livestock, crops, storms, disease, property and inheritance, sexual dysfunction or rivalry, family feuds, marital discord, stepparents, sibling rivalries, and local politics. Maleficium

was a threat not only to individuals but also to public order, for a community wracked by suspicions about witches could split asunder. No wonder the term witch-hunt has entered

common political parlance to describe such campaigns as that of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy in his attempt to root out “communists” in the United States in the 1950s.

Another accusation that often accompanied maleficium was trafficking with evil spirits. In the Near East—in ancient Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan, and Palestine—belief in the

existence of evil spirits was universal, so that both religion and magic were thought to be needed to appease, offer protection from, or manipulate these spirits. In Greco-Roman

civilization, Dionysiac worship included meeting underground at night, sacrificing animals, practicing orgies, feasting, and drinking. Classical authors such as Aeschylus, Horace,

and Virgil described sorceresses, ghosts, furies, and harpies with hideous pale faces and crazed hair; clothed in rotting garments, they met at night and sacrificed both animals and

humans. A bizarre set of accusations, including the sacrifice of children, was made by the Syrians against the Jews in Hellenistic Syria in the 2nd century bce. These accusations

would also be made by the Romans against the Christians, by early Christians against heretics (dissenters from the core Christianity of the period) and Jews, by later Christians

against witches, and, as late as the 20th century, by Protestants against Catholics.

 

Burning

 

Along with this older tradition, attitudes toward witches and the witch-hunts of the 14th–18th centuries stemmed from a long history of the church’s theological and legal attacks

on heretics. Accusations similar to those expressed by the ancient Syrians and early Christians appeared again in the Middle Ages. In France in 1022 a group of heretics in Orléans

was accused of orgy, infanticide, invocations of demons, and use of the dead children’s ashes in a blasphemous parody of the Eucharist. These allegations would have important

implications for the future because they were part of a broader pattern of hostility toward and persecution of marginalized groups. This pattern took shape in 1050–1300, which

was also an era of enormous reform, reorganization, and centralization in both the ecclesiastical and secular aspects of society, an important aspect of which was suppressing

dissent. The visible role played by women in some heresies during this period may have contributed to the stereotype of the witch as female.

The Devil, whose central role in witchcraft beliefs made the Western tradition unique, was an absolute reality in both elite and popular culture, and failure to understand the

prevailing terror of Satan has misled some modern researchers to regard witchcraft as a “cover” for political or gender conspiracies. The Devil was deeply and widely feared as the

greatest enemy of Christ, keenly intent on destroying soul, life, family, community, church, and state. Witches were considered Satan’s followers, members of an antichurch and an

antistate, the sworn enemies of Christian society in the Middle Ages, and a “counter-state” in the early modern period. If witchcraft existed, as people believed it did, then it was

an absolute necessity to extirpate it before it destroyed the world.

Because of the continuity of witch trials with those for heresy, it is impossible to say when the first witch trial occurred. Even though the clergy and judges in the Middle Ages were

skeptical of accusations of witchcraft, the period 1300–30 can be seen as the beginning of witch trials. In 1374 Pope Gregory XI declared that all magic was done with the aid of

demons and thus was open to prosecution for heresy. Witch trials continued through the 14th and early 15th centuries, but with great inconsistency according to time and place.

By 1435–50, the number of prosecutions had begun to rise sharply, and toward the end of the 15th century, two events stimulated the hunts: Pope Innocent VIII’s publication in

1484 of the bull Summis desiderantes affectibus (“Desiring with the Greatest Ardour”) condemning witchcraft as Satanism, the worst of all possible heresies, and the publication in

1486 of Heinrich Krämer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), a learned but cruelly misogynist book blaming witchcraft chiefly on women.

Widely influential, it was reprinted numerous times. The hunts were most severe from 1580 to 1630, and the last known execution for witchcraft was in Switzerland in 1782. The

number of trials and executions varied widely according to time and place, but in fact no more than about 110,000 persons in all were tried for witchcraft, and no more than

40,000 to 60,000 executed. Although these figures are alarming, they do not remotely approach the feverishly exaggerated claims of some 20th-century writers.

Witch Finder Generall

 

The “hunts” were not pursuits of individuals already identified as witches but efforts to identify those who were witches. The process began with suspicions and, occasionally,

continued through rumours and accusations to convictions. The overwhelming majority of processes, however, went no farther than the rumour stage, for actually accusing

someone of witchcraft was a dangerous and expensive business. Accusations originated with the ill-will of the accuser, or, more often, the accuser’s fear of someone having ill-will

toward him. The accusations were usually made by the alleged victims themselves, rather than by priests, lords, judges, or other “elites.” Successful prosecution of one witch

sometimes led to a local hunt for others, but larger hunts and regional panics were confined (with some exceptions) to the years from the 1590s to 1640s. Very few accusations

went beyond the village level.

Three-fourths of European witch-hunts occurred in western Germany, the Low Countries, France, northern Italy, and Switzerland, areas where prosecutions for heresy had been

plentiful and charges of diabolism were prominent. In Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, witch prosecutions seldom occurred, and executions were very rare. There were

additional hunts in Spanish America, where the European pattern of accusations continued even though the differences between the folklore of the Europeans and Native

Americans introduced some minor variations into the accusations. In Mexico the Franciscan friars linked indigenous religion and magic with the Devil; prosecutions for witchcraft in

Mexico began in the 1530s, and by the 1600s indigenous peasants were reporting stereotypical pacts with the Devil. Like the Spanish colonies, the English colonies repeated the

European stereotype with a few minor differences. The first hanging for witchcraft in New England was in 1647, after the witch-hunts had already abated in Europe, though a

peculiar outbreak in Sweden in 1668–76 bore some similarity to that in New England. Although the lurid trials at Salem (now in Massachusetts) continue to draw much attention

from American authors, they were only a swirl in the backwater of the witch-hunts. The outbreak at Salem, where 19 people were executed, was the result of a combination of

church politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all in a vacuum of political authority. Prosecutions of witches in Austria, Poland, and Hungary took place as late as the 18th

century.

Soul-killing witches that deform the body

 

The responsibility for the witch-hunts can be distributed among theologians, legal theorists, and the practices of secular and ecclesiastical courts. The theological worldview—

derived from the early Christian fear of Satan and reinforced by the great effort to reform and conform that began in 1050—was intensified again by the fears and animosities

engendered by the Reformation of the 16th century. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation heightened the fear of witchcraft by promoting the idea of

personal piety (the individual alone with his or her Bible and God), which enhanced individualism while downplaying community. The emphasis on personal piety exacerbated the

rigid characterization of people as either “good” or “bad.” It also aggravated feelings of guilt and the psychological tendency to project negative intentions onto others. Moreover,

just as the growth of literacy and of reading the Bible helped spread dissent, so did they provoke resistance and fear. Sermons and didactic treatises, including “devil books”

warning of Satan’s power, spread both the terror of Satan and the corresponding frantic need to purge society of him. Both Protestants and Catholics were involved in the

prosecutions, as the theology of the Protestant Reformers on the Devil and witchcraft was virtually indistinguishable from that of the Catholics. More differences existed among

Protestants and among Catholics than between the two religious groups, and regions in which Protestant-Catholic tensions were high did not produce significantly more trials than

other regions.

Because accusations and trials of witches took place in both ecclesiastical and secular courts, the law played at least as important a role as religion in the witch-hunts. Local courts

were more credulous and therefore more likely to be strict and even violent in their treatment of supposed witches than were regional or superior courts. Crude practices such as

pricking witches to see whether the Devil had desensitized them to pain; searching for the “devil’s mark,” an oddly-shaped mole or wart; or “swimming” (throwing the accused into

a pond; if she sank, she was innocent because the water accepted her) occurred on the local level. Where central authority—i.e., bishops, kings, or the Inquisition—was strong,

convictions were fewer and sentences milder. Ecclesiastical and civil authorities usually tried to restrain witch trials and rarely manipulated witch-hunts to obtain money or power.

The witch executions occurred in the early modern period, the time in Western history when capital punishment and torture were most widespread. Judicial torture, happily in

abeyance since the end of the Roman period, was revived in the 12th and 13th centuries; other brutal and sadistic tortures occurred but were usually against the law. Torture was

not allowed in witch cases in Italy or Spain, but where used it often led to convictions and the identification of supposed accomplices. The latter was the greatest evil of the system,

for a victim might be forced to name acquaintances, who were in turn coerced into naming others, creating a long chain of accusations. Witch trials were equally common in

ecclesiastical and secular courts before 1550, and then, as the power of the state increased, they took place more often in secular ones.

El aquelarre. Ilustración del libro de Anton Praetorius

 

Among the main effects of the papal judicial institution known as the Inquisition was in fact the restraint and reduction of witch trials that resulted from the strictness of its rules. It

investigated whether the charges resulted from personal animosity toward the accused; it obtained physicians’ statements; it did not allow the naming of accomplices either with

or without torture; it required the review of every sentence; and it provided for whipping, banishment, or even house arrest instead of death for first offenders. Like the Inquisition,

the Parlement of Paris (the supreme court of northern France) severely restrained the witch-hunts. After an outbreak of hunts in France in 1587–88, increasingly skeptical judges

began a series of restraining reforms marked by the requirement of “obligatory appeal” to the Parlement in cases of witchcraft, making accusations even more expensive and

dangerous.

The decline of witch-hunts, like their origins, was gradual. By the late 16th century, many prosperous and professional people in western Europe were accused, so that the leaders

of society began to have a personal interest in checking the hunts. The legal use of torture declined in the 17th and 18th centuries, and there was a general retreat from religious

intensity following the wars of religion (from the 1560s to 1640s). The gradual demise during the late 17th and early 18th century of the previous religious, philosophical, and legal

worldview encouraged the ascendancy of an existent but often suppressed skepticism; increasing literacy, mobility, and means of communication set the stage for social

acceptance of this changing outlook.

Nevertheless, the reasons for the decline in the witch-hunts are as difficult to discern as the reasons for their origins. The theory best supported by the evidence is that the

increasing power of the centralized courts such as the Inquisition and the Parlement acted to begin a process of “decriminalization” of witchcraft. These courts reduced the number

of witch trials significantly by 1600, half a century before legal theory, legislation, and theology began to dismiss the notion of witchcraft in France and other countries.

 

Burning

Explanations of the witch-hunts continue to vary, but recent research has shown some of these theories to be improbable or of negligible value. Most scholars agree that the

prosecutions were not driven by political or gender concerns; they were not attacks on backward, or rural, societies; they did not function to express or relieve local tensions; they

were not a result of the rise of capitalism or other macroeconomic changes; they were not the result of changes in family structure or in the role of women in society; and they

were not an effort by cultural elites to impose their views on the populace. Moreover, the evidence does not indicate a close correlation between socioeconomic tension and

witchcraft, though agrarian crises seem to have had some effect.

One of the most important aspects of the hunts remains unexplained. No satisfactory explanation for the preponderance of women among the accused has appeared. Although the

proportions varied according to region and time, on the whole about three-fourths of convicted witches were female. Women were certainly more likely than men to be

economically and politically powerless, but that generalization is too broad to be helpful, for it holds true for societies in periods where witchcraft is absent. The malevolent sorcery

more often associated with men, such as harming crops and livestock, was rarer than that ascribed to women. Young women were sometimes accused of infanticide, but midwives

and nurses were not particularly at risk. Older women were more frequently accused of casting malicious spells than were younger women, because they had had more time to

establish a bad reputation, and the process from suspicion to conviction often took so long that a woman might have aged considerably before charges were actually advanced.

Although many witchcraft theorists were not deeply misogynist, many others were, notably the authors of the infamous Malleus maleficarum. Resentment and fear of the power of

the “hag,” a woman released from the constraints of virginity and then of maternal duties, has been frequently described in Mediterranean cultures. Folklore and accounts of trials

indicate that a woman who was not protected by a male family member might have been the most likely candidate for an accusation, but the evidence is inconclusive. Children

were often accusers (as they were at Salem), but they were sometimes also among the accused. Most accused children had parents who had been accused of witchcraft.

In the long run it may be better simply to describe the witch-hunts than to try to explain them, since the explanations are so diverse and complicated. Yet one general explanation

is valid: the unique character of the witch-hunts was consistent with the prevailing worldview of intelligent, educated, experienced people for more than three centuries.

The Ride Through the Murky Air John Gilbert

Contemporary witchcraft

Academics tend to dismiss contemporary witchcraft (known as “Wicca”), at the heart of the modern Neo-Pagan movement, as a silly fad or an incompetent technology, but some

now understand it as an emotionally consistent but deliberately anti-intellectual set of practices. Adherents to Wicca worship the Goddess, honour nature, practice ceremonial

magic, invoke the aid of deities, and celebrate Halloween, the summer solstice, and the vernal equinox. At the start of the 21st century, perhaps a few hundred thousand people

(mostly in North America and Britain) practiced Wicca and Neo-Paganism, a modern Western reconstruction of pre-Christian religions that draws upon the diversity of worldwide

polytheistic religions to create a new and diverse religious movement. The rise of Wicca and Neo-Paganism is due in part to increasing religious tolerance and syncretism, a

growing awareness of the symbolism of the unconscious, the retreat of Christianity, the popularity of fantasy and science fiction, the growth of feminism, the ascendancy of

deconstructionist and relativist theory, and the emphasis upon individuality and subjectivity as opposed to intellectual coherence and societal values. Most modern Neo-Pagans,

distrustful of the demands of traditional religions, eschew doctrine or creed and engage in the ritual expression of “symbolic and experiential” meanings. Although Neo-Paganism

incorporates the emotional involvement and ritual practices associated with religion into its tradition, many Neo-Pagans prefer to think of themselves as practicing magic rather

than religion, and although their emphasis is on opening themselves up to hidden powers through rites, chants, or charms, most do not call themselves “witches,” as Wiccans do.

Both Wiccans and Neo-Pagans also have strong ecological and environmental concerns, worship the Goddess and other deities, and celebrate the change of seasons with elaborate

rituals. Whether magic or religion, these groups reject intellectual coherence and objectivity in favour of personal experience and dismiss science as well as traditional religion.

Although some Wiccans claim to be part of the “old ways” and “ancient tradition,” their religion is new. Wicca is creative, imaginative, and entirely a 20th-century invention, with

no connection to ancient paganism or the alleged “witches” of the witch-hunts. No cult of the “Goddess” played a significant role in Western culture between late antiquity and the

mid-20th century. Wicca, in fact, originated about 1939 with an Englishman, Gerald Gardner, who constructed it from the fanciful works of the self-styled magician Aleister

Crowley; the fake “ancient” document Aradia (1899); the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and other late-19th and early-20th century occult movements; and Margaret

Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and article “Witchcraft” in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929), which put forth in its most popular form her

theory that the witches of western Europe were the lingering adherents of a once general pagan religion that had been displaced, though not completely, by Christianity. Gardner,

backed by Murray, who wrote a laudatory introduction to his book Witchcraft Today (1954), fixed this erroneous notion of an ancient witch-cult somewhere in the public

consciousness, and it has been nurtured there by Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948) and innumerable more recent quasi-fictional and fictional accounts.

Jeffrey Burton Russell

 

School of Fontainebleau

See collection:

  

Rosso Fiorentino

                 

  

Fontainebleau school

The vast number of artists, both foreign and French, whose works are associated with the court of Francis I at Fontainebleau during the last two-thirds of the 16th century.

There is both a first and a second school of Fontainebleau. The earlier works are the more important.

The palace itself can be described as charming and picturesque, though architecturally it is not a work of consequence, being chiefly a transformation of the previous

medieval castle, even incorporating some of the older parts. The King began rebuilding in 1528 and by 1530 had persuaded Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540), the first of

many Italians who were to work there, to locate in France. Rosso was joined in 1532 by Primaticcio (1504–70). Artists of great merit, they evolveda brilliant system of

combining painted panels with stucco nudes, garlands, and other forms sculpted in high relief. In addition, Rosso developed a much imitated “strapwork” technique; that

is, he treated stucco like pieces of leather that had been rolled, folded, and cut into shape. Artists who could not visit Fontainebleau knew of the work there through

engravings, and these same engravings are useful today as records of what has been lost. Much of the most characteristic Fontainebleau decorative sculpture and painting

can still be seen there in the Galerie François I, the Chambre de la Duchesse d'Etampes, and the Salle de Ball.

Primaticcio was active long after the death of Rosso, and his manner of representing the human figure with long limbs, thin necks, small heads, and exaggerated

classical profiles was canon for the rest of the century. Other foreign masters included the painter of mythological landscapes, Niccolo dell'Abbate, who was at

Fontainebleau from 1552, Antoine Caron, Jean Cousin and Benvenuto Cellini, Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, who is well known for his saltcellar made for Francis I

(1540; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and “Nymph of Fontainebleau” (1543-44; Louvre, Paris).

The so-called second school of Fontainebleau generally refers to the painters Antonio Fantuzzi, Ambroise Dubois(1543–1614), Toussaint Dubreuil (1561–1602),

and Martin Freminet (1567–1619), men who, though competent, lacked imagination and invention and were content to work within the artistic boundaries set by their

predecessors at Fontainebleau.

 

               

 Fontainebleau school

(Fr. Ecole de Fontainebleau)

Term that encompasses work in a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, stuccowork and printmaking, produced from the 1530s to the first decade of the 17th century in France. It evokes an unreal and

poetic world of elegant, elongated figures, often in mythological settings, as well as incorporating rich, intricate ornamentation with a characteristic type of strapwork. The phrase was first used by Adam von Bartsch

in Le Peintre-graveur (21 vols, Vienna, 1803–21), referring to a group of etchings and engravings, some of which were undoubtedly made at Fontainebleau in France. More generally, it designates the art made to

decorate the château of Fontainebleau, built from 1528 by Francis I and his successors, and by extension it covers all works that reflect the art of Fontainebleau.  With the re-evaluation of MANNERISM in the 20th

century, the popularity of the Fontainebleau school has increased hugely. There has also been an accompanying increase in the difficulty of defining the term precisely. 

First School of Fontainebleau (from 1531):

Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio, Niccolo dell'Abbate

Second School of Fontainebleau (from 1594):

Ambroise Dubois, Toussaint Dubreuil, Martin Freminet

     

   

Rosso Fiorentino

born March 8, 1495, Florence [Italy]

died Nov. 14, 1540, Paris, France

also called Rosso Fiorentino, or Il Rosso Italian painter and decorator, an exponent of the expressive style that is often called

early, or Florentine, Mannerism, and one of the founders of the Fontainebleau school.

Rosso received his early training in the studio of Andrea del Sarto, alongside his contemporary, Pontormo. The earliest works

ofthese two young painters combined influences from Michelangelo and from northern Gothic engravings in a novel style, which

departed from the tenets of High Renaissance art and was characterized by its highly chargedemotionalism. Rosso's most

remarkable paintings from this period are the “Assumption” (1517; fresco at SS. Annunziata, Florence), the “Deposition” (1521;

Pinacoteca Comunale, Volterra), and “Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro” (c. 1523; Uffizi, Florence).

At the end of 1523 Rosso moved to Rome, where his exposure to Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, the late art of Raphael, and the

work of Parmigianino resulted in a radical realignment of his style. His “Dead Christ with Angels” (c. 1526) exemplifies this new

style with its feeling for rarefied beauty and subdued emotion. Fleeing from the sack of the city in 1527, he worked briefly in

several central Italian towns. In 1530, on the invitation of Francis I, he went to France (by way of Venice) and remained in the

royal service there until his death.

Rosso's principal surviving work is the decoration of the Galerie François I at the palace of Fontainebleau (c. 1534–37), where, in

collaboration with Francesco Primaticcio,he developed an ornamental style whose influence was felt throughout northern Europe.

His numerous designs for engravings also exercised a wide influence on the decorative arts both in Italy and in northern Europe.

 

 

Madonna and Child with Putti

1517Oil on wood, 111 x 75,5 cmThe Hermitage, St. Petersburg

 

Madonna Enthroned with Four Saints1518

Oil on wood, 172 x 141 cmGalleria degli Uffizi, Florence

 

 

Musician Angei1520Tempera on wood, 47 x 39 cmGalleria degli Uffizi, Florence 

   

Decoration1534-36Stucco

Galerie François I, Fontainebleau

 

Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro

1523

 

 

Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro

1523

    

 

 

Rosso Fiorentino

  

Rosso Fiorentino

born March 8, 1495, Florence [Italy]

died Nov. 14, 1540, Paris, France

also called Rosso Fiorentino, or Il Rosso Italian painter and decorator, an exponent of the

expressive style that is often called early, or Florentine, Mannerism, and one of the founders of

the Fontainebleau school.

Rosso received his early training in the studio of Andrea del Sarto, alongside his contemporary,

Pontormo. The earliest works ofthese two young painters combined influences from

Michelangelo and from northern Gothic engravings in a novel style, which departed from the

tenets of High Renaissance art and was characterized by its highly chargedemotionalism.

Rosso's most remarkable paintings from this period are the “Assumption” (1517; fresco at SS.

Annunziata, Florence), the “Deposition” (1521; Pinacoteca Comunale, Volterra), and “Moses

Defending the Daughters of Jethro” (c. 1523; Uffizi, Florence).

At the end of 1523 Rosso moved to Rome, where his exposure to Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling,

the late art of Raphael, and the work of Parmigianino resulted in a radical realignment of his

style. His “Dead Christ with Angels” (c. 1526) exemplifies this new style with its feeling for

rarefied beauty and subdued emotion. Fleeing from the sack of the city in 1527, he worked

briefly in several central Italian towns. In 1530, on the invitation of Francis I, he went to France

(by way of Venice) and remained in the royal service there until his death.

Rosso's principal surviving work is the decoration of the Galerie François I at the palace of

Fontainebleau (c. 1534–37), where, in collaboration with Francesco Primaticcio,he developed an

ornamental style whose influence was felt throughout northern Europe. His numerous designs

for engravings also exercised a wide influence on the decorative arts both in Italy and in

northern Europe.

 

Dead Christ with Angels1525-26

Oil on canvas, 133,5 x 104 cmMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston

    

 

Deposition from the Cross1528

Oil on canvas, 270 x 201 cmSan Lorenzo, Sansepolcro

 

 

Marriage of the Virgin1523

Oil on wood, 325 x 250 cmSan Lorenzo, Florence

 

Madonna Enthroned and Ten Saints1522

Oil on wood, 350 x 259 cmGalleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence