The Witch As Muse Art, Gender, And Poer In Early Modern Europe [Paperback]

Occult topics have long fascinated artists, and the subject of witches—their imagined bodies and fantastic rituals—was a popular one for painters and printmakers in early modern Europe. Focusing on several artists in depth, Linda C. Hults probes the historical and theoretical contexts of their work to examine the ways witches were depicted and the motivations for those depictions.

While studying the work of such artists as Dürer, Baldung, Jacques de Gheyn II, and Goya, Hults discerns patterns suggesting that the imagery of witchcraft served both as an expression of artistic license and as a tool of self-promotion for the artists. These imagined images of witches were designed to catch the attention of powerful and important patrons as witchcraft was being debated in political and intellectual centers. Dürer's early engravings of witnesses made in the wake of theMalleus maleficarumof 1487 were crucial in linking the seductive or aged female form with the dangers of witchcraft. The polarized idea of gender pervaded many aspects of early modern culture, including art theory. As the deluded female witch embodied the abuse of imagination and fantasy, so the male artist presented himself as putting those faculties to productive and reasoned use.

List of Illustrations
Preface

Chapter 1. The Witch as Woman
Chapter 2. The Witch as Muse
Chapter 3. Inventing the Witch in the European Heartland: Dürer and Baldung
Chapter 4. Francken, the Rhetoric of Habsburg Power, and Artistic Invention in Antwerp
Chapter 5. The Art of Describing Delusion: De Gheyn and the Dutch Variant
Chapter 6. Rosa: Witchcraft and the Fiery Painter
Chapter 7. Between Enlightenment and Horror: Goya's Reinvention of the Witch

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

The most significant and broad-reaching study we have on the place of the witch in the imagination of artists from the early sixteenth to the early l#(