Description
Book SynopsisThe figure of the witch is familiar from the work of early modern German, Dutch, and Flemish artists, but much less so in the work of their Italian counterparts. Art and Witchcraft in Early Modern Italy seeks to explore the ways in which representations of witchcraft emerged from and coincided with the main cultural currents and artistic climate of an epoch chiefly celebrated for its humanistic and rational approaches. Through an in-depth examination of a panoply of arresting paintings, engravings, and drawings—variously portraying a hag-ridden colossal phallus, a horror-stricken necromancer dodging the devil’s scrabbling claws, and a nocturnal procession presided over by an infanticidal crone—Guy Tal offers new ways of reading witchcraft images through and beyond conventional iconography. Artists such as Parmigianino, Alessandro Allori, Leonello Spada, and Angelo Caroselli effected visual commentaries on demonological notions that engaged their audience in a tantalizing experience of interpretation.
Trade Review“…a very stimulating and engaging book, brimming with new insights into Italian representations of witchcraft in the early modern period. It is the first study to offer a comprehensive and coherent account of these images, bringing many little known works to the reader’s attention... The analysis of the images and their artists is both complex and sophisticated, focusing on the intellectual and emotional responses artists may have stimulated in their viewers, and the codes, narratives, and traditions that allowed different groups of viewers to gain access to these different meanings.”
- Charles Zika, Professorial Fellow in History, University of Melbourne
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 Old Women under Investigation: The Drab Housewife and the Grotesque Hag
Chapter 2 Chimerical Procession: The Poetics of Inversion and Monstrosity
Chapter 3 Priapic Ride: Gigantic Genitals, Penile Theft, and Other Phallic Fantasies
Chapter 4 Magical Metamorphoses: Variations on the Myths of Circe and Medea
Chapter 5 A Visit from the Devil: Horror and Liminality in Caravaggesque Paintings
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
