music_collector

Am I the only one who came here thinking Ozzy was the subject in question?

Trollheart

Well the title would certainly fit, but no. Fraid not. I seldom do music journals these days, apart from my Prince one, my country music one and my classical music one. And maybe one or two more.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

music_collector

Bait and switch.

I get it!

Trollheart

Actually no. Believe it or not, Ozzy didn't enter my mind. I just wanted a snappy title. I was originally going with Diabolus Histoire, but then that didn't really seem likely to grab people, so I fell back on the old cliche.

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music_collector

I'm teasing. I figured you were going a different route, based on past posts. I do like learning history though.

Trollheart

Chapter III: Fallen angel to rising star:
The Devil goes mainstream

Although the Devil - or at least, a devil - has been portrayed in everything from stone to wood throughout early history, mostly it's been the image of gods or demons who have really little if anything to do with the character we known as the Devil, or Satan, and up until about the Middle Ages nobody had really seen a proper depiction of him. I’d have to check, but I don’t think he was in any of the illuminations the Christian monks made - I doubt they would allow such a figure to sully their holy work - and other than them, nobody else was really making what could be called any sort of art until about maybe the twelfth century. Perhaps oddly, while we have discussed Pan, Dionysos and other pagan gods whose image, or parts of it, was appropriated for the, if you like, blueprint of the Devil by the Christian Church, one of the earliest representations of a divine being bearing a strong resemblance to our now accepted image of the Devil was in fact not a god of evil at all, but one of protection and plenty.

Bes was a god worshipped by the ancient Egyptians, and he was a household protector, a god who, rather than leading or marshalling evil spirits to his cause, fought against them, keeping them away from houses where his statue stood. He watched over children, and women in labour, but because he was also associated with all those things the Church tsked and shook its motherfuc - I mean, motherly head at, and disapproved of - sexual lust, drinking, dancing, music, all that ungodly stuff - and because he was also linked with dancing girls, servant women and courtesans, he was prime material for the Church. His image then, meant to scare, but to scare demons and not people - meant to be a friendly protector to them - was half-inched by the Church and used to help mould the figure of Satan, the Accuser.

From the Middle Ages, Satan would appear in increasingly lurid drawings, often quite sexually explicit, to delineate how corrupt he was, and how far from the Christian idea of piety and purity. How we should not emulate his example, but shun it. Artists of all stripes needed commissions, and these would be usually won for them by patrons. These could be anything from rich merchants right up to kings, emperors and popes, but one thing was pretty much constant among all these patrons: the paintings they wanted (unless they were portraits, either of themselves, their family or some higher-up they were trying to butter up) had to be religious in nature. Nobody really painted anything else. Later would come landscape painters such as Van Gogh and Turner and Constable, but leading up to and well before the Renaissance, you painted Jesus, or the saints, or the Virgin Mary, and in these paintings, often, and always cast of course in the role of the bad guy, the tempter, the meter out of justice to the sinner, the eternal and literal fall guy, was the Devil.

Nevertheless, in terms of ratio the Devil appears in far less medieval and even less Renaissance paintings than did his eternal enemy, God. Jesus and the saints had it good in the 12th to 15th centuries, and beyond too, because only a handful of artists wanted to paint the “other guy”, such depictions often failing to find favour with the Church, and therefore seldom commissioned by patrons who had a vested interest in keeping on the right side of the Pope. There were some who would buck the trend a little, though as I say only to ensure the Devil was painted in the worst light possible. I suppose you could call them early cautionary tales, warnings of what awaited in Hell for those who allowed themselves to sin, a grim vision of eternal punishment beyond this life for the damned.

I: Drawing the Devil Down - Early Images in Art

Timeline: 6th century


A very mild version of this, and believed indeed to be one of the first - if not the first - depictions of Satan in art, comes from the sixth century, from a Byzantine mosaic in the Basilica de Sant Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. The idea here is simple, though somewhat a reversal. It’s called The Last Judgement (duh) and in the centre sits Jesus in purple, separating out the good from the bad, the saved from the damned. The latter are represented as goats while the former are sheep. Those attaining salvation are being shepherded by an angel in red (on the left) while the lost are marshalled under Satan’s care, he being shown also as an angel, but in blue. Two things are reversed here. Firstly, of course, red would later become the colour associated with Satan, synonymous with blood and flames, and with Hell itself. But also, the left-hand side would quickly become associated with evil, darkness, the wrong path. The word “sinister” actually means “left” in Latin, so to have the “good” angel and all the saved on the left of the mosaic is odd to say the least.

Nevertheless, as the first real image of Satan in western art, or possibly any art, it is interesting to note how completely un-demon-like he is drawn; in this work, he is quite literally the fallen angel - still an angel (he even has a halo - surely he was required to turn that in when he was kicked out of Heaven? Maybe he had a spare) although differentiated from what is seen as a good or proper one by virtue of being a different colour. I suppose it’s possible that the artist here considered red a warm colour, maybe representing warmth, or it could be that he’s identifying the angel with the blood of Christ, so he would have to be red. Could even be red to indicate the heart, too, whereas Satan is possibly seen as a colder figure, given that he went against God, or maybe the blue represents the sky, the firmament through which he Fell. I imagine it could also be a symbol of Heaven, eternal blue, Satan covered in it in order to hammer home how doomed he was, how he would never see Heaven again.


At the very turn of the eleventh century we get one of the first depictions of the Fall, showing in an almost cartoonish way the expulsion of Satan and his supporters from Heaven. It’s not too easy to make out details, but it looks as if the angels fall and then change shape as they do, and end up in what could I suppose literally be termed a hellmouth, a big gaping fanged maw waiting to receive them, the very entrance to their new realm. This will be reflected in other images on this theme by artists later in history.

Timeline: 12th - 14th century


Even by the twelfth century, to quote the Beautiful South a little, blue is still the colour. In this uncredited painting from the island of Torcello, near Venice, Satan is shown as something, to me anyway, of a tired, old, defeated figure. His hair and beard (the first time he is shown bearded?) are white, like those of an old man, and he himself is blue. He sits on a throne, whose arms are two living monsters who eat the damned. Personally, I can see slight callbacks here to Norse legend, where the two ravens Hugin and Munin (Thought and Memory) sit on the shoulders of Odin, the All-Father. Now admittedly, they don’t eat anyone, just bring him news from Midgard, the world of men, but I can’t help but think there is something of the All-Father about this arrangement.

There’s a curious addition of two angels in the foreground of the painting, large in the left-hand corner, and they appear to be spearing and playing with human heads (as you do) so I assume they’re meant to be demons, or fallen angels like their boss, but it’s a strange thing to put in the painting, I feel. If these guys are going to look like angels, and we assume they’re some of the ones who followed their leader into Hell, why is Satan not like them? Not only this, but in the background, much smaller, milling around the throne are other blue-skinned creatures, presumably also demons, having great craic altogether with the doomed humans. If the two boys in the foreground weren’t sticking humans with their spears I might have said they were angels, maybe observing Hell, but unless they’ve decided it’s a case of when in Rome, then I feel they have to be demons, just not sure why there’s such a marked difference between them and the boys in blue.

You know, looking at it more closely, there’s also a more disturbing aspect about this image. The blue Satan appears to be holding a human on his lap. He’s not devouring or torturing him (maybe he’s about to) but just letting him sit there. It’s almost as if he’s letting this human observe the carnage going on, as if he were his son or something. But that’s not the weirdest and most off-putting thing about this, for me anyway. Considering the Devil has white hair and a beard, and with a human sitting on his lap, does this not convey a very freaky foreshadowing of kids sitting on Santa’s lap? Satan/Santa? Fair gives me the shudders, it does.

This stone frieze on the western wall of Lincoln Cathedral in England shows a representation of Christ kicking the crap out of Satan after he has triumphantly risen from the dead, but cooling his heels in the tomb with strict instructions not to pop his head out before Easter Sunday, had boogied on down to Hell to annoy Satan and mouth off to the souls there. The image of Satan is pretty, well, demonic for the time, but it’s hard not to see in it an almost copy of that guy Bes we spoke about at the start. Talk about trampling someone underfoot! I think it’s quite cute that - I suppose, given that it was going on a church - Satan still has the presence of mind while being walked on to cover his business, so that the public don’t get any rude shocks.



A monochrome image here of Satan’s Fall, showing God looking down from Heaven as the boys tumble down. Weirdly, and I’m sure not deliberately, he appears to be waving in a “see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya!” or “Good riddance!” kind of way. Odd. Well, a lot is odd about this image, even given its early origins. So far as I can make out (and the image I have is quite small and doesn’t seem to want to enlarge much) the fallen angels are shown perhaps upside down, as if falling out of heaven head-first, then on the ground there are weird beast like creatures, who I suppose would be what they changed into when they entered Hell? And at the bottom of the picture is a huge monstrous mouth, supposed, again, I guess, to represent Hell.

This seems, from what I can gather, to come from a psalter (basically a holy book of psalms and things), this one that of Saint Louis and Blanche of Castille.


The Devil is green for the Codex Gigas, also known as The Devil’s Bible, a huge manuscript (the largest in the world) created in the 13th century by Benedictine monks in what is now the Czech Republic but was then known as Bohemia. The book is perhaps the only religious one known to contain a full-page illustration of Himself, and not at all surprisingly, it’s less than complimentary. In keeping with the image and impression of what the Devil looked like at this period in history, this figure is not in the least human, standing on extremely clawed, even animal feet with very long, red toe-nails (the same on his hands - fingernails obviously, not toenails) and wearing a sort of leopard-skin loin cloth, either to demon-strate (sorry) how primitive he is, compared to the perceived more enlightened of God’s creation, or perhaps only to protect the illustrators from having to ink in his todger, who knows? But though his torso is roughly human-shaped, as are his arms and legs, we’re almost looking more an an ape-like thing here, particularly in the way he squats rather than sits, even looking, rather uncomfortably, like a deformed baby waiting to be picked up.

But what’s the most monstrous feature of this Devil is his face, indeed his whole head. It’s not even the face of a beast, but literally that of a nightmare, a monster, a creature out of the illuminator’s darkest, most twisted imagination. It’s entirely green, possibly to indicate sickliness, or pestilence, disease or poison, and there are two very large sharp tusks curving down from the upper lip - odd in itself, and supposedly meant to be an even baser corruption of nature, as animals who have tusks generally tend to have them in the lower lip and curving up. Think of elephants, boars etc. The mouth out of which these huge tusks depend is red as blood (or with blood) and filled with razor-sharp teeth, while above the eyes are small, round and sort of glassy but with red, staring pupils. I can’t see a nose as such (this parchment is after all seven hundred years old, and it’s worn down a little) but the Devil here does seem to have big, misshapen ears and then on top of his head are the classic curving horns, though kind of more like those of a bull than of a goat. Finally, his head is topped with what looks like an early attempt at an afro, though the hair itself seems to be white, possibly nodding back to the one from Torcello, which I could, if I were a smart bastard (which I am) name the Devil Santa.

Overall a pretty nasty, bestial vision and it’s very hard to believe that this nightmare figure could, in three hundred short years, morph into the heroic rebel, defiantly opposing God and standing up for himself, and perhaps by extension the common man. It just shows how changing attitudes, not necessarily in the Church, who always had and probably always will hate and revile Satan, and place him in the worst light possible, but among humans in general, allowed the Prince of Darkness to reinvent himself and secure a place of honour, for a while, in our history.

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Another green Devil in this illustration from a stained-glass window (I don’t know who painted it; it doesn’t say) showing him tempting Jesus in the desert. It’s, to be fair, a little simplistic: Satan is offering Jesus food and the Saviour is raising his hands as if to say “thanks dude but I just ate.” The Devil himself is almost a cartoonish figure here, indeed he is grinning, or seems to be. It would be next to impossible to fear this manifestation of the Devil, but it is interesting that, though his entire body is green, his head is yellow, while two blue snakes sprout from his head, almost, you might think, in a look back to the Gorgon Medusa, out of Greek legend, who could petrify a man with one glare. I expect though the snakes are meant to represent the one in the Garden of Eden, given that this is essentially a painting depicting temptation and resistance.

The feet are kind of clawed but also the heels reach back behind the legs, to make it look as if Satan is wearing some sort of pointy flippers or something, and I don’t know if that blue thing roughly positioned at his arse is meant to be a tail, but it looks like he’s farting a blue cloud! I think it’s just another element of the window that he happens to be painted against though. The face is mostly human, though with a sort of curving nose almost like that of a beak, and the artist has definitely attempted to make it look cruel, though I think it actually looks quite bland. But what do I know? I couldn’t even paint a stick man on a stained-glass window. Perhaps quite fitting, and probably intentional, that the background behind Satan is a lurid ruby red, while Jesus chills against a soft blue backdrop. Again though, the colours reverse compared to those used in that sixth century you-take-the-goats-I’ll-have-the-sheep mosaic.


One of perhaps the earliest of these comes from 1260, painted by a Florentine artist called Coppo di Marcovaldo. Okay, another source says it’s by a Franciscan monk called Jacobus. Whoever painted it, it’s a mural - seems to be part of a much bigger one that covers the ceiling of the Florence Baptistry - depicting the Last Judgement, and you can see by just looking at it that this was a painting created long before the traditional figure of the Devil was conceived and agreed on. Devils, or if you prefer, demons, were painted in many different colours by artists up to about the Renaissance, when the idea of a red-skinned demon took hold. Here, the devil is blue, and to be fair, bears little to no resemblance to what we recognise today as the image of Satan. There are horns, yes, and the feet could be cloven (though only one is visible, the other obscured by a corpse) but otherwise there are none of the usual features: no forked beard, no wings, no claws or talons, no scales. A Devil, as it were, shown as a work in progress.

Another Last Judgement (popular theme with artists painting the Devil, for obvious reasons) comes from the fifteenth century, painted by Fra Angelico, an Italian artist who built on the work of Jacobus or di Marcovaldo, whichever painted the one above, keeping his Devil blue, though this one is stockier, more almost gorilla-looking, with powerful muscular arms and a head looking more like the sort of thing that would begin to be seen on the shoulders of demons and the Devil later on. In contrast to the other one, Angelico’s devil seems to be covered with some sort of thick fur, and his eyes glow with a hellish yellow light. He too has horns, though considerably smaller than the earlier one (size isn’t everything you know!) and yes, like his contemporary he’s chowing down on humans, presumably damned ones. One thing that seems to be consistent with images of the Devil at this time is his hunger for human bodies. Wonder if he ever thought of just ordering from Deliveroo or Uber-Eats? Probably not.

There are other differences too. While Jacobus/di Marcovaldo’s devil is sitting on, well, something - kind of looks like he fell arse-first into the middle of a pizza, splitting it down the middle, Angelico’s one is enjoying a soak in the tub. Well, he’s in some sort of massive bowl in which I can only assume there is boiling water, or, well, something, with lots of lovely tasty humans, some possibly in parts, bobbing around in it. His lieutenant demons, unlike their master, are green and brown, that is, some are green and some are brown. I guess if you wanted to scare the faithful, this image is a pretty good attempt at it.

Until the advent of more permissive literature, I guess you might say, the Devil is seldom seen out of Hell. Almost all - perhaps all - of the paintings created up to at least the seventeenth century depict not himself, but Hell; he is seen as ruling there, often the central figure of course, but the main theme of these paintings is Hell and the punishment that awaits sinners in the afterlife. In the one above, painted just at the turn of the sixteenth century by Lucas Signorelli, there are demons - and the damned of course - but so far as I can see, no devil, no big boss, nobody overseeing things. The demons are again green and blue, and while there are flying ones hovering above in armour, I don’t think any of them are meant to represent Satan. Again, this is more for illustrating the horrors of going against the teachings of the Church, a preview of how your immortal soul could suffer eternal torment if you don’t buckle down and do as the priests say. It’s not a real attempt to depict the Devil; he’s pretty incidental here, though a looming, if unseen, presence. Perhaps he doesn’t need to be shown: at this point, everyone knows who runs things in Hell.

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Timeline: 15th - 16th century


Taken from one of the illuminations of the Historiated Bible of Guiard des Moulins, believed created around 1410, the bottom far right panel shows a later stylised depiction of the Great Fall, with most of the angels black, and one red. I assume the red one is himself. It’s hardly detailed, but it does get the idea across.

Yeah, even when artists were commissioned, it would seem, to draw their idea (or the Church’s idea, probably - I imagine there were many what would today be called network executives’ notes!) of Hell, few either wanted to or were allowed depict the actual Devil. We have the likes of Bosch’s Last Judgement, which, while it does feature a sort of Hellish scenario, and a lot of weird and almost alien figures and shapes (this is Bosch, after all!) looks more to be focused on God overlooking the whole thing, and I can’t see (though maybe I’m wrong) any sign of the actual Devil. Maybe he didn’t get the memo. Bosch does throw him into his famously weird The Garden of Earthly Delights, but as he portrays him as some sort of devilish bird that eats and then shits humans out, I think we’ll just avoid eye contact and be moving along, nothing to see here. Hendrick Goltzius’s sixteenth-century The Descent into Hell of the Damned features more tits and ass than demons and devils - I mean, there are some vague winged shapes and things that could be demons, but it’s kind of more a sense of macabre titillation I get from it than horror or fear. Again, maybe that’s just me.

A strange image from the fifteenth century shows Satan as almost some sort of early battle beast. He’s hardly human at all - horns, fangs, tusks, pig-like ears, body covered (where it’s not armoured) in some sort of fur or scales, with claws on both hand and foot and a very monstrous-looking face. All that is bad enough, but then he has a second head in a place where, well, let’s just say I wonder how he’s going to take a pee? This second face is kind of like a horned wolf, with a big tongue hanging out - at least, I hope it’s a tongue! These kind of “hybrid Satans” became somewhat familiar around this period; it was an attempt to further, if you’ll excuse the use of the word, demonise Satan, to dehumanise (or perhaps de-angelify) the Fallen One, show how different he was, not just from God’s angels, but from men. Would you put your trust in such a monster?

Or in this one, painted by miniature Dutch painters the Limbourg Brothers? I don’t mean they were midgets, but that they painted miniatures, small portraits and things like lockets and so forth. But this was from their work on illustrating a Book of Hours (basically, a devotional prayer book for every hour) called Belle Heures du Duc de Berry, and shows Satan reposing in Hell, master of his own domain, indulging in his favourite pastime, torturing and eating sinners. For I think the first time though, he wears a crown in this image, denoting his total mastery of Hell. Not that you’d argue with the guy, now would you? The image shown here is back to the bestial, covered in fur, horns, claws, nothing really human about this figure at all.

Looking closer at this image, there’s a lot to take in. Firstly, this Devil is huge. I mean, earlier representations of him were large but this guy is massive. Also, he doesn’t sit on a throne (or in a bowl of soup) but rather on some sort of pallet or stretcher, kind of analogous to those things they used to drag people to the gallows on who were sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. Oh wait I see: it’s a huge brazier, on which he’s relaxing, no doubt after a hard day of tempting and sealing deals for the souls of sinners. Well, we all have to kick back every so often. He also seems to be breathing fire (though that could be metaphorical); if so, this is I think the first instance in which he does so. His feet, though not cloven, do have claws (though his hands appear to have normal fingers) and with these, again for the first time in art I think, he grips a human in each, like a massive bird of prey, about to carry them off to his lair.

What’s also intriguing is that, again a first I feel, some of his demons or lieutenants look almost exactly like him. Look at those two guys on the left; other than the crown, they could be brothers to Satan. Then again, there is another primary difference: they have wings (bat wings) whereas Satan does not. Satan also has, - and sorry to keep repeating the phrase, but I don’t know how else to say it - for the first time, the classic high curved horns of a goat, which looks back perhaps to his genesis, when gods like Pan and Bacchus were transformed into the figure we know today as the Devil.

I’m also intrigued by the sinners. If you look closely, you’ll see they all seem to have the same haircut, and it’s the one typified by monks. Are the Limbourg brothers here hinting that even holy men can end up in Hell? Or are they even going further, and accusing the monks of being perhaps not quite as holy as everyone believed and expected them to be. We know that from the fourteenth century on - and possibly before - monks, abbots, nuns and abbesses had broken many of the cardinal rules of the Church, with wives, whores, gluttony, drinking and all sorts of other vices being indulged in behind the walls of the cloisters, those cloisters fantastically and expensively decorated and appointed. Are the Limbourgs pointing out the hypocrisy of men who swore to live simple lives of poverty and chastity, and who broke those vows? Are they saying this will be their reward?

Or is it just coincidence? Are these, perhaps, the only haircuts they could draw, or just the most popular at the time, when maybe everyone was trying to be as pious as they could without actually becoming a monk or a nun? Either way, it’s tempting to think that these brothers are pointing at the Church and saying you think you’re so cool, but you’ve sinned too: God sees through you, and you’re all bound for Hell too. One last interesting thing about this is that the Limbourgs, though they’ve used a lot of red - mostly in the brazier and in the doomed souls - chose to paint Hell itself not that colour, but a dull grey, maybe to emphasise how miserable a place it is?

This one I really like. Given that it was painted in 1483, I think it looks like some sort of modern cartoon, where the Devil is like a green alien or something! Really funny. And the colours! So bright and vivid. This was part of an altarpiece (which I assume is a set of paintings that adorned an altar in a church) made by German artist Michael Pacher and this pnelt was called The Devil Presenting St. Augustine with the Book of Vices. Kind of a This is Your Life, maybe? I’m sure there’s some deep religious significance to such a book, but I’m not really interested in that. I just think it looks cool, and for a fifteenth-century painting, like wow!

Oh all right. Thanks to some clever clogs on Reddit here’s the story: One day St Augustine saw the Devil pass before him carrying a book on his shoulders. He asked the Devil to show him what was inside, and the demon said that there were sins of all men and women that he put down in it. The sneaky bishop looked to see if there was something about his own sins written in there and found the only record of the time when he had forgotten to say Compline [the Night Prayer]. He ran to a church to briefly complete this prayer. Back with the Devil, Augustine asked him to check that very place in the book with his only sin and, a miracle, it was empty now! “You have shamefully deceived me, I regret that I showed you my book, because you have cancelled your sin by the power of your prayers!“ - said the Devil and disappeared confounded.

An interesting story, which places the Devil in an odd position, that of bearer and recorder of man’s sins, but more, makes Augustine act in what might be considered a very unsaintly way, essentially cheating his way out of the book, and kind of making us feel a little sympathy for the Devil (sorry) who had been tricked. Usually it’s him that does the tricking. But whatever about the story, the image of the Devil here is pretty unique. Allover green, and looking like a kind of giant anthropomorphic frog or reptile, he has the classic bat wings that were popular in depictions of him around this time (though they. Like the rest of his body, are green not black) and he also has another face in his arse, somewhat like the creature envisaged in the earlier hybrid Satan we saw, as well as a kind of bony ridge running down his back (ending in what looks like the nose of the, if you will, arse face) which is covered with what look like scales. He’s tall and very thin, and his face is kind of lizard-ish, but very alien-looking, though he does sport the goat’s horns on top of his head. His feet, rather than being cloven, are two-toed, but do look almost to end in hooves.



An engraving by Albercht Dürer titled Knight, Death and the Devil shows our man with those goats legs again but otherwise bearing a pretty striking resemblance both to the blue white-haired and bearded devil of the 13th century painting, and looking not a little like the Greek god Neptune too. Or is that meant to be Death? I think that’s Death, bearing the hourglass. If so, then the guy behind the knight, who looks a little like a badly-drawn Nemesis the Warlock, for those who read Trollheart’s Futureshock some years ago, and for those who didn’t, he was a character in the 2000 AD strip, said to be a goat, but I don’t quite see it. At any rate, as a representation of the Devil, it’s not great, as the main focus of the engraving is the knight, bravely striding past the two dread figures, but we don’t give a fuck about him, so as a Devil picture, with all due respect to Dürer, this one sucks.


Satan puts in a guest appearance in the 1546 work showing the Fall of Man, but the artist, one Guilio Clovio, has gone for the path of least resistance and just painted him as that pesky serpent, whom you can see there wound around the… hey! Stop staring at Eve’s tits! Yes you are! I saw you! Serpent, son! As Satan would no doubt hiss, “Up here, pal! I’m up here!”

I find this other one more challenging and interesting, though I can’t seem to find out much about it, other than it may have been painted for a Book of Hours by Carlos Fecha in about 1501. I like the way that the artist has merged the idea of Satan and sin (as represented by Eve) into one figure. Well, two. You have Eve standing looking all innocent on the right (and again, stop looking at her tits!) while wound around the tree on the left is a creature who is a snake up to his head but then takes on the characteristics of a woman, perhaps Eve herself, her head and shoulders (sigh! Yes, and tits) that of a woman, in a perhaps none too subtle depiction of the woman as being the root (sorry) of all evil. Oh, and she has wings too, for some reason.


Even Johannes Saedeler’s 1590 work, rather simply but appropriately titled Hell, while again shows us some sort of cloven-hooved figure dragging a poor doomed soul away, doesn’t really give the idea or impression of a lord of the place bossing everyone around, and that figure could just be a demon. In fact, other than the tortured human souls who take up most of the painting, the eye is mostly drawn to a sort of mixture between a skeleton and a ghost in the bottom right-hand corner, and I have to say that looks decidedly female. A model for Coleridge’s night mare Life-in-Death three hundred years later? The first real sixteenth-century depiction of himself, that I can see anyway, is in Cornelis Galle I’s again appropriately-titled Lucifer, which is almost a study in how the Devil was seen by the mid-sixteenth century.

There he is, with all the by-now traditional marks of the Evil One: hairy goat legs, horns, a beard and for I think the first time - at least, the first I can find - big bat-like wings, deliberately, I would imagine, draw differently to the wings possessed by angels, always shown as white, graceful and swanlike. The Devil’s wings are meant, it would appear, to be a corruption of those worn by God’s messengers, a cold, callous, cruel mockery perhaps of the wings he once possessed as Lucifer, before his Fall. Probably meant to make him look more bestial and less angelic. The addition of wings could possibly be attributed to Florentine writer and poet Dante Alighieri, whose hugely popular Divine Comedy, and in particular the book dealing with Hell, Inferno, contains the first mention of Satan in literature. Actually, interestingly the feet are not cloven in this version of the Devil drawn by Galle, but seem to have claws or talons like those of a beast, as do his hands.

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Timeline: 18th - 19th century

Perhaps it was the changing attitudes or techniques in painting by the eighteenth century, but it’s interesting that Thomas Stotthard’s Satan Summoning His Legions pulls away entirely from the traditional image of the Devil as the goat-monster-demon, representing him as very human, almost heroic, in silver armour and with no hint of horns, tails, claws or even beard. If you were to look at the painting without knowing its subject, you might convince yourself it was, I don’t know, some Roman general or a hero out of Greek myth. It’s quite extraordinary, and I do find myself wondering how it was received, painted as it was in 1790, only a hundred years after the infamous Salem witch trials.

Well, reading a little about him I can see that despite the rather German-sounding name, he was in fact English, and worked as an illustrator as well as an artist, painted scenes from classical mythology, Shakespeare and famous figures such as George Washington, Margaret of Anjou and King George III, and was a friend of William Blake. So it would appear that the above painting was a departure for him, not something he would normally turn out, and in that manner I suppose based pretty much on the historical and military figures he had painted, thereby I imagine explaining why his Devil is so, well, human. I suppose he hadn’t either the taste for painting monsters, nor any real need to. Nevertheless, I would say his work stands as a very unique and almost - perhaps not intentionally - complimentary image of the Lord of Lies. Oddly, in a list of seventy-four of his paintings I can’t find this one, so perhaps it’s not one of his better-known or regarded works.

And of course I’m wrong. I’m not at all surprised; I am no student of art and couldn’t tell a Botticelli from a jelly botty, so no gasps of astonishment as I realise that this very ideal of Satan was in fact also used by another Thomas, this time Thomas Lawrence, who in 1796-7 produced the very same subject with the same title (I think these are both depicting a scene in Paradise Lost by John Milton?) where Satan is again a powerful, classically-beautiful man, well-muscled and quite noble looking, with not a hint of the animal or the monster about him at all. Like Thomas Stotthard, he too seems to have been primarily a painter of portraits, which might go some way towards explaining why he painted Satan as he did; he had no skill, perhaps, or at least interest or experience in drawing fantasy monsters, demons or devils.




Francisco Goya seems to have painted two images called Witches Sabbath, though the one above is called that, from 1797-98, while another is called, um, Sabbath of the Witches. Both feature the devil as basically an anthropomorphic goat. That’s it: no human characteristics at all, just a goat standing and behaving as a man.

Again, I don’t know if it was intentional or accidental, but there’s a very popish look to Louis Boulanger’s 1828 work, The Round of the Sabbath, which has the Devil (presumably) standing in the middle of and I guess officiating at a witches’ sabbath. He even has a crozier! That can’t be coincidence. Let’s see what I can find out about this guy. Well, not much on a general skim. Nothing about his religious leanings, though given that his father was a colonel in Napoleon’s Army, perhaps he had none. He was a great friend of Victor Hugo, but that doesn’t really help me. If the painting is meant to be a criticism of, or allusion to the power of the Pope and trying to tie him to evil via witches, then it works very well. If not, well, I don’t get it. I mean, why give the Devil - again, assuming it’s meant to be him, but I think it is - such a close resemblance to the Bishop of Rome?

In the very same year we have a far more traditional and accepted image of the Devil in Eugene Delacroix’s Mephistopheles Flying Over the City, which I can only assume, given the title, is based on Goethe’s novel, which we will come to in due course. This Devil has the wings, the horns, the beard, the hairy legs (in fact, hair all over his body, a little like our blue friend from 1490 as envisaged by Fra Angelico) although it’s interesting to note that Delacroix has opted to provide his Devil - Mephistopheles - with wings more like those of the angels, or at least more like those of swans, in contrast to the bat-like ragged black ones favoured by Cornelis Galle I three hundred years ago. I guess he could be basing them on the description given by Goethe (I haven’t read Faust, tried once, got bored) but he does agree with his fifteenth-century contemporary (or maybe with Goethe, or both) on the feet of the Devil, which are not cloven but again have claws or talons.

I find it interesting that in this depiction the Devil is looking behind him, as if being pursued, as if almost fearful; perhaps a representation of the idea of his always being hunted by the thought of what he did, how he Fell from Heaven? Or maybe he’s just seen something interesting. I also get a real impression of a sense of femininity about this figure; despite the beard, the shape of the body (though it lacks breasts or any female genitalia) just suggests a woman to me. Maybe it’s the way the creature has its hand raised, which reminds me of a female gesture. And once again, maybe it’s just my twisted mind, seeing things that aren’t there.

Ah but is it? Look at the picture above, created in 1866, and tell me this doesn’t look like a woman in distress, possibly being chased by someone and taking a breath, wondering how she’s going to give them the slip? It’s hardly classic devil imagery. I mean, yes, the wings, horns and kind of inhuman eyes are there, but the body, far from being covered in animal-like fur like our friend in the human soup from 1490 or even Delacroix’s slightly feminine Mephistopheles from four hundred years later, this is a far more human Devil. The fact that he is wearing what looks like the kind of thing a Roman legionnaire might have sported, essentially a tunic ending in what looks more like a skirt than anything, the bare legs and what could almost be breasts, adds to the feminine look. But what makes this one like a woman to me is the attitude almost of despair or panic; the hand pressed to the forehead in a gesture of fear, the way he’s shrinking back against the rock, as if trying to hide, the raised foot indicating flight or running, all speak to me of a Devil perhaps powerless and now on the run. Let me see what I can find out about this one.

Okay, well first, and interestingly, Gustav Doré was not only an artist but a comics artist, a sculptor and a caricaturist (well, you’d expect that if he drew comics, wouldn’t you?), a Frenchman who illustrated some famous works (including the most famous, the Bible) such as Poe’s The Raven and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first book perhaps able to claim a sort of re-invention of Satan, or to put it in the words of Jagger and Richards, to attempt to gain sympathy for the Devil. This work though I can’t see among the list of his drawings, though the article does say “his early paintings of religious and mythological subjects, some extremely large, now tend to be regarded as "grandiloquent and of little merit" at least according to the Oxford Companion to Art. I’m not even sure if that is a painting though; from my very limited indeed knowledge of art I would hazard it’s an engraving? Anyway it doesn’t seem to have been regarded as very good by critics.

Ah. Looking a little further afield I find this is indeed from Paradise Lost, and depicts Satan’s Fall from Heaven, which would, I suppose, explain why he’s looking pretty apprehensive, even scared. The person pursuing him - or perceived by him to be doing so - is no less than God, so I guess he would be shitting himself. Doré also produced another painting (etching, lithograph, whatever) of him twenty years later, this time seated in council with all his demons in Hell, and he certainly looks more relaxed. He’s had time to settle in and get the place looking how he likes it, and he’s firmly established as the head honcho. If God was after him, he’s given up now and gone back to being praised by the angels, or whatever God does, and has left Satan to run things as he sees fit. So while it’s the same basic figure - hard really to get too many details as he’s drawn in the distance, all the demons clustered around him in the foreground - this one looks more in command, more a prince of Hell than a frightened exile fleeing Heaven.

Doré also painted one of Satan based on The Inferno, where you can only see his top half as the rest of him is submerged in ice, and I have to say he looks pretty pissed off. Although he has the huge bat wings, the face is almost leonine, with thick curly hair and a thick beard, and so far as I can see, no real animal characteristics. If anything, he looks more like a figure out of Greek mythology, one of their gods or demigods. Minus the wings, of course. Dead giveaway, those wings.


I’m looking at this one by William Blake, produced sixty years before Doré’s efforts, and I have to admit it confuses me. First of all, there are three figures in his Satan, Sin and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell (1808) and while one is clearly a woman, and therefore out of the running (if we take it that each of the figures represents one of the three in the title, then I guess she’s meant to be sin?), either of the other two figures could be him. One is a man, naked and without any of the usual demonic attributes - a distinct lack of horns, wings or even beard, and not a talon or claw in sight - Death maybe? Again, though, a very untraditional view of the Grim Reaper - while the other, whom I assume has the better claim to being Satan due to the presence of a crown on his head, seems to fade in and out of the figure as if there was some sort of superimposition going on. Either that, or the head at least is too far down on the body to be where a head usually is, and the arm seems to fade or not be completely drawn. All I can say is that if the figure on the right is Blake’s idea of Satan, then again he’s very human looking and not at all demonic.

His Satan Calling Up His Legions, from about the same period, again shows quite a human figure, if surrounded by lurid red and yellow (obviously to represent Hell) while his later Satan Smiting Job in the Sore Balls, sorry, with Sore Boils does at least add wings, and bats wings at that, but still retains the basic, almost unsullied figure of a man, and quite a beautiful, angelic one too. Perhaps this is Blake’s attempt to show us what Satan has given up, what he was, and what he could have been had he obeyed God, with the wings there as a mark of what he has been changed into. Either way though, it’s hardly scary is it? William Hogarth’s even earlier (1735 - 1740) version of Satan, Sin and Death seems to show The Devil as a kind of skeletal, dark figure (assuming he’s the one of the right) or else a warrior in that skirt-tunic again (if the one on the left) with red wings.

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Trollheart

Apparently the idea of the Devil changed around the time of the French Revolution, and with the publication of Paradise Lost, which - I’m not sure if intentionally - turned Satan from a monster and demon into a sort of tragic anti-hero, a rebel battling against a cruel overlord, in the same way, I guess, French and other European poor saw themselves as locked in a struggle with their richer masters. So the Devil becomes a figure of resistance, standing up to the big guy, and in the process can’t be painted as a beast or a demon, so takes on more human characteristics. This of course would not last - the Church would not stand for anyone humanising the Devil! - and soon after this the accepted form of the devil - horns, tail, wings, red skin etc - was re-established, and has remained our image of him ever since.

Staying with the rebel notion though, sculptor Jean-Jacques Feuchère had him as a brooding, contemplative figure, the idea perhaps of his wings being folded over him indicating he was not about to cause anyone any harm, nor indeed take flight, but was thinking about what he had done and what it meant for him, and how he intended to go on. The face - what you can see of it - looks vaguely monstrous, though it could just be an ugly one, perhaps the result of his Fall - and really if anything he’s the Fallen Angel in this one, much more than the goat-legged Devil or misshapen monster of the fifteenth century.


George Frederic Watts’ 1847 Satan gives us almost a non-image of the Devil, as he is seen looking away, so we can’t see his face, but even at that, his body is human and proportioned like one, and it’s unlikely his face is going to be that of a beast. He certainly has no horns and no wings. But by the nineteenth century we’re back to the idea of the Devil as a kind of goat-man, as certainly made popular due to the interest in and sale of tarot cards, which used the basic idea of Baphomet as their template.

The thing about Baphomet is that the creature is not really anything to do with the Devil. It is in fact another very ancient symbol that dates back to about the tenth century, and is more closely tied in with magic (not necessarily black magic, but probably more so that) than any real Satanic connection. Nevertheless, it has become, if you like, appropriated as a symbol of the Devil, and I have to say, some heavy metal bands have to admit to their share of blame for that, as Baphomet is used by quite a few, especially NWOBHM not-quite-superstars Angel Witch, who used it both in a song title and on the cover of that single. But Baphomet, originally believed to have been worshipped by the Knights Templar, seems to be more of a symbol of unity than chaos - the idea of bringing together two disparate opposites and melding them together. The first real image of Baphomet to be seen was drawn in 1856 by Elias, an occultist, and later bastardised into a symbol of satanism by another, more famous (or infamous) magician, Aleister Crowley.

Personally, I think Baphomet looks cute: always looks as if he’s waving and saying hello. Nice guy. Just keep him away from pentagrams, black candles and virgins.


I can’t say I think much of Jean Jacques Joseph (JJJ? Surely not!) Tissot’s mid-nineteenth century depiction of Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness. I mean, he just seems to be an old man with brown skin, quite small and shrivelled up looking. Certainly does not look like any sort of threat, more like someone who, as we say here, you’d give tuppence to. I suppose the idea the artist was trying to get across was the insignificance and futility of the Devil tempting the Son of God; Jesus doesn’t even seem to notice him.

He does somewhat better in his later painting where Satan carries Jesus to the top of the mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the earth, trying to get him to acknowledge him as the master of the world; Jesus of course tells him where to stick it. But here he’s a grey, shadowy figure, almost translucent, kind of as if he’s made of smoke or stone, with the by-now traditional bat wings spread as he hovers, though his face is left pretty nondescript, almost blank. Still, it’s better than a beggar in the mouth of the cave.

What’s even more interesting about this painting, compared to the other one, is the reversal of sizes. In the first one, Jesus is much larger and taller than Satan - yes, he’s drawn in the foreground and the Devil is on his knees (an odd kind of posture for one supposed to be tempting, but let that go), but you can still see the difference in sizes. Satan is small, shrivelled, almost pathetic, and brown, to merge with the dirt of the cavern floor, whereas Jesus is brilliant in white. He’s still in white in the second image, but Satan, behind him, is about twice his size, literally holding him up. This one, I think, perhaps deliberately, changes the relationship between the two and makes Jesus look almost vulnerable. Of course, we know that were he to fall he would not die - this is not part of his father’s plan - but you still get the impression of danger, which you did not from the other painting.

It’s also a clever touch that Satan is coloured the same as the buildings around him (hold on, wasn’t this supposed to be a mountain? Artistic licence, I guess) so that not only does he kind of blend into them, we get the feeling that, as he says, he does own them; he is part of the world, master even of it, but Jesus, standing starkly white against the brickwork, looks to be separate, not part of this sordid world, destined for greater things, unconcerned, aloof, untouchable. Oh, I see the Devil first took him up to the top of the temple in the Holy City, which is where this is set, before going up the mountain. Fair enough. I wonder if the fact that the figure of the Devil is sort of blending with the city is meant to suggest impermanence, that his evil, his power is fleeting, whereas that of God is eternal?

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