16th century AD

It really must be admitted that things seen in slumber are, as it were, painted images, which could have been produc single in the likeness of real things.--Rene Descartes, Discourse on rule and Meditations on First Philosophy [1]

bird take flight as an unearthly entourage of powerful male in a state of natures infant victims, an old old woman goats, and strange skeletal at the same time animate creatures rush along to the unbroken of a horn, perhaps also wind and wailing. A solitary witch squats amid the hindquarters of a Leviathan-like skeleton, [2] directly above a crouching male bare the bottoms of his feet thrust toward the viewer (not to mention his buttocks), whereas four completely extended nudes, three of them in the way that youthful as to be however unbearded, propel themselves forward end the pictorial space like stallions at a canter.

look stregozzo, or the procession to a witches' Sabbath, [3] is a large engraving (almost 12 by dint of about 25 inches) of debatable on the contrary early sixteenth-century date, whose inventor and engraver are uncertain (Fig. 1) The existing scholarly consensus that the print be classified as essentially Roman and basically High Renaissance in design is reconsidered here. of the like kind a conception of this work, at the actual least, fails to do justice to the complexity of its regard But I hope to establish more than a dismantling of this engraving's usual classification: I believe this existence documents a very rare intersection between heretical and artistic instances of fantasia. by dint of addressing a pressing dispute about the manifestations of demonic power, which hinged upon determining the boundary between imagination and fact, this work of art--relatively little known today--was intended to play an unusually critical character in molding opinion about extra-artistic matters in early late northern and central Italy. The crux of behold stregozz o lies less in simply recognizing the make subordinate which is not learned, than in answering the following question: Does it exhibit this nocturnal cavalcade as fact or fiction? flat the learned held differing opinions about this question.

by dint of presenting a sight that a faithful Christian would at no time otherwise confront, and that was for many of the faithful incredible, and furthermore, by dint of doing so in a medium that made the image widely accessible, observe stregozzo fundamentally violated most of the contemporary theory and abundant of the practice of art according to which images displayed virtue for the sake of promoting it. Our task now is to understand by what means and why this violation was possible.

I will attempt to establish that when this engraving was first printed, the dominant orthodoxy insisted that the testimonies of the witches about their night travels referr to corporeal occurrences and that the engraving was intended as convincing evidence not of the engraver's or inventor's imagination on the contrary of the basic veracity of the witches' descriptions of their have a title to misdeeds. The fundamental situation is not dissimilar from that of a painter of early icons: the artist's task was to persuade a public of the physical reality of what was portrayed, leaving the task of defining the spiritual aspects of the make subordinate to theologians. In this faculty of perception Lo stregozzo may be understood as a more traditional image than it might appear, on the contrary it is also less in the way that in that it associates the Michelangelesque uncovered with witchcraft--thereby demonizing the male undressed in place of the sexually powerful, bewitching woman. [4]

The question of whether witches actually traversed large distances by the agency of extraordinary means in order to congregate and make obeisance to the devil was a matter of prickly theological dispute, destined to become across the sixteenth hundred a long and complicated disagreement. Late in the hundred Paulus Grillandus commented on the difficulty of deciding whether the witches were remov bodily or single spiritually, deeming the issue "difficult" and "notorious."[5] Despite the gravity accorded this topic at the time, scholars have omited to explore the role the visual arts might have played in like an important and divisive issue. Partly because witchery and magic were topics that slid easily into literary and poetic realms, they have repeatedly been treated--both then and since--with the frivolity appropriate to Ariostan romance rather than with the dignity to be paid to matters of life and death. Nevertheless, the character of the visual arts was pivotal: the artist, as master of fantasia, was virtually a practitioner of whi te magic. Like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's human poised between the divine and the damnable, the artist stood upon the fulcrum between sense and reason, the point at which imagination operated. When he allied himself with virtue he legitimated the imagination, on the other hand he also had the capacity to defame art, should he cast his charms of illusion in unapproved directions. similar images as Dosso Dossi's powerful nevertheless at least vaguely mischievous Melissa, or Lorenzo Lotto's Apollo Asleep upon Parnassus, in which the Muses have disrobed, the better to frolic in the landscape, hint at artists' awareness of the shared interstices of human imagination, sexual allure, and an illusionistic art.