Overview

The 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.

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9789463722599

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Reviews

"""...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"

Author Information

Guy Tal is Senior Lecturer in the Unit of History and Philosophy at Shenkar College, Israel. His publications on body language, gender, imagination, and witchcraft in early modern Italian, Spanish, and Dutch art appeared in such venues as Simiolus, Word and Image, Print Quarterly, Poetics Today and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte.

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