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.