Trollheart

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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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

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: Signature-free since April 2018

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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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

music_collector

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

Mindy

A lot of information in this thread!