Art of the Devil. Arturo Graf
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another. The simplest form in which he has been clothed is that of a tall, lank man, of sooty or livid complexion, extraordinarily emaciated, with fiery and protuberant eyes, breathing ghostly horror from all his gloomy person. Thus is he described more than once, in the thirteenth century, by Caesarius von Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk, whose name will reappear frequently in these pages; and thus is he introduced by Theodor Hoffmann (1776–1822) in his weird tale entitled “The Devil’s Elixir”. Another form, represented time and again in art, is that of a blackened and disfigured angel, with great bat-like wings, an emaciated and hairy body, two or more horns on his head, hook-nosed, with long pointed ears, swine’s tusks, and hands and feet armed with claws. Such is the appearance of the demon who, in the Dantean Hell, flings into the viscid pitch-bath of the barrators one of the Ancients of Santa Zita:
Ah! what fierce cruelty his look bespake!
In act how bitter did he seem, with wings
Buoyant outstretch’d and feet of nimblest tread.
His shoulder, proudly eminent and sharp,
Was with a sinner charged; by either haunch
He held him, the foot’s sinew griping fast.[26]
This form does not preclude a certain elegance; but because of this very fact it must needs find many willing distorters. The horns often became ox-horns; the ears, asses’ ears; the tip of the tail was embellished with serpents’ jaws; hideous visages, like the carved heads of fountain-spouts, covered the joints and grinned from the breast, the belly and the buttocks; the virile member coiled and twisted in weird fashion, recalling certain bizarre creations of ancient art; the legs were changed into goats’ legs, reminiscent of the pagan satyr, or one of them was changed to the leg of a horse; the feet were sometimes the talons of a bird of prey or the webbed claws of the goose.
But with all this, the last word in monstrosity had not yet been reached. One strange belief maintained that the bodies of devils had only a front and were hollow within, like those old tree-trunks that by slow decay have been emptied of all ligneous substance. Saint Fursey (died about 650) once saw a pack of devils with long necks and heads like brazen cauldrons. Certain other devils, seen by Saint Guthlac (673–714), had huge heads, long necks, thin swarthy countenances, squalid beards, bushy ears, lowering brows, savage eyes, teeth like horses’, singed locks, wide mouths, bulging breasts, scraggy arms, knock-knees, bow legs, unwieldy heels and splayed feet. Furthermore, they had loud, hoarse voices, and from their mouths they vomited flames – though this act of vomiting flame from the mouth is not an especially striking feature, since, as a rule, they used to spout living flames from every orifice of the body. To Saint Birgitta there once appeared a devil having a head like a pair of bellows furnished with a long pipe, his arms like serpents, his feet like grappling irons.
But who could ever describe this new Chimaera under all its aspects? The belief that each individual demon must have a peculiar form of his own, befitting his peculiar character, his rank and the nature of his infernal office, tended to multiply these strange fancies and increase their confusion. We have seen brute members joined in the bodies of demons with members of human shape; not seldom the brute predominates over the human, and in such a case we find, for instance, a beast with the head of a man, like Dante’s Geryon;[27] sometimes the brute excludes the human altogether, and then we meet a diabolic beast, which also may be composite, made up of portions taken from this creature and from that, a monster that does violence to nature, a living symbol of falsehood and confusion.
Anonymous, The Krampus, Demon Companion of St. Nicholas,19th century. Imprint on a cake pan. Private collection.
All through the Middle Ages, the Devil, as we have seen, is represented as being exceedingly ugly; and to this rule – a moral rather than an aesthetic one – it is very hard to discover exceptions. Nevertheless, some rare exceptions can be found. A Latin Bible of the ninth or tenth century, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, contains among other pictures a miniature representing Satan and Job. Satan is here depicted in a fashion that cannot be called ugly. Of the former angel, there are still preserved the wings and – stranger still – the nimbus that encircles his head, but the feet are armed with claws, and in his left hand he holds a vessel filled with fire, wherewith he seems to intend to symbolise his own nature. A devil, whom the poet calls handsome, but who nevertheless has a large mouth and a hooked nose, is described in a French epopee of the twelfth century, La Bataille Aliscans. Federigo Frezzi, bishop of Foligno and author of the Quadriregio (died in 1416), finds in Hell, contrary to his expectation, a Satan of great beauty:
I thought to see a monster foul, uncouth;
I thought to see a realm all waste and sad:
And him I saw triumphant, glorious.
Stately he was, and fair, and so benign
His aspect, and with majesty so filled,
That of all reverence he appeared most worthy.
And three fair crowns he wore upon his head:
Joyous his countenance and blithe his brow,
And in his hand the sceptre of great power.
And though his height might well exceed three miles,
His features and his form such balance showed,
Such harmony, I marvelled much thereat.
Behind his shoulders, too, six wings he had,
Of plumage so adorned, so radiant,
Nor Cupid nor Cyllenius have the like.
But this is merely a deceptive appearance, and the poet, looking through the diamond shield of his guide, Minerva, beholds the prince of the demons as he really is – of most savage aspect, entirely black, with fiery eyes, his head surrounded, not with a crown but with dragons, all the hairs on his head and trunk changed into serpents, his arms furnished with claws, the rest of his body and his tail like those of a monstrous scorpion. Satan begins to reacquire something of his beauty with the arrival, or rather with the unfolding, of the Renaissance; and it is easy to understand how an age enamoured of beauty, an age that devoted to the cult of beauty all the best of its own elements, could not suffer, even in Satan, too base and horrible a deformity. In the “Last Judgment” of Michelangelo, the figures of the demons do not differ greatly from those of the damned, and they are impressive rather through their awfulness than their horribleness. Milton’s demons keep in their fall no small portion of their former beauty and their former majesty; but those of Tasso have strange and horrible forms and even reproduce all the monsters of antiquity. The figure of the cavalier, in velvet doublet and silken mantle, his cap adorned with a long cock’s feather and with sword at his side, is a product of modern imagination.
Paolo Uccello, St. George and the Dragon, c. 1470. Oil on canvas, 55.6 × 74.2 cm. The National Gallery, London, United Kingdom.
The demons, though they had their own proper forms, could also at their pleasure assume other forms; but so great is the variety, so extensive the development, of both one kind and the other, that it is not always possible to distinguish between them. In general, it may be said that there is no shape which the Devil may not assume on occasion, a faculty which renders him most worthy of the name sometimes bestowed on him of the “Infernal Proteus”. Milton was well aware of this faculty. Speaking of the fallen angels, he says:
“Spirits when they please
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure;
Nor tied nor manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condens’d, bright or obscure,
Can execute their aery purposes,
And