The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (review)

In her adventuresome new book, Professor Hults’s twin objectives are clear: to interpret witchcraft images by early modern artists as arising out of a specific local culture, and to reveal the ways in which the construction of witchcraft images helped artists build their creative identities. She is quick to point out that she is not attempting a comprehensive survey of witchcraft themes in early modern European art. Instead, she focuses on six figures who evinced a particularly provocative engagement with witchcraft: Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung, Frans Francken II, Jacques de Gheyn II, Salvator Rosa, and Francisco Goya. This work is therefore expansive both chronologically and geographically, since it moves from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, and from Germany to the Dutch Republic, from Naples to Spain. It also involves conceptual and methodological challenges. Situating each of these artists in an intellectual environment and teasing out connections between their art and wider conceptions of witches is no mean feat. Equally problematic is proving that four of these artists—who left behind no diary or correspondence, or any sort of self-reflective documentation—deliberately produced witchcraft images to enhance their status.

Hults begins her task with a literature review of the historiography of witchcraft, summarizing various scholarly arguments about the phenomenon (a number now seriously out of date); she goes on to highlight the impact of the Malleus maleficarum, and raises the question of whether gender really was at the root of the persecution. Entertaining but discarding recent arguments by Stuart Clark and Walter Stephens, Hults maintains that “gender informed everything” (p. 13), and notes that a feminist reading of witchcraft will “expose the basis of the pattern of woman-as-witch in theory and rhetoric [and] its relation to other forms of social control of early modern women” (p. 14). Since the discourse of woman-as-witch could be visual as well as textual, artists reinforced stereotypes in their treatments of witch themes. At the same time, though, depictions of witches offered a grand opportunity for invention, whether the witches in question were portrayed as hags or beauties: thus “Images of witchcraft helped male artists enhance their status by proving their imaginative and intellectual prowess to peers or superiors and by aligning themselves with the rhetorical and political strategies of elite groups or individuals” (p. 24). Moreover, for the artists treated here, images of witches were related to an even larger cultural contest: namely, the battle for artists to generate their own subjects and to become authors with images rather than words (p. 34), a fight that began in the late fifteenth century against Albertian principles of naturalism.

In six chapters, Hults seeks to relay how all these themes—local cultures for witchcraft and the social control of women, the quest for status, and the pursuit of artistic autonomy—illuminate the witchcraft pictures of the six artists under review. Hults often produces perceptive interpretations of specific images, such as Marcantonio Raimondi and Agostino Veneziano’s Lo stregozzo (ca. 1523), which “subjects the heroic male nude . . . to the humiliating rule of an aged witch”; or Franz Francken II’s Witches’ Kitchen (1606), in which Francken gendered curiosity by planting it on young, beautiful witches, and thereby left his male viewers feeling reassured that “their own thirst for knowledge and fascination with the erotic” (p. 127) had nothing to do with the Devil. And Hults tells a traditional Enlightenment story of increasing artistic freedom, in which later figures such as de Gheyn, Rosa, and Goya expressed caution, satire, or skepticism toward the witches they created, even if they happened to live in Catholic countries.

Nevertheless, in this reader’s opinion, the book exhibits too many argumentative weaknesses to be very successful. There is a potential contradiction in tying witchcraft images to wider cultural currents or textual clichés—such as asserting that Dürer’s Four Witches (1497) is indebted to the Malleus, for...