Art of the Devil. Arturo Graf

likewise; but Isidorus of Seville, who has already been quoted, declares that the demons do not grow old, nor can we well make any different assertion until diabolic anatomy and physiology have been more thoroughly studied. If they do not grow old, neither ought they to die; and those Rabbis are guilty of a great falsehood who declare that they too die, like men – not all of them, it is true, but yet the great majority. It seems that they could fall ill, however; at any rate the witches, during the days of the Inquisition, sometimes went so far as to say in their depositions – after having suffered two or three turns of the cord – that the Devil did fall ill from time to time, and that it was then their task to nurse and cure him.

      Some Fathers and Doctors, like Saint Gregory the Great (Pope 590–604), – not to mention others – would have it that the devils were altogether incorporeal; but this belief was, as I have shown, far from being the generally accredited one. However, one was at liberty to accept one belief or the other, and Saint Thomas (1225–1274), after citing the conflicting opinions on the subject, concludes by saying that it matters but little to faith whether the demons have bodies or not. But if it matters little to faith, it matters much to fancy, and people were not slow in giving the devils as solid a body as possible.

      And how was this body formed? Let it suffice here to treat only of the bodies that the devils possess naturally, not of those which they can assume at their pleasure and of which I shall speak later.

      Fra Angelico, The Last Judgment (detail), 1432–1435. Tempera and gold on wood. Museo di San Marco, Florence, Italy.

      In general, and as a rule, the bodies of the demons had a human form. This ought not to excite our wonder, since man, who has made the gods in his own image, has also made in his own image both angels and devils. However, when we speak of a human form, we must not conceive of a form in all respects like our own. In consequence of his sin and of his fall, Satan (“The creature who fair semblance once possessed,” as Dante Alghieri calls him[23]) and with Satan the other rebels, not only beheld their bodies grow denser and coarser, but they also saw changed into ignominious deformity the sovereign beauty wherewith God had first clothed them. The form of the devils is, then, a human form, but disfigured and monstrous, wherein the beastly mingles with the human and not seldom exceeds it; and if, on the basis of this form, we were to assign to the demons (with the consent of the naturalists) a place in the zoological classification, we must needs class the greater portion of them in an appropriate family of anthropoids.

      An excessive ugliness, sometimes fearful and awe-inspiring, sometimes ignoble and ridiculous, was, then, the most prominent and apparent among what I may call the physical characteristics of the Devil; nor was this without reason, for even if it be not true that the beautiful is, as Plato was held to teach, the splendour of the good, it is, on the other hand, very true that men are drawn by some kind of instinct, whose origins we will not seek to discover, to associate beauty with goodness and wickedness with ugliness. To give to Satan an excessive degree of ugliness was considered a work of merit, which in itself benefited the soul and in which was found a legitimate outlet for hatred of an enemy never sufficiently feared. Authors of legends, painters, sculptors, expended the best of their inventive talent in depicting Satan; and so well, or to speak more correctly, so ill did they depict him that Satan himself must have resented their efforts – though it is not likely that he sets any great store by his own beauty. There is a well-known story, told by many writers of the Middle Ages, about a painter who, having painted a certain devil uglier than fairness demanded, was by that same demon hurled down headlong from the scaffolding where he was working. Luckily for the painter, a Madonna, whom he had represented as very beautiful, thrust forth her arm from the picture and caught and upheld him in mid-air.

      However, it was not necessary to invent anything in this connection. Many persons had seen the Devil with their own eyes and were able to say how he was formed; in the vertiginous fantasies of the visionaries, at every slightest shock he would take shape from the shreds and fragments of images, just as from particles of multicoloured glass are formed the capricious figures of the kaleidoscope.

      The Manichaeans, a famous heretical sect that arose about the middle of the third century, attributed to the prince of demons a form which was not only human but gigantic, and they said that men were made in his image. Saint Anthony (251–356), who was destined to behold him under so many other aspects, once saw him in the form of an enormous giant, entirely black, and with his head touching the clouds; but on another occasion, as a little child, likewise black, and naked. Black appears as the native colour of the demons from the very earliest centuries of Christianity, and the reasons for assigning it to them are self-explanatory, so obvious are they, and natural. More than one anchorite of the Thebaid beheld the demon in the form of an Ethiopian – which once more goes to show how the demon conforms himself to the times and places amid which he moves, or has been made to move; but countless other saints of later times continued to see him in this guise, not the least of whom was Saint Thomas Aquinas. Neither is this gigantic stature without a reason, since in all mythologies the giants are usually wicked. In that of Greece, the Titans are the enemies of Zeus, and for this reason Dante places them in Hell. Dante likewise makes his Lucifer of gigantic size;[24] and in the French epopees of the Middle Ages the giants are quite often devils, or sons of devils. In the Vision of Tundal, composed about the middle of the twelfth century, the prince of the demons, who is roasting eternally on a gridiron, is not only of gigantic dimensions but, like Briareus, he has a hundred arms; and like Briareus, with a hundred hands and a hundred feet, he was seen in the fourteenth century by Saint Birgitta (1303–1373). On the other hand, the Devil is occasionally represented as a dwarf, probably through the influence of Germanic myths that need not be discussed in this place.

      Matthias Grünewald, St. Antony, Isenheim Altarpiece (detail), c. 1512–1515. Oil on wood. Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France.

      Taddeo di Bartolo, Hell (detail), between 1393 and 1413. Fresco. Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta, San Gimignano, Italy.

      Giotto di Bondone, The Last Judgment (detail), 1302–1305. Fresco. Capella degli Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua, Italy.

      Dante’s Lucifer has three faces, but Dante was not the first to give him these. The Trinity was sometimes represented in the Middle Ages in the guise of a man with three countenances; and since the divine trinity suggested by way of contrast the idea of a diabolic trinity, and since, furthermore, in the spirit of evil there are supposed to be three faculties or attributes opposite and contradictory to those allotted to the three divine persons, it was but natural that in representing the prince of the demons artists would turn to the image of the Triune God in order to form a well fitted counterpart. This Lucifer with the three faces, a sort of antithesis or reverse of the Trinity, appears in works of sculpture, in paintings on glass, in manuscript miniatures, his head now girt with a crown, now surrounded by horns, holding in his hands sometimes a sceptre, sometimes a sword, or even a pair of swords. How ancient this image is, it is hard to tell; but certainly it is anterior to Dante, who brought it into his poem, and to Giotto (1276–1337), who, before Dante, introduced it into his famous fresco; it is found already in the eleventh century; and allusion to a three-headed Beelzebub is made in the Gospel of Nicodemus, which, in the form it now presents, is not later than the sixth century.[25]

      Giovanni da Modena, The Punishments of the Damned in Hell,1410. Fresco. Basilica di San Petronio, Capella Bolognini, Bologna, Italy.

      Anonymous, Madonna del Soccorso (detail), c. 1470. Chiesa dei Sancto Spirito, Florence, Italy.

      The more the fear of Satan increases in men’s minds and spreads through the world, the more horrible and fantastic becomes his ugliness; but it is easy to understand how differences in occasion, belief and

23

Inferno, xxxiv, 18. In the Inferno, it is the Giants, not the Titans, who appear as warders of the Ninth Circle of Hell (Inf. xxxi).

24

From the data given by Dante in Canto xxxiv of the Inferno, Lucifer’s height has been estimated at about 2,500 feet.

25

The Gospel of Nicodemus is one of the so-called “apocryphal writings”.