Witches on top: Magic, power, and imagination in the art of early modern Italy

This dissertation probes the dark side in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque art by examining images of witchcraft. While these images may seem to deviate from the humanist and rationalist aura ascribed to early modern Italy, they represent a unique interpretive vector for enriching our understanding of the surprisingly interconnected worlds of humanism and witchcraft. Artists perceived witchcraft as an intellectual topos rather than a frivolous wonder and thus conveyed in their images allegories, metaphors, social concerns, and cultural experiences. The images constitute an original commentary on early modern thought about witchcraft, including the multifaceted stereotype of the witch, and debates emerging from witchcraft discourses. At the same time, this study delves into the reciprocity between art and witchcraft. Art reinforces the act of seeing in witchcraft, while witchcraft enacts metaphors of artistic creation. The images reflect witchcraft not only as a theme but also as a mode of representation characterized by inconstancy, deception, and hybridity.;Chapter 1 establishes the stereotypes of the magic practitioners---the old witch, the young sorceress, and the male necromancer---through Salvator Rosa's series of four tondi. By employing visual sources, artistic concepts, and pictorial language, Rosa composed these stereotypes upon parameters of authority, expertise, and appearance. The two subsequent chapters add a male victim to the domain of witches and place the witch on top of him. Chapter 2 focuses upon a provocatively sexual etching designed by Parmigianino of a witch riding on an enormous phallus. By linking the image to witchcraft discourses, I will explore its cultural and social implications and its ambiguous tone. The engraving Lo stregozzo by Marcantonio Raimondi or Agostino Veneziano examined in Chapter 3 also displays a witch dominating a subservient man, yet her power is questionable. Through a grid of metaphors, I will reconstruct in this image an analogy between the artistic creation and the witch's magic. At last, the power of the witch built in the three chapters evaporates. Chapter 4 shows how artists like Alessandro Allori, Angelo Caroselli, and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione express their refutation of the belief in witchcraft by portraying the sorceress Circe in melancholy.