Strange, disturbing, and unintentionally funny: this is a brief history of the Devil in art...
The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted by Hieronymus Bosch at the beginning of the 16th century, is probably the most famous portrayal of Hell in art.
What's most striking about it is that Bosch does not just portray the Devil as evil — here he is utterly insane.
But Bosch is not unique.
He was part of a broad Lade Medieval tradition whereby Hell and the things in it — including the Devil — were depicted, above all else, as *strange*.
The Harrowing of Hell, by one of Bosch's followers, continues to indulge that same fiery madness.
Or consider Pieter Brueghel the Elder's Fall of the Rebel Angels, painted in the 1560s; it depicts Lucifer and his followers being cast out of Heaven.
Zoom in and look at the details — some of them are almost inexplicably bizarre.
Surreal, darkly funny, and dreamlike terror.
Bartolomé Bermejo, a 15th century Spanish painter who travelled to the Netherlands and there learned the art of oil painting, created one of the most memorable versions of the Devil.
A metallic beetle-monster whose every limb is a different creature, whose very joints are jaws.
In Italy, meanwhile, Fra Angelico — most famous for his pious and pure paintings of saints — conjured this foul beast.
The Renaissance was coming, but the Late Medieval imagination still held sway with its unbounded embrace of sheer and fantastical strangness:
Though, that being said, the Middle Ages also produced some of the most unintentionally funny devils...
But the Devil has not always looked so strange.
As the influence of the Renaissance spread, the imaginative scope of artists also seemed to shrink.
Guido Reni's 1636 version of St Michael triumphing over Satan simply depicts him as an evil-looking man with wings.
Though, done well, this modern trope of the Devil as a winged man can be rather frightening.
Alexandre Cabanel's famous Fallen Angel, from 1847, has an almost disturbingly dark intensity, all because of the expression on his face.
Sometimes you don't need flames or monsters.
Any discussion of Hell must include Dante and his famous Inferno, where Satan is described as a huge three-headed monster submerged in a sea of ice.
But, sometimes, when a thing is too well described it becomes less scary — is not mystery the most frightening thing of all?
Gustave Doré was a 19th century French artist who, among other poems and books, made illustrations for John Milton's Paradise Lost, a 17th century epic poem where Satan is (sort of) the protagonist.
Satan as a character may be more engaging, but it is perhaps less frightening.
But these dramatic and characterised portrayals became more common.
From the genuinely disturbing devils of the Middle Ages we move to something like Pandemonium, by the 19th century English painter John Martin
This scene, epic in scale, is almost cinematic.
John Martin also made Satan Presiding Over His Infernal Council, which again leans into that epic scale and grand narrative.
Satan as a dramatic character is certainly more compelling, but that sense of the visceral horror of evil has perhaps been lost.
Some of the most frightening paintings of the Devil are the least dramatic.
Rather than reigning in a realm of flames or appearing as a fantastical beast, the Devil is more chilling when portrayed as part of the real world.
Albrecht Dürer's devil is skin-crawlingly creepy.
And then there is something like the Witches' Sabbath by Francesco Goya.
Goya's talent for painting faces strained with anguish and torn apart by lunacy only enhances the overwhelming creepiness of this painting.
Along similar lines is Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare, from 1781.
Although it doesn't portray the Devil, strictly speaking, as a vision of evil it is almost oppressively dark.
Sometimes you don't need to be graphic.
In Giotto's painting of Judas betraying Jesus, from the early 1300s, we simply see a dark figure embracing him.
This is somehow more unsettling than any strange monster or colossal beast... a mere shadow.
And perhaps the most striking paintings of the Devil don't even include him.
Like Christ in the Wilderness, painted by Ivan Kramskoy in 1872, where by his very absence the Devil feels more real, more invisibly and universally present, than ever.
Of course, the Devil is not only a Christian concept — other religions have similar ideas of evil creatures, spirits, and demons, and there is a whole world of strange and terrifying art out there.
There is no single way to portray evil — so what is it, specifically, that makes paintings of the Devil frightening to you?
Is it when we see something horrifying and strange, something otherworldly, or a scene of total mundanity?
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But it was basically an accident — and he didn't even know about it...
As with the other continents, it isn't completely clear how the Americas got their name.
But the most widely accepted theory is that America was named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who travelled there twice in the late 1490s and early 1500s.
This Amerigo Vespucci was born on 9th March 1454 in Florence, northern Italy, the home of the Renaissance.
He knew members of the famous de' Medici Family, and through them ended up working in Seville, southern Spain, where he may have worked with Christopher Columbus.
Mont-Saint-Michel in France is one of the most famous places in the world.
You've seen thousands of photos of it... but what is Mont-Saint-Michel? Who built it? And when?
This is a brief history of the world's strangest village...
First — where is it?
Mont-Saint-Michel (which is the name of the island, the village, and the abbey) is a tidal island off the coast of Normandy, in northern France.
"Tidal" means that it is surrounded by sea or by land depending on the tides.
Legend says that during the 8th century a bishop called Autbert of Avranches had a dream in which the Archangel Saint Michael told him to build a shrine on the island.
The Archangel Michael, who defeated Satan in battle, was a popular saint at the time.
This unusual house in Turin was built 123 years ago.
It's the perfect example of a kind of architecture unique to Italy, known as the "Liberty Style".
How to make ordinary buildings more interesting? The Liberty Style has an answer...
During the 1890s there was an artistic and architectural revolution in Europe: Art Nouveau.
It means "New Art" in French, and that's exactly what it was — a whole new approach to design, whether of buildings, furniture, clothes, sculpture, or crockery.
There were many genres of Art Nouveau, but what they had in common was a commitment to traditional craftsmanship, the embrace of new materials like iron, and a turn toward flowing designs inspired by nature.
Like the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, designed by Victor Horta, from 1893:
It's by Grant Wood (most famous for American Gothic) and it's called The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.
Why does it look like that? Because Grant Wood had one of the most unusual styles in art history...
Grant Wood was born in 1891 in rural Iowa; ten years later the family moved to Cedar Rapids.
He worked at a metal shop, studied at arts and crafts schools in Minneapolis and Chicago, and then became a public school art teacher back in Cedar Rapids.
Humble beginnings.
In the 1920s, while working as a teacher, Wood made several trips to Europe, including a year studying at the Académie Julian in Paris.
There, like so many artists of his generation, he adopted a generic and basically unremarkable Impressionist style: