16th century AD

It really must be admitted that things seen in sleep are, as it were, painted images, which could have been produced only in the likeness of true things.--Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy [1]

Fowl take flight as an unearthly entourage of powerful male nudes, infant victims, an old crone, goats, and strange skeletal yet animate creatures rush along to the sound of a horn, perhaps also wind and wailing. A solitary witch squats amid the hindquarters of a Leviathan-like skeleton, [2] directly above a crouching male nude, the bottoms of his feet thrust toward the viewer (not to mention his buttocks), whereas four fully extended nudes, three of them so youthful as to be yet unbearded, propel themselves forward through the pictorial space like stallions at a canter.

Lo stregozzo, or the procession to a witches' Sabbath, [3] is a large engraving (almost 12 by about 25 inches) of debatable but early sixteenth-century date, whose inventor and engraver are uncertain (Fig. 1). The existing scholarly consensus that the print be classified as essentially Roman and basically High Renaissance in design is reconsidered here. Such a conception of this work, at the very least, fails to do justice to the complexity of its reference. But I hope to establish more than a dismantling of this engraving's usual classification: I believe this object documents a very rare intersection between heretical and artistic instances of fantasia. By addressing a pressing dispute about the manifestations of demonic power, which hinged on determining the boundary between imagination and fact, this work of art--relatively little known today--was intended to play an unusually critical role in molding opinion about extra-artistic matters in early modern northern and central Italy. The crux of Lo stregozz o lies less in simply recognizing the subject, which is not learned, than in answering the following question: Does it represent this nocturnal cavalcade as fact or fiction? Even the learned held differing opinions about this question.

By presenting a sight that a faithful Christian would never otherwise confront, and that was for many of the faithful incredible, and furthermore, by doing so in a medium that made the image widely accessible, Lo stregozzo fundamentally violated most of the contemporary theory and much of the practice of art according to which images displayed virtue for the sake of promoting it. Our task now is to understand how and why this violation was possible.

I will attempt to establish that when this engraving was first printed, the dominant orthodoxy insisted that the testimonies of the witches about their night travels referred to corporeal events, and that the engraving was intended as convincing evidence not of the engraver's or inventor's imagination but of the basic veracity of the witches' descriptions of their own misdeeds. The fundamental situation is not dissimilar from that of a painter of early icons: the artist's task was to persuade a public of the physical reality of what was portrayed, leaving the task of defining the spiritual aspects of the subject to theologians. In this sense Lo stregozzo may be understood as a more traditional image than it might appear, but it is also less so, in that it associates the Michelangelesque nude with witchcraft--thereby demonizing the male nude in place of the sexually powerful, bewitching woman. [4]

The question of whether witches actually traversed large distances by extraordinary means in order to congregate and make obeisance to the devil was a matter of prickly theological dispute, destined to become across the sixteenth century a long and complicated disagreement. Late in the century, Paulus Grillandus commented on the difficulty of deciding whether the witches were removed bodily or only spiritually, deeming the issue "difficult" and "notorious."[5] Despite the gravity accorded this topic at the time, scholars have neglected to explore the role the visual arts might have played in such an important and divisive issue. Partly because witchery and magic were topics that slid easily into literary and poetic realms, they have often been treated--both then and since--with the frivolity appropriate to Ariostan romance rather than with the dignity due to matters of life and death. Nevertheless, the role of the visual arts was pivotal: the artist, as master of fantasia, was virtually a practitioner of whi te magic. Like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's human poised between the divine and the damnable, the artist stood on the fulcrum between sense and reason, the point at which imagination operated. When he allied himself with virtue he legitimated the imagination, but he also had the capacity to defame art, should he cast his spells of illusion in unapproved directions. Such images as Dosso Dossi's powerful yet at least vaguely mischievous Melissa, or Lorenzo Lotto's Apollo Asleep on Parnassus, in which the Muses have disrobed, the better to frolic in the landscape, hint at artists' awareness of the shared interstices of human imagination, sexual allure, and an illusionistic art.