The demonic arts and the origin of the medium

Michael Cole

Guiding us through his exercises in skepticism, seeking to show us how our world might be illusory, Rene Descartes first invokes the condition of the dream:

Let us suppose, then, that we are dreaming, and that none of these particulars--neither the opening of the eyes, nor the moving of the head, nor the putting forth of the hands, nor even that we have these hands or this whole body--are true; let us suppose, rather, that they are seen in sleep like painted images, which could not be fashioned except in the likeness of real things. (1)

For a moment, the dream seems to be a fair model for deception, a familiar experience that involves the feel of both sight and self-motion, but which any of us can also easily appreciate as "unreal." The dream, remembered from the moments of wakefulness, represents a kind of dispossession; it allows us to imagine how we might no longer have even the things that are most immediate to us, the hands that guarantee the world through their touch, or the bodies that we might think we are.

The dream, however, quickly proves insufficient for Descartes's purposes:

Nevertheless, we must admit that at least these general things--eyes, head, hands, the entirety of the body--are not imaginary things, but rather things that truly exist. For clearly painters themselves, even when they aim, with the most extraordinary forms, to represent sirens and satyrs, cannot assign them natures that are in every way new, but can only mix the members of different animals; or if by chance they should conceive something so novel that nothing similar has ever been seen before, something that is, therefore, wholly fictitious and false, it is at least certain that the colors of which they composed this must be real. (2)

Dreams cannot provide a model for true deception because dreams are made of real things. Like paintings, which, however rearranged for perception, nevertheless depend on the existing world for their being, dreams cannot be entirely false. Their most radical fictions are mere Horatian chimeras, and what's more, even the chimeras are hampered by their dependence on their substance; every invention is an invention built of colors. Dreams have sources in the very things of which they are supposed to dispossess us; they cannot take away our world, because they are made of it.

Dreams and paintings having failed, Descartes finally refers his readers, for their comprehension of deep skepticism, to the experience of demonic possession:

I will suppose, then, that not almighty God, the source of truth, but rather some evil spirit, one that is at once exceedingly potent and cunning, has set all of his industry to deceiving me. I will imagine that sky, air, earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things are nothing other than the mockeries of dreams, by means of which this being seduces my credulity. I will consider myself not to have hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and to have falsely believed that I have these. I will remain resolutely fixed in this meditation, and thus, if indeed it not be in my power to recognize some part of what is true, I will at least, with strengthened mind, beware of what is in me, so that I do not assent to what is false, and so that that demon, however powerful and however cunning he be, not be able to impose anything on me. (3)

The demon, like the painter of dreams, is an artificer. Yet for the would-be skeptic, possession by a genio maligno overcomes the drawbacks of mere sleep in its total separability from reality. In this perfect nightmare, all that belongs to us--our bodies, our sensory apparatuses, as well as the colored, figured worlds they take in--can be reduced to the "mockeries of dreams." The condition of true skepticism is the condition of complete painting. Both in its total invention and in its pure illusion, possession promises to be an artifice with nothing behind it. Possession is an art of absolute fiction.

The following essay aims to suggest how Descartes's intuitions--that dreams are like paintings, that possession resembles, but also trumps, both--come out of a broader tradition, and how that tradition might bear as much on the history of art as it does on the history of philosophy. The idea of the demonic, it will argue, cuts across not only the early modern literature of magic and witchcraft but also that of art, making possible a kind of mutual refraction that illuminates both. In one direction, the figure of the painter provides a function for the demonic magician. Possession can be understood as a kind of art, and the possessive agent as a kind of artist. (4) In the other direction, the figure of the demon provides the artist with a conception of medium. The literatures of magic and demonology serve a notion of what the artist, who had always to channel expressions through a product, could control.

Some seventy years ago, Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz argued that the rise of pictorial illusionism coincided with the refiguring of the artist as a kind of magus. Semblance, they proposed, came to be a concern precisely at moments when the power of a culture's effigies--images magically inseparable from the subjects they depict--collapsed. (5) "Where the belief in the identity of picture and depicted is in decline," they wrote, "a new bond makes its appearance to link the two--namely, similarity or likeness. Formulating these remarks differently, we would say: the closer the symbol (picture) stands to what is symbolized (depicted), the less is the outward resemblance; the further apart, the greater is the resemblance." (6) Kris and Kurz viewed likeness as a means of revivifying the art object that had become untethered from its living subject. For them, accordingly, illusionistic art had two founding conditions: a difference, even an isolation, from the world in which it found itself, and an aspiration to the viv idness, the reality, of that very world. Under these conditions, the artist's charge came to be that of bringing pictures themselves to life, rehabilitating them to something like their former condition, which now meant spanning the gap between the pictures' own stoniness and the ensouled animation of their makers and viewers. (7) As an operator who, through effects of naturalism, created enlivened things, the artist became a kind of magician, an alter deus.

One of the remarkable aspects of Kris and Kurz's book was the attempt to consider illusionistic painting as much in relation to its maker as to its subject. The authors did not limit their argument to an account of pictorial traditions; in addition, they suggested that, given a set of pictorial conditions, the actions an artist performs might themselves be resonant in distinctive ways. For anyone now interested in the poetics of manner or facture, this broad perspective as well as Ens and Kurz's chosen example, the art that looks like magic, invite further thought. We might recall, for instance, how Renaissance artists, in conducting their operations, might call on supernatural help, asking muses, genii, planetary governors, and even angels to enable their work. (8) As all such attendant beings could be grouped under the general rubric not only of "spirits" but also (to allow for the congruence of D. P. Walker's famous categories) of "demons," the value of such work would vary from case to case. (9) Just as t he furor to which artists were subject had to be fenced off from its counterpart, demonic madness, so the assisted operations could be either evil or good. (10) One's genius might well be maleficent--even Lucifer, after all, was an angel (11)--and all knew that witches, no less than artists, pulled off their tricks by summoning demonic aid. (12) The artist's very assignment complicated the matter further. It could well seem, for example, that artifice, the opposite of creation but the basic task of the mundane artist, was the very thing that gave devils their own character. (13) The core image in Kris and Kurz's account, the artist who attempts to be divine, itself worried many thinkers, for if God was the first Creator, it was Satan who was the first dieu manque, the first actor to pretend overzealously to God's part. (14) Reginald. Scot, an important sixteenth-century English writer on witchcraft, affirmed that "[Lucifer] would needs be like God, and for his arrogancie was throwne out into destruction." (15 ) The Dominican theologian Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, one year before launching his important attack on Michelangelo's Last Judgment, dedicated an entire book to the demonic project of emulating the divine. (16) And Giovanni Battista Marino, giving an even more explicitly pictorial spin to the exegetical tradition, asked rhetorically, "Who was this Painter, who was so arrogant, so ignorant, that he wished to correct the perfect images of the great smith of smiths?" (17) As audacia (boldness) and fierezze (pride, fierceness) became newly valued as artistic virtues, as artistic giants attempted to build their way to the heavens, the divinity of the artist became thinkable as it had not been since antiquity. (18) Precisely for this reason, however, the seductive and dangerous proximity of the artist and the sorceror became a new kind of problem as well.

For Kris and Kurz, it was illusionism that made the artist a magus. The more convincing the painting, the greater the paradox that it was but a reflection or shadow, and the more the painter looked like a prestidigitator. With regard to early modern art, the point is of some consequence: that Narcissus, Leon Battista Alberti's inventor of painting, should die attempting to grasp the ombra he sees shimmering in the water, completes a theory that understood painting as a window, something one looks through no less than at. (19) If Renaissance painting would make the absent present, it would also allow for a new absence at its core. Insofar as Kris and Kurz also suggested that the making of illusions itself deified the artist, however, their thesis, at least when pursued in relation to the Renaissance material, might be qualified, not only by adducing evidence that shades the artist-magician more diabolical than they did, but also by looking further at the nature of the illusions the magus made. Paul Freart de C hantelou quotes Gian Lorenzo Bernini remarking that painting is a lie and sculpture a verity, inasmuch as "the former is the work of the Devil, and the latter that of God." (20) In the literature of art, the theme dates at least as far back as Benvenuto Cellini:

Quel immortale Iddio della natura,
che fece i cieli e 'l mondo, e noi fe' degni
delle sue mani, senza far disegni
come quel che ogni arte avea sicura,
  di terra fece la prima scultura,
e la mostro agli angel de' suoi regni:
per qual ne nacque quei crudei sdegni,
cagion d'inferno, e morte acerba e dura.
  Cadde nel fuoco colle sue brigate
quel ch'ubbidir non volse 'l suo maggiore,
che aveva tante gran cose create.
  Questo fu 'l primo che si fe'pittore,
che con tal ombre ha l'anime ingannate,
qual non puo far nessun buono scultore. (21)

(That immortal God of nature, who made the heavens and the earth, and who made us worthy of his hands, [did this] without making designs, as does the one who practices his art with certainty. He made the first sculpture out of clay, and then he showed this to the angels of his realms, and thence was born those cruel disdains that were the cause of Hell and of bitter, hard death. The one who did not wish to obey his superior, creator of so many great things, fell with his brigades into the fire. He then made himself into the first painter, one who, using shadows, deceived souls, something that no good sculptor could do.)

Though Cellini's poem is a burlesque, and Bernini's remark, too, has a humorous element, both statements are nevertheless noteworthy for the evidence they offer of artists imagining their counterparts as Satanic figures as well as for their suggestion that the making of illusions might ultimately differentiate the artist from the divine. Though Cellini, at least, would elsewhere overturn the values apparently at the base of the poem, describing his own sculptural work as demonic, even there a basic conviction remains: that the problem of the artist's divine or diabolical status ensued from the sorts of activities he undertook and from the materials and processes he employed. (22)

While Kris and Kurz considered the ways in which the artist became a magician, Renaissance writers on the demonic explored the converse: that spellbinders, when going about their own works, made themselves into artists. Johannes Weyer's De Lamiis, for example, explained the powers the Devil gave witches by citing Horace's famous lines on the like capacities of painters and poets, (23) while Marino, more succinctly, referred to "Satanasso, Pittore." (24) Such reversals of Kris and Kurz's formulation ultimately change the nature of the problem, for once magic is treated as an art, as a kind of making, the substance of its illusions itself becomes germane. Consider the remarkably vivid description of demonic activities given in the discourse "On the Art of Magic's Superstition," composed in the 1560s by one of Weyer's Italian contemporaries, Francesco Cattani da Diacceto:

[Demons] can also form themselves into bodies and present themselves to our eyes in various aspects [spezie], it being within their power to operate those things that one conducts to an end with the local motions of inferior bodies. One of the things demons can do is operate bodies that appear to be men, or some sort of animal, the likeness of this body consisting in its figure and in its color. The figure is induced by means of local motion, just as painters, by means of brushes and other instruments, color their bodies. In this manner, then, they figure and color their bodies, and the bodies then appear at one moment in the form of a man, in the next in the form of a woman, in the next in the form of an animal, or of another thing, according to what the demons judge most harmful to others. (25)

What is striking in these lines is how, for Diacceto, it is not the hollowness of their products that make demons seem like painters, but rather those products' very substantia1ity. Demons approach the viewer in the form of species, images that, according to medieval and Renaissance theories of optics, strike the eye and allow vision. (26) Demons, that is to say, transmute themselves into physically apprehensible, percussive entities: when Diacceto maintains that demons rely on the "local motions of inferior bodies," he distinguishes demonic works, which operate on the physical, mechanical world, from the actions that take place in the outer, less material rings of the cosmos. It is this specification that underwrites the comparison with painters. As one of Diacceto s contemporary readers, Girolamo Menghi, put it, the demonic apparition "is nothing other than the depiction of a body," all made "with local motion," as we learn "by our experience of the art of painting, since, using local motion, painters make [their figure], adding, taking away, changing, disposing, with this motion and with the said colors and with their instruments." (27) Construing demonic art as the formation of bodies from figure and color, these writers intimate that demonic illusions exist both as things and as the likenesses of things. (28) The notion amplifies a more general commonplace: that demons, remixing the things of nature, but creating nothing themselves, were "apes of Cod." (29)

What makes demons deceptive is that, although embodied as species, the aspect they present has nothing behind it. Though they exist as appearances, those appearances do not, as they should, point beyond themselves: "all the efficacy of their art," Diacceto puts it elsewhere, "consists in making something appear to others that does not exist." (30) Because demons irritate the distinction between representation and thing, the comparison between demons and painters, here and elsewhere, highlights the matter of means. Cellini maintains that demonic painters make illusions because they work with shadows rather than with earths. Descartes concludes that demons make paintings that are better than the pictures found in dreams because they rely on nothing extrinsic to themselves when making them. Diacceto, for his part, adds the following:

It now remains for us to recount how marvelous effects derive from these things, how it is that making needles, nails, bones, or sponges pour from the mouths of others, or causing similar things, are illusions, such that they make things appear to us that are not there, whether they do this by means of some active natural qualities, apt to cause similar effects, by means of the condensation of air, or in some other way. (31)

Though Diacceto believes that demonic illusions are marvels, or wonders, he does not take this to set those illusions beyond scrutiny. Even illusions, he sees, must be made "by means of [mediante]" some other thing. If demonic productions are special effects, it should be possible to account for how those effects are achieved, and Diacceto's last lines make it equally plain that he has some ideas of how demons go about their painting. As above, where Diacceto proposed that demons made figures by means of the movement of "inferior bodies," his comments here bring up a very concrete phenomenon, the "condensation of air." (32) If demons make us see something, that is, Diacceto has a fairly specific idea of what they must use to make us see it, of what materials, or vehicles, make demonic artifice specially deceptive.

Stuart Clark has remarked that it was, in early modern Europe, "virtually the unanimous opinion of the educated that devils, and a fortiori, witches, not merely existed in nature but acted according to its laws." (33) Diacceto's remark about condensation illustrates this conviction, and it might be normalized in different ways. Consulting any theological authority, to begin, Diacceto could have learned that Saint Paul had referred to Satan as "the prince of the powers of this air, and that Augustine rehearsed arguments by Apuleius and Origen to the effect that demons were made of air. (35) Thinkers in Diacceto's own day, moreover, could have offered varied and elaborate accounts of why demons, when painting, might work with especially subtle materials, "airy" substances such as fog, mist, and smoke. The idea that demons condensed, for example, was consistent with their understanding of the other spiritual beings that visited their worlds-angels--which materialized out of air and into paintings in churches all around them (Fig. 1). (36) It corresponded as well to the period's psychology of love, according to which airy spirits entered the eyes and "figured" themselves in the imagination, imprinting the image of the beloved in the heart. (37) It also made sense of the celestial apparitions they could observe above them: Weyer noted that the Devil "disorders the air, creating prodigies in the sky similar to natural phenomena"; (38) Sebastien Michaelis wrote similarly that devils could produce rainbows, could shape clouds into dragons and serpents, and could so corrupt the atmosphere that it would rain frogs and toads. (39) Both of these writers reflect the comments of the eleventh-century philosopher Michael Psellus, who likewise associated the figurative capacity of demons with the images in air:

The bodies of demons are simple, and are easy to twist and distend; they are by their nature apt for being figured into whatever guise pleases them. Thus it often happens that, in the air, we see clouds take on the semblance and form of men, of bears, of dragons, and of other manners of animal; the same thing also happens with the bodies of spirits. (40)

The notion that demons made air into forms could account for everything from normal meteorological events to atmospheric singularities. (41) It could also provide clues to how the magus, or artist, might manipulate and use demons. Recalling the way the necromancer he accompanied to the Roman Colosseum summoned demons, Cellini notes that the man used fire and "perfumes," as if the smoke and fragrances would give the demons something to occupy. (42) Later, Cellini reassures a companion at the event that the huge devils flying all about them are not to be feared, since they are "only made of smoke and shadow." Whether he had learned this from the priest or from another member of his profession, the artist knew what the bodies of demons were like. (43)

The materials with which demons worked were fundamental to the illusions of which they were capable. And if, as Descartes supposed, the power of their painting was achieved through possession, such dynamics must have been important, for they would have helped to explain how it was that demons got under their victims' skin. In his Discourse on Demons, for example, Francesco de' Vieri drew the following conclusions about how demons use bodies:

When spirits move themselves, they do this with simple motions, taking some body of air and entering into a human body--spirits being between forms and souls. Once in the bodies, they stop, and then, retracting themselves, they take shape and they figure the air, being of their own nature without figure. (44)

Vieri's comments depend on a distinction, rooted in Paul's epistles and theorized by Marsilio Ficino, between soul, spirit, and body. (43) Being of the middle nature--what Ficino refers to as the medium, and what Vieri, best known otherwise for his writings on meteorology, identifies with air (aria)--demons were incorporeal enough to pass through the body's boundaries, yet bodily enough to move the works once inside. (46) The self-transformation that put them in position to possess the victim's faculties was inseparable from the demons' work of figuration itself. The victim was detached from his or her previous position of self-control through the demon's act of taking shape. (47)

Vieri's comments presume that figuration involves the closing of the circuit between the possessing artificer and the fascinated viewer. And in this, his ideas are consonant with widespread notions about air's conductive capacities, its potential to carry, and even translate, its cargo from one domain into another. Ficino, one of the most important sources for sixteenth-century writers on demons throughout Europe, held that both sound and music consisted of air, and that it was the movement of that air that conveyed it from instrument to ear. Ficino's understanding of vision, as Gary Tomlinson has shown, was very much homologous, inasmuch as it presented spirit, "a certain vapor, very thin and clear," as the carrier that "takes up through the instruments of the senses the images of external bodies, images that cannot be imprinted directly on the soul because incorporeal substance, which is more perfect than bodies, cannot be formed by them through the reception of images." (48) In principle, the reliance of t he human sensory faculties on air laid the ground for demonic interference. The sixteenth-century Spanish Franciscan Martin de Castanega wrote that the Devil could cause visual rays "to become tied up in such a way that they represent the figure he desires" and could also "divert the rays so they do not go straight to the eyes looking at it." (49) Menghi, inspired by Ficino, wrote that maleficent men and witches, and even people who cry, can injure others with their eyes: "their eyes, being infected with a bad quality, infect the air that is between the two, and the infected air then infects the eyes that are encountered." (50) Various writers, north and south, suggested that the Devil could deceive by creating phantasms, simulacra of things like those that healthy people form with their fantasia (imagination), but which the Devil could place both before one's eyes and inside one's head. (51) And the popular German preacher Johannes Geiler von Kaiserberg, for one, suggested that this capacity was one that dep ended precisely on the Devil's facility with given media. "Since the Devil brings it about that something appears and you see something in your eyes," he writes, "there must be a medium between what you see and your eyes, for the sensible applied to the sense does not make the sensation." "The Devil can create a medium," Geiler adds, "such that a thing appears to be different than it is." Further along, Geiler rephrases the claim, putting the point in terms of visual rays: "The Devil can also change the streams [that go from the visible object to the eye] and can make other streams go into your eye . . . such that you think that you are seeing one thing, when in fact you are seeing another." (52)

The widespread interest in phantasms illustrates the geographic breadth of the discourse on demons and their media. And inasmuch as this discourse was sustained not only through the circulation of Latin texts but also, more locally, through vernacular booklets and sermons, it is hardly surprising that artists, too, would come to think about the simulacra that the Devil could make. The wit in Niklaus Manuel Deutsch's Temptation of Saint Anthony (Fig. 2), for example, is that the vision appearing before the hermit seems in all wise a perfect likeness of a woman, betrayed as an illusion only by the demonic claw (which we see, but which Anthony does not) emerging from the back of the costume. (53) The detail may reflect the belief, reported by GiovanFrancesco Pico, that the Devil, when taking human form, could not transform his feet. (54) More generally, however, pictures like this offer a model for how demonic species and phantasms might work, operating through what the German literature refers to as Blendwerken or Blendungen, the Devil wrapping himself in a false shape, or hanging a picture between himself and his viewer. (55) The writings we have been looking at, of course, suggest that Blendungen could happen behind, no less than in front of, a viewer's eyes, and artists, too, seem to have considered this. Whereas the Devil in Deutsch's Saint Anthony works primarily with a disguise, the one in Albrecht Durer's (Fig. 3) is aided by a demon, which bellows air into the saint's head. In this instance, the tempter not only interferes with visual rays but also bypasses the outer instruments of sight altogether. (56)

Saint Anthony became a popular subject for German and Flemish artists in the sixteenth century, perhaps, as Weyer himself suggests, because the saint provided an example for others trying to resist the Devil's temptations. (57) The conceit, nevertheless, is not limited to that subject; it is also strikingly close to an idea Durer had used in earlier works, including, most famously, the Dream of the Doctor (Fig. 4). With the whole sequence of bedevilment images in view, it should not seem remarkable that the demons' airy medium, their work of picturing, and their ability to possess people could eventually encourage a writer like Descartes to compare demonic possession with dreaming. In Italy, as Robert Klein and Charles Dempsey have shown, writers from Dante to Politian, and artists from Botticelli to Michelangelo were fascinated with the contributions spirits, demons, and phantasms made to the nightmares sleepers experienced. (58) Writers on magic, meanwhile, made the mechanics of dreaming, and the role airs played in this, accessible to readers through imaginative, and often detailed, vernacular tracts. In England, for example, Scot explained:

Physicall dreames are naturall, and the cause of them dwelleth in the nature of man. For they are the inward actions of the mind in the spirits of the braine, whilest the bodie is occupied with sleepe: for as touching the mind it selfe, it never sleepeth. These dreames vane, according to the difference of humors and vapors.

Scot's remarks, to the effect that dreams might be "physicall" and that they depend on "vapors," agree in large measure with the thoughts he would have come across in Giovanbattista Della Porta:

The Head grows full and heavy, and is overwhelmed in a deep sleep. Whence it comes to pass, that the species descending, meet and mix with other vapors, which make them appear preposterous and monstrous: especially, in the quiet of the night. But in the morning, when the excrementitious and foul Blood is separated from the pure and good, and become cool and allayed; then pure, and unmixed, and pleasant visions appear. (60)

Della Porta, like Scot after him, suggested that dreams have natural, internal causes; what Scot acknowledges with his reference to the "spirits of the braine," Della Porta explains more fully, hypothesizing that the vapors generated during the digestion of food reshape the other internal vapors, which carry "species." Significantly, both writers bring up the topic while discussing magic. The passage excerpted here from Della Porta appears in his book Natural Magick, in the chapter entitled "To Cause Several Kindes of Dreams." Its broader topic is that of how the monsters of the mind can be controlled (Della Porta's recommendation: eat "windy" foods). (61) Scot, by comparison, insists on the naturalness of dreams in his book on witchcraft, in the course of reviewing the possibility that dreams might have extrinsic origins. Insisting that the causes of dreams "dwelleth in the nature of man," Scot allows for inferences like Della Porta's, and accepts that dreams might be informed by the airs released during dig estion. In contrast to Della Porta, though, Scot is not ostensibly interested in manipulating dreams himself, and he casts doubt on most possibilities for accomplishing this, including especially the possibility of importing dreams through techniques more direct than Della Porta's. In particular, he opposes the notion sketched in the widely read writings of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who maintained, as the later writers did, that dreams were airy and volatile, but who also made more radical claims:

[Air] receives into itself, as if it were a divine looking glass, the species of all things, natural as well as artificial, and also of all manner of speeches, and retains them. Carrying these species with it, and entering the bodies of men and other animals through their pores, and making an impression upon them, both when they sleep and when they be awake, [air] affords the matter for diverse strange dreams, foresights, and divinatons.... It is for this reason that many philosophers were of the opinion that air is the cause of dreams, and of many other impressions of the mind, through the prolonging of images, or similitudes, or species. (62)

Like Psellus, Ficino, and others, Agrippa suggested that air is specially conductive; he effectively gives air (aer) a role much like the one Ficino gives to spiritus, claiming that air carries species into the body. His discussion, nevertheless, must count among the most materialist statements of the position argued later by Descartes, that dreams cannot serve a suspension of belief in reality, since they are made up of things brought in from outside. (63) If Della Porta maintains that the alchemy effected from the kitchen might itself be sufficient to change the forms of dreams, Agrippa makes it easier to understand why Scot might become worried about a related scenario, in which demonic rather than gastric vapors enter the head. Durer's Dream of the Doctor had already presented the possibility that the Devil, using air, could occupy a dreamer, and Scot records a troubling implication of this idea--that the magus, invoking demons, could attempt the same:

There are diabolicall dreames, which Nicolaus Hemingius divideth into three sortes. The first is, when the divell immediatlie of himselfe (he meaneth corporallie) offereth anie matter of dreame. Secondlie, when the divell sheweth revelations to them that have made request upon him therefore. Thirdlie, when magicians by art bring to passe, that other men dreame what they will. (64)

In what Scot, following Hemingius, calls the first sort of dream, the Devil actually makes his own body into the dreamer's dream. Given the contention we have encountered in various texts that the demonic body is already inherently airy, the proposal may seem almost natural: Agrippa, for his part, states explicitly that dreams have matter as well as form; air not only brings dreams about, it constitutes them. The idea can hardly be regarded as eccentric. The assertion that dreams are made of air, for example, helps explain the iconography in Vicenzo Cartari's Imagini dei Dei, which gives its personification of Sleep a horn filled with air as an attribute (Fig. 5). It likewise helps explain a representational convention of the time, that of showing thoughts, dreams, and visions taking place within a cloud (Fig. 6). If, even today, we encounter hints that speech, rendered as breath, is materially different from thought, made of cloud (Fig. 7), the distinction must have been still clearer in a time when the arti fice of thought clouds was itself of interest. (65) Karel van Mander, elaborating the construction of the dream (Fig. 8), actually shows little spirits painting castles in the air. The cloud frame in which all of the activity takes place indicates both that the spirits in our heads use air as their basic material and, more generally, that even at the level of thought, every image has its substance.

The proximity of the dream made of the demon's body to the dream made by what Scot calls the magician's art must have provoked both fascination and fear. Scot himself devotes an entire chapter to proving "[t]hat neither witches, nor anie other, can either by words or hearbs, thrust into the mind of a sleeping man, what cogitations or dreames they list." The Venus before Durer's sleeping doctor, which might read as the demon responsible for the doctor's deception, as the artful vision being blown in his ear, or as both, shows what Scot had to argue against. It is not difficult to conclude, in fact, that the dreams and phantasms made of air could, at moments, seem even constituent of witchcraft. When Hans Baldung's or Domenico Veneziano's witches hold their sabbats, they direct themselves to working airs (Fig. 9). (66) And though recent writers on these pictures have appropriately drawn attention to a number of things that the witches in these pictures do--kill infants, brew potions, fly--these operations, too, deserve attention, for they are inextricable from the period's larger vision of what sorcery involves. The witches' airs, no doubt, could be put to various ends: clouds might initiate the storms for which witches were sometimes blamed, and airs might facilitate the invocation of the demons with which witches were thought to copulate. (67) No less relevant, however, is Scot's denial, and its implication that in the views of some, witches also made dreams.

Durer's print and van Mander's drawing bear on the history of both superstition and artistic creativity. For if art was, at least on some accounts, a product of fantasy, and if fantasies were built of air, then air itself could be understood not only as the demon's but also as the artist's first medium. (68) Whatever van Mander's drawing shows about spirits and their materials, it also demonstrates that painting can come uyt den gheest (from the spirit), the Dutch gheest, like the German Geist, serving to denote both the painter's thought and the specter that haunts him. (69) In Italy, similar intuitions seem to have guided the creation of grotteschi. Sixteenth-century writers connected inventions like these, which were frequently rendered as air or smoke, both with the artist's fantasia and, more generally, with dreams. (70) If the arrival of an idea is, furthermore, a movement or a condensation of air, then we have a literal way of thinking about the condition that all artists depend on, inspiration. This, too, had its demonic counterpart; occultists writing in Italian referred to those possessed by demons as spiritati--literally, "spirited," but also, in a literal sense, inspired victims. Durer's doctor (Fig. 4) may represent a kind of mirror for the visionary painter, insofar as both find themselves with new thoughts placed in their heads. At the same time, Durer's print also raises the question of how the agency of inspiration would ideally work. In his still fundamental discussion of the image, Erwin Panofsky proposed that the combined presence of the ball in the foreground and the ring on Venus's finger bespeak the artist's awareness of a medieval legend according to which a boy, playing with a ball, became bewitched by, and then engaged to, a statue of Venus that the Devil had entered. (71) Panofsky went on to argue that Durer's image contained a moral lesson, one that turned on the dangers of sleep. Yet since the Venus's form, as numerous writers on the image have remarked, specifically evokes that of an cient statuary, it seems possible to read the print in a different way as well, namely, as a study in occupied bodies, a meditation on the relation between the possessed and the enlivened and, by implication, on the nature of the artist who might be involved with both. It is easy to imagine that the artist would seek to internalize the demon, to draw from the heavens the ideas that could guide his work. Yet in Durer's time, any wizard worth his salt could not only receive demons but also send them on his bidding. Good or evil, the would-be magus had to deploy the spirits that would make marvelous works possible. Magical artifice involved the transmutation and control of the air, incorporating air into work. (72)

Such a principle might be relevant to any number of pictorial categories. It is worth thinking, for example, about the advent of sfumatura, the technique by which the painter made illusions more convincing by allowing subjects to dissolve into or resolve out of atmosphere. (73) Leonardo, who gave elaborate instructions for the rendering of the smoke, dust, and vapor that should shroud the contents of a painting, also advised painters to study the stains on walls, since the artist, using his invention, could see battles, "strange airs of faces and costumes," and other such things in these blurs. Giorgio Vasari, attributing a similar inventive mode to Piero di Cosimo, wrote that the artist found his material in a wall on which sick persons had spat and in the clouds; he remarked that Piero was inspired to do this "because he had seen certain things that had been smoked and finished [fumeggiate efinite] by Leonardo." (74) Comments like these suggest how the sfumato painting (Fig. 10) might represent, include, or even constitute a kind of condensation, drawing aerial materials into shapes. Slumatura, as air, can, like the grotesque, depict the spiritually charged fantasia, or it can, like a demon, carry out its own meteorological operations. Furthermore, as David Summers has demonstrated, a painting did not need to be sfumato to suggest its air. Throughout the Renaissance, artists employed various means--swirling draperies, fluttering hair, translucent aureoles, even wind gods themselves-to unify their components and to imbue the whole with spirit. (75) Renaissance pictures were filled with air, and once this quality is extracted from stories of progressive realism and treated rather as a trick, datable to a historical moment, by which painters intensified their illusions, those paintings serve as fitting illustrations for one of Kris and Kurz's main points: that the artist becomes a magus precisely by attempting "to bring pictorial conventions to life." (76) Such an approach to Renaissance painting would, among othe r things, undermine the arguments of contemporary paragoni that the atmosphere of paintings makes them fundamentally different from (and better than) sculptures. What Vasari says of Leonardo's paintings--that they were "smoked and finished"--might, for example, bear comparison with what Filippo Baldinucci later said of Giambologna--that he finished the model he had invented "with his breath." (77) The air in painting can play a role analogous to that of air in sculptures, completing the work by entering its "body." To follow the lead of Kris and Kurz, we might even conclude that the issues here have as much to do with a vision of artistic performance as with depiction as such: the air that pervades the pictorial figure is not only a record of the world but also a trace of the inspiration that the artist has, at least notionally, enacted. (78)

At stake here is both the ontology of the artwork and the status of the artist who creates it, and on these topics, the magical literature is a helpful guide. Especially where the demonological version of such processes was concerned, for example, influential ideas would have been available in the Asciepius of Hermes Trismegistus. This dialogue, which Renaissance readers held to be a work of deepest antiquity and authority, provided them with a powerful view of the divine nature of human artifice: "Just as the master and father--or god, to use his greatest name--is maker of the gods in heaven, so is man the maker of the gods that are in the temple, content to be near to humans. Not only are humans illuminated; they illuminate as well." (79) The practice of art among humans, the Asciepius stated, is inherently divine. If the things that God created were other gods, so were the statues humans made. The process of making statues (the field of art most at issue in the dialogue) was something more than the mere ac t of giving materials a shape. What God did with his own works was to "illuminate" them, and humans, if they were to follow his lead, had to do the same. What this required emerges further along:

The image of gods that humans form has been formed of both natures--of the divine, which is primary and more divine by far, and of that which is found among humans, namely, the material of which they are built. [In making gods, humans] represent them not only with the heads but with all the limbs and the whole body. Always mindful of its own nature and origin, humanity persists in that imitation of divinity; just as the father and master made his gods eternal to resemble him, so does humanity make its gods with the likeness of its own features. (80)

Central to the passage is the question of what humans might use to make god statues. While it acknowledges that any selected materials will fall short of God's own-the substance of the temple god will never match human flesh, just as the human body itself is less than divine--it nevertheless suggests that the creation of gods requires the artist to imitate all of the features of his prototype, be they spiritual or material. It is a notion that amounts, on one reading, to a defense of anthropocentrism: the student of Hermes would know, roughly, what temple gods should look like. At the same time, the proposal also raises the consequential difficulty, as technical as it is theological, of how to represent the most important part of the human model. It is this problem that the dialogue's most notorious passage confronts directly:

Our ancestors, having once erred gravely, being skeptical of the divine plan, and inattentive in their worship of and reverence for the divine, discovered the art of making gods, and to this, they added a conformable power, drawing this from the nature of the world. Because they could not make souls, they mixed this power in and, calling up the souls of demons or angels, they implanted them in their images using holy and divine rites. Only through these souls could the idols have the power to do good and evil. (81)

In what was, to Renaissance readers, a shocking passage, the Asclepius indicated that statues of gods, in antiquity, were brought to completion through the invocation of demons. (82) To follow the Asclepius, the creation and adoration of semidivine images, which arose from a desire to demonstrate humanity's reverence for its maker, ultimately led to a demonic approximation of God's generative operations.

The Asclepius suggested that divine artists sent demons into partially fashioned, but not yet breathing, bodies, bringing them to life, and Renaissance readers, looking to other sources, could have encountered any number of ideas on how the artist might do this. Psellus, for example, wrote that certain materials, when properly employed, could themselves draw life heat into statues, while Trithemius instructed the magician to model spirits in wax, with the expectation that the representation itself could invoke the thing represented. (83) A more vernacular version of such a conjuration can be found in Gellini's account of the casting of the Perseus, wherein the statue comes to life on the artist's invocation of Christ's name. Cellini notes that to complete the task, he had entered into a "diabolico furore," and that, through what sounds like both an exorcism and an act of metempsychosis, the enlivening of the statue helped chase away the fever that had occupied him. (84)

If Michael Camille is right in suggesting that the Renaissance saw the rebirth of the pagan idol, one consequence of this might be that the Renaissance statue became a type of spiritato, and the statue maker a double for the witch or necromancer. (85) Spirits could be a sculptor's basic medium, and, as was true for the painter as well, awareness of such a medium could shape conceptions of the body that served as the vehicle for his art. (86) It is worth asking here about why it was sometimes dangerous, in these years, for artists to render demons in paintings: Was the problem simply that vivid portrayals betrayed something about the painter's own knowledge or allegiance, or was it that, when convincing, the painter might well seem to introduce living devils into the picture's body and, therewith, into the church or home? (87) To follow the demonological literature, devils were perfectly capable of invading artworks, especially statues, making their lifeless bodies, like artificial cadavers, begin to move and speak. (88) What's more, the artifice that Mannerist animators carried out with clay and colors could seem uncomfortably close to the operations that the Satanic trickster performed with living victims, using air to cloud those victims' perception and change their visible behavior. (89) When Francois Duquesnoy's student Orfeo Boselli writes that the sculptor should arrange his figure in a pose that is spiritoso, but not spiritato, we might be reminded either of Reformist complaints like Gilio's, about the "modern painters" who, "when they have to make some work, have as their first intent to twist the head, arms, or legs of their figures," (90) or of Weyer's nearly contemporary description of what the Devil does:

He is able, against the will of his victim, to contract nerves and muscles; often he paralyzes the body of a person, so that the neck cannot, as it could previously, turn left and right, and moves like a piece of wood. Sometimes he pulls together the veins around one's neck in such a strange and marvelous fashion that the head, neck, and whole body must hang down. At other times, he does the opposite, making the head bend back as far as the shoulders, and the shinbone twist and turn backward over itself. And who can imagine and tell of all the marvelous and strange contorsions of the body's members? (91)

The fine line, often indiscernible, between the spiritoso and the spiritato raises the question of whether any animated artwork might smack of the demonic. When, within the artwork, there appears a figure that is simultaneously a demonstration of artistic virtuosity, a response to antique forms, and a representation of possession, what does this make of the artist?

If all of this points up the connections between magic, the medium, and the Renaissance idol, it may be useful here to consider yet another category of late Renaissance motifs, the bind, which, beginning in the time of Michelangelo, came to be a widespread visual topos. Michelangelo himself included what appear to be ligatures not only on his figures of prisoners but also on his Moses, his Victoty (Fig. 11), and his Aurora, among other works. Leone Leoni, Pietro Tacca, and Giambologna all treated the enchained figure as a basic module for invention. Cellini wound his statuettes of Perseus and Danae together with a ribbon (Fig. 12), while Vincenzo Danti used binds to control his two figures of Honor and Falsehood, all but compressing them back into the block from which they should emerge. On some of these figures, the binds seem to serve a relatively straightforward attributive function, indicating that the figure they wrap has, in one way or another, been subjugated. In other cases, however, the motif is more intriguing, for it is not everywhere easy to determine whether it is a single figure, or two, or even a whole composition--that is, the work itself--that is bound. In Vincenzo Danti's Honor and Falsehood, the victor, no less than the victim, is wrapped up. In Gellini's Perseus and Danae, the tie mysteriously joins the two characters, whose bodies have been expressively turned. In Michelangelo's Victory, the binds creep up the ostensible conqueror's leg. In the same artist's Prisoners, the bound figures paradoxically break away from their monument to become "independent" characters.

If we allow that some artists, at least, must have hoped that viewers would associate their work with the moving of bodies, then it is worth noting that binding could serve both as a trace and as a cause of motion, especially where statues were concerned. As Plato twice recounted, the ancient sculptor Daedalus, after infusing his statue and causing it to move, lost control of it and had to tie it up. (92) When we find sixteenth-century writers like Vieri remarking, with reference to Plato, that "statues would not stay still were they not bound with ropes," it is tempting to conclude that the binds on later statues suggest that their artists, like Daedalus, have at least notionally made two successive moves, first starting their statues, then stopping them. (93) Just as relevant, however, might seem another perspective on the bound, moving statue, one that returns us directly to the matter of idols and demons. This alternative could take its orientation from another text well known in later periods, Saint Augu stine's etiology of the idol:

For what are idols but what the same Scripture describes in these words: "Eyes have they, and they do not see," and whatever else may be said of substances however skillfully carved into shape, but withal lacking life and sense? But unclean spirits, bound to these same images by that wicked art, had miserably enslaved the souls of their devotees by bringing them into fellowship with themselves. (94)

In the present context, what is significant about Augustine's lines is not their objection to idolatry as such, but rather their explanation of how idols work. In revisiting the Hermetic operation, and in accounting for how it is that demons mix with human images, Augustine relies not on the dynamics of air or breath, but rather on the image of the bind. As he says explicitly further along, "a demon bound to an idol by impious art is a god made by man." (95)

That binding counted among the ancient magus's most basic operations no doubt informed Augustine's thought here, and Augustine's own words, in turn, only added to the legacy, literary and material, that passed on to the Renaissance. (96) The Spanish mystic Francisco tie Ossuna assembled quotations from various theological authorities to support his belief that when doctors attempted to cure patients by wrapping them in ligatures, they were in fact employing "devilish arts." (97) Weyer dedicated an entire chapter to binding, identifying it explicitly with possession (98) Menghi writes that "sometimes, using certain valueless trinkets, [demons] can easily be made into slaves and servants of magi and enchanters, and sometimes they are constrained, either in hair, or in nails, or in wax, or in lead, or they are bound with a weak piece of thread." (99) Agrippa, thinking either more metaphorically or more metaphysically, gives the impression that virtually every trick in the magician's repertoire amounts to a sort of enchainment:

It remains now that we understand a thing of great wonderment, and that is the binding of men into love, or hatred, sickness or health, and such like. Also the binding of thieves, and robbers, so that they cannot steal in any place; the binding of merchants, so that they cannot buy, or sell in any place; the binding of an army, so that it cannot pass over any bound; the binding of ships, so that they be entirely unable to exit the port by any force of winds, even with limitless sails stretched to the wind. Also the binding of a mill, so that it can by no force whatsoever be turned round; the binding of a cistern, or fountain, so that the water cannot be drawn up out of them; the binding of the field, so that it cannot bring forth fruit; the binding of any place, so that nothing can be built upon it; the binding of fire, so that it cannot be lit in a certain place, and that anything, however combustible, not be able to burn, even if a very strong fire is put to it. (100)

His inventory goes on, and when he comes to cataloguing the instruments that the binder might employ, he lists not only rings, sounds, and "strong imaginations" but also images, suggesting how pictures might participate in the fantasy of control. (101) Agrippa's thoughts on art and binding can be assimilated both to demonology broadly and to the more narrow Hermetic pursuit of talismanic statues: here, too, after all, the objective of the magus is to capture the demon--to put the genie in the bottle, so to speak--and to use the captured mover to his own ends. (102)

This literature may well be relevant to the way the bind emerges as a Renaissance visual motif. It seems telling, for example, that Michelangelo's sonnets include figures like the lover, "bound and fettered though free and unfettered," and the beloved, who can "enchain without a chain." (103) In Michelangelo, to be sure, the mode is lyrical, and the context is generically different from that of, say, Agrippa. Yet following loan Couliano's demonstration of how the Ficinian tradition conflated eros and magic, or Charles Dempsey's study of the place of possession in the poesie, textual and visual, that Lorenzo the Magnificent's courtiers generated, it seems telling that even Agrippa himself, giving his first example of what the magus might do, points to "the binding of men into love." (104) When the lover in Michelangelo's poetry longs for the power to cast spells, when Cellini's Perseus and Danae reincarnates Amor and his mother, when Dosso Dossi transforms the seductive beauties of Titian and Giorgione into Me lissa or Circe (Fig. 13)--adding, in the upper left, small male figures (figurines?) bound to a tree--the possession at issue is no doubt that of the enchanter. (105) And though such material may, in the end, encourage a rethinking of Couliano's thesis, bewitchment, in all of its aspects, is still very much to the point. The magus need not be a Machiavellian manipulator: though Giordano Bruno, it is true, would write of how "the artisan binds with his art," and though the artist, like some Gallic Hercules, might ultimately aim to bind an audience, the poetics of Michelangelo allow that the maker, too, can be a subject, with a master. (106) The bound statue may mark a fantasy of power, or it may merely analogize the conditions of the artwork and the lover. Even in these cases, though, what matters is that where binding is eros, both magic and the medium remain central. The bind figures the difference, spanned by art, between the body and its distant movers.

As a model, binding both complicates and expands the artist-magus's work. Whereas the pictures of Durer and van Mander may simply demonstrate that there is no such thing as a pure image, these last figures point, beyond this, to the artistic necessity of constraint. Still, the tropes of chains and laces, in their way, do lead back to those of demons and airs, for if there is one condition that motivates the use of air to generate thought and illusion, it is that air itself is both pervasive and binding, connecting its subject to the agent that shapes it and disarming that subject in the process. The painter, and the demon, resort to air for the same reason that they resort to other binds: without it, all becomes discrete, things fall apart. The medium points to inevitable embodiment, but it also implies a kind of alienation, an otherness in the world the artist confronts. Such otherness includes the object itself, the cold, dead thing that must somehow be both moved and moving. If art, as a medium, is to bind , it must also be bound. The work, to be expressive, must be possessed.

Notes

I am grateful to Paul Barolsky, Anthony Grafton, Ingrid Rowland, Madeleine Viljoen, and an anonymous Art Bulletin referee for reading earlier versions of this essay and for their valuable criticisms and suggestions. Excerpts of the paper were presented in February 2002 at the American Academy in Rome, in March 2002 at the Villa Spelman in Florence, and in April 2002 at the University of Chicago. I owe thanks to all of these audiences, and to Tom Gunning and Walter Melion in particular, for their helpful comments. The paper grew out of a seminar I taught on art and magic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I conducted much of the research for it with support from a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art History and the Humanities, and from the Donald and Maria Cox Postdoctoral Rome Prize. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine, though Madeleine Viljoen offered valuable help with the German, and John Curtis Franklin with the Latin.

(1.) Rene Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, ed. Genevieve Lewis (Paris: Vrin, 1944), 19.23-28: "Age ergo somniemus, nec particularia ista vera sint, nos oculos aperire, caput movere, manus extendere, nec forte etiam nos habere tales manus, nec tale totum corpus; tamen profecto fatendum est visa per quietem esse veluti quasdam pictas imagines, quae non nisi ad similitudinem rerum verarum fingi potuerunt."

(2.) Ibid., 19.28-20.8: "ideoque saltem generalia haec, oculos, caput, manus, totumque corpus, res quasdam non imaginarias, sad veras existere. Name sane pictores ipsi, ne tum queidem, cum Sirenas & Satyriscos maxime inusitatis formis fingere student, naturas omni exparte novas iis possunt assignare, sed tantummodo diversorum animalium membra permiscent; vel si forte aliquid excogitent adeo novum, ut nihil omnino ei simile fuerit visum, atquae ita plane fictitium sit & falsum, carte tamen ad minimum veri colores esse debent, ax quibus illud componant."

(3.) Ibid., 22.23-23.9: "Supponam igitur non optimum Deum, fontem varitatis, sed genium aliquem malignum, eundemque summe potentem & callidum, omnem suam industriam in eo posuisse, ut me falleret: putabo caelum, aerem, terrain, coloras, figuras, sonos, cunctaque externa nihil aliud esse quam ludificationes somniorum, quibus insidias credulitati meae tetendit: considerabo meipsum tanquam manus non habentem, non oculos, non carnem, non sanguinem, non aliquem sensum, sed haec omnia me habere falso opinantem: manebo obstinate in hac meditatione defixus, atque ita, siquidem non in potestate mea sit aliquid vari cognoscere, at certe hoc quod in me est, ne falsis assentiar, nec mihi quidquam iste daceptor, quantumvis potens, quantumvis callidus, possit imponere, obfirmata mente cavebo."

(4.) For the concept of the Deikelos, the devil whose name is derived from Deikelon, "representation" or "image,' and who strikes terror with faces and pictures," see Weyer, 62 (1.22). Weyer published De praestigiis daemonum in Latin in 1563, and in his own German edition in 1566. An excellent English translation of the first Latin edition by John Shea is now available (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), and in order to facilitate its consultation, I have provided book and chapter references with all of my citations. As the present essay aims more to explore the range of ideas available about demons than to examine the thoughts and reception of Weyer per se, I have for the most part opted to draw on a more expansive 17th-century German edition of the text rather than on the early Latin version.

(5.) Kris and Kurz, 77: "the 'stronger' the belief in the magic function of the image, in the identity of picture and depicted, the less important is the nature of that image.... Whenever a high degree of magic power is attributed to an object--whether this be the fetish of primitive men or the miracle--working ritual image of civilized man--its resemblance to nature is rarely of decisive importance."

(6.) Ibid., 77-78.

(7.) As Kris and Kurz explained, in qualifying their terminology: "We should, however, make it clear what we mean by likeness. It has nothing to do with the idea of 'true to nature,' which has the aim of exact photographic reproduction; rather it may be more generally described as the attempt to bring pictorial conventions to life." See Kris and Kurz, 78. With the rise of the likeness, the artist ceased to be a maker of clones and became something closer to a damiurge. This, for Kris and Kurz, raised the specter of the demonic: "When St. Augustine (citing Apuleius) reiterates the view of the much-quoted Egyptian Hermes that the demonic arts have the power 'to install invisible spirits in visible objects formed of matter,' he is in fact referring to the secret bond between art and theurgy." See Kris and Kurz, 79.

(8.) See, for example, the fascinating recent discussion in Kristina Herrmann Fiore, "Gli angeli nella teoria a nella pittura di Federico Zuccari," in Federico Zuccari: Le idea, gli scritti, ad. Bonita Cleri (Milan: Electa, 1997), 89-110, with further references; also Frances Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1947), asp. 59, 77-94, 131-34, which discusses the preoccupation of 16th-century French writers with "furor"; and Robert Klein's magisterial "Spirito Peregrino," in Form and Meaning: Writings on the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans. Madeline Jay and Leon Wiseltier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 62-88. On the painter and writer Gian Paolo Lomazzo's reading of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim's writings on magic, and on Lomazzo's recommendations for how painters might draw on planetary influences in their art making, see idem, "Form and Meaning," in Form and Meaning, 54-57; and idem, "'Las sept gouverneurs de l'art' salon Lomazzo," in La forme et l'intelligible, ed. Andre Chastel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 174-92. On Michelangelo's furor, see David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 60-70; and Irving Lavin, "David's Sling and Michelangelo's Bow: A Sign of Freedom," in Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 29-61, with further references.

(9.) As later writers knew, Plato's term for the spirit of afflatus was [delta][alpha][micro]ov, Latinized by Apuleius and others as daemon. The late 16th-century meteorologist Francesco de' Vieri, for example, identifies dimonii with spiriti, which he divides into three categories. The first kind of spirit or demon is "the power in our mind, by which we are governed [quella potenza dell'animo nostra, dalla quale siamo gouernati]." As an example of this, he points to the Demone of Socrates. Vieri also comments that "every artificer, operating with knowledge, is accompanied and guided by the Demon, that is, by the soul of someone who, being formerly embodied, exercised that art [ogni artefice, con scienza operante, e scorto, e retto, da'l Dimonio, cioe da alcuna anima, che essendo prima nel corpo, quell'arte esercitaua....]." Sea Vieri, Discorso intorno a' dimonii, volgamente chiamati spiriti (Florence: Bartolomeo Sermartelli, 1576), 10; Wayer, 56 (1.20), who cites Lactantius as evidence that the Latin for d aemones is Genios; and in the secondary literature, the recent discussion in Dempsey, 41 and passim. Although it should be clear throughout the following text that I, like all other current writers on Renaissance magic, have depended on D. P. Walkar's Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), my approach has also been informed by recent criticisms of his dichotomy between the spiritual and the demonic. See asp. Couliano, 156; and Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 126.

(10.) On the distinction between artistic furor and demonic fury, see, for example, Sarafino da Fermo, Trattato da le discrezione, in Opere (Venice, 1548), esp. chap. 6, "Del vera a falso fervore"; Pontus de Tyard, Oeuvres: Solitaire premier (Geneva: Droz, 1950). 8-12; and Giordano Bruno, "De gli eroici furori," in Dialoghi italiani, ed. G. Gentile (Florence: Sansoni, 1985), vol. 2, 986-87.

(11.) In his essay Von Gespenster, ungeheweren, Fallen, oder Poltern, und anderen wunderbaren dingen...., Ludwig Lavater writes succinctly that "the pagans believed (as their writings show) that every person has a good and an evil genius, spirit, or angel. The first orients him to what is good, helps him, and advises him; the second leads him to harm whenever he can and wherever he wishes [Die Heyden haben es auch darfur gehalten (wie jre Schriefften bezeugen) ein jeglicher Mensch habe ein guten unnd ein bosen Genium, Geist oder Engel. Der ein weise jn auff guts, helffe und rathe jm, der ander fuge im schaden zu wo er konne und moge]." For Lavater, I have consulted the edition included in the compendium Theatrum de veneficis (Frankfurt: Basse, 1586), 165. Weyer, 56 (1.20), suggests that all genii are evil: "And Lactantius discusses this matter repeatedly, saying that the unclean, lost spirits roam all the world's places, and so that they fulfill their own corruption, they see how they can draw people into cor ruption as well. Thus they look how they can fill every corner with secret entanglements, deceits, and fears. They follow every person around, and they never let up, and they take over one house after the next, and they call themselves 'Genios' (for this is what the Romans called evil spirits) [Und abermals spricht Lactantius von diesem handel also: Die unreine verlohrne Geistes durchstreiffen alls orther inn der Welt, unnd damit sie ihres verderbens zukommen, sehsen sie wie sie auch die Menschen mit sich ins verderben ziehen. Derohalben lugen sie wie sie alls winckel mit heimlichen stricken, betriegeren unnd schrecken erfullen. Dann einem jeden Menschen hangen sie nach unnd lassen nicht ab, so nemmen sie auch ein hauss nach dem andern ein, und nennen sich Genies (dann also heissen die Latiner die bosen Geister]." Citing Dionysius, Weyer also observes, 164 (3.8), that the Devil, being an angel, has the same capacities for inspiration: "Nor does Dionysius deny that a person's intellect or understanding may be illuminated by something like an angel, in that [this angel-like being] draws or paints in the understanding of a person a thing or its image, so as to disclose it. The Devil is no less capable even today, on account of his [angelic] nature, which he did not entirely lose in the Fall, except that he does not, like good angels, illuminate the judgment and understanding of a person, but rather convinces him of false things, and seduces him [Zu dem so ist Dionysius nicht darweider, dass der Intellectus odes verstandt eines Menschen etwan von eim Engle moge erleuchtet werden, so er ihm nemlich ein Speciem oder ebenbild, dessen, so er im offenbart, im vesstand entwirfft und abmahlet. Gleichs vermogens ist auch noch heut dess tags der Teuffel, ja von Natur her, welche Natur er, wie angangs bezeugt, nit aller ding durch den fall verlorn hat, aussgenommen, dass er nicht wie die guten Engel dess Menschen urtheil unnd verstandt erleuchtet, sondern falschlich uberred unnd verfuhrt]."

(12.) See Clark, 179-94, esp. 186: "In and for themselves, after all, magicians and witches had no greater capacity to effect things with the means they used than other human beings. All alike were constrained by the same natural limits to creaturely powers. ... It followed that effects beyond their capacities could only be achieved, or even hoped for, if some agent with superhuman (though not, we recall, supernatural) powers was also involved."

(13.) Michael Psellus's book On Demons, which was translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino and into Italian by a mid-16th-century scholar, and which was widely cited throughout the later Renaissance, contended that artifice proper happened only in the base realms, and that its operator was less God's double and more his counterpart: "to God, the creator of all good things, there is added another god, artificer of evils; to the god who is lord of celestial things is added a god who is lord of subcelestial things [a Iddio creatore de' beni ui aggiugne un altro dio artefice de gli mali, et al dio signore dells cose celestiali, il dio signore delle cose sottocelestiali]"; Psellus, 10r. Jean Bodin wrote that the Devil "portrays God's works [Nous auons assez d'exemples que le Diable s'efforce de centrefaire les oeuures de Dieu]"; Bodin, De la demonomanie des sorciers (Antwerp: Arnould Coninx, 1586), 24. Still more elaborate versions of the antithesis appear in Giovanni Battista Marino's La pittura (Venice: Giacomo Violati, 1615). On formulations of this nature, see also the chapter on "contrariety" in Clark, with further citations.

(14.) Thomas Aquinas, interpreting Isaiah 14, explained that Satan sinned precisely "by seeking to be as God." The 16th-century Spanish priest and mystic Francisco de Ossuna opened his treatise on demons with a discussion of the words Ezekiel gives to Satan: "I am God and I sit on God's throne, and I have created myself." See Thomas Aquinas, Summe Theologica 1.63.3, and Ossuna, Flagellum Diaboli (I have used a vernacular German edition, in a translation by Aegidius Albertinus [Munich: Adam Berg, 1602], 1r).

(15.) Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, ed. Montague Summers (New York: Dover, 1972), 220. Weyer, 1998 (as in n. 4), 6-9, assembled a long list of classical and medieval sources on Lucifer's fall.

(16.) Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, Trattato ... de la emulatione che il demonio ha fatto a Dio. ... (Venice: Francesco de Franceschi, 1563).

(17.) Marino (as in n. 13), 38v: "Chi fu questo Pittore tanto arrogante, quanto ignorante, che prese a voler correggere le imagini perfettissime di quel gran fabro de' fabri? Questi fu Lucifero scelerato."

(18.) On audacia, see David Summers, "David's Scowl," in Collaboration in the Italian Renaissance, ed. Wendy Steadman Sheard and John Paoletti (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 113-24. On the divinity of the Renaissance artist, see, for example, Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, ed. and trans., The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy's Homage on His Death in 1564 (London: Phaidon, 1964); and Richard Spear, The "Divine" Guido: Religion, Sex, Money, and Art in the World of Guide Reni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Especially interesting, in the present context, is Lomazzo's comment that Hieronymus Bosch, "in representing strange apparitions and frightening, horrid dreams, was singular, and truly divine [nelrappresentare strane apparenze e spaventevoli et orridi sogni, fu singolare e veramente divino]"; Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, vol. 2, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi (Florence: Centro Di, 1974), 305.

(19.) For Alberti on Narcissus, see most recently Ulrich Pfisterer, "Kunstlerliebe: Der Narcissus-Mythos bei Leon Battista Alberti und die Aristoteles-Lekture der Fruhrenaissance," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 64 (2001): 305-30, with comprehensive further bibliography. On the metaphor of the shadow, see esp. Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).

(20.) Ludovic Lalanne, ed., Journal du voyage du Cavalier Bernini en France par M. de Chantelou (Paris: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1885), 205: "Il a dit a cet ambassadeur la comparaison de la sculpture et de la peinture, qui est rapportee au commencement de ces memoires, qua la sculpture est une verite; qu'un aveugle en juge ainsi; mais que la peinture est une tromperie, us mensonge; celui-ci l'ouvrage du diable, l'autre celui de Dieu qui avait ete sculpteur lui-meme, ayant fait et forme l'homme de terre, non pas en us instant, mais a la maniere des sculpteurs." I owe thanks to Steven Ostrow for this reference.

(21.) Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, ed, Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Turin: UTEP, 1980), 853. The sort of antithesis pursued in the poem may derive ultimately from Augustine's account of the fall of Lucifer, wherein the Devil, refusing to be second to the Creator, became a dissimulator ("affectat per superbam elationem simulare quod non est"). See Augustine, 155r (11.13).

(22.) Cf. Margherita Orsino, "Il fuoco nella Vita di Benvenuto Cellini: Aspetti di un mito dell'artista-fabbro," Italian Studies 52 (1997): 94-110.

(23.) See Weyer, De Lamiis: Dee ist; Von Teuffelss gespenst Zauberern und Gifftbereytern...., trans. Henricus Petrus Rebenstock (Frankfurt: Basse, 1586), 14-15: "A lamie is what I call a woman who, of her own free will, makes a shameful, despicable, or imaginary pact with the Devil, or who, through the Devil's urging, force, compulsion, sharp spurring and help, hopes, through bad thoughts or through insalubrious wishes, to commit and carry out terribly evil things, such that she ... dances with evil spirits, communes with them, turns people into animals, and otherwise shows and accomplishes thousands of marvelous, foolish things, as poets mendaciously relate and write, according to the saying 'Good painters and poets hold that all that they finely write and paint must be true and right [Lamiam hesse ich ein solches Weib, welches mit dem Teuffel ein schandliches grausames oder imaginirtes Verbundnuss, aus eigenem fryen Willen, oder durch dess Teuffels Anreytzung, Zwang, Treiben, hefftiges Anhalten und seine Hu lff, etzliche bose Ding, durch Gedancken, unheilsams Wundschen, zubegehn und zuvollbringen, vermeynet, als dass sie ... mit den bosen Geistern tastzen, sich mit ihenen vermischen, die Menschen in Their verwandeln, und sonsten tausenterley wunderbarliche narrische Ding zeigen und zu Werck bringen konnen, wie dann die Poeten viel Lugen hierveu erdichtet und geschreiben, dem Sprichwort nach: Pictoribus atq; Poetis / Quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas. / Die Mahler und Poeten gut, / Vermeynen gantz in ihrem Gmuth / Es muss als gelten und recht seyn, / Was sie dichten und mahlen fein]."

(24.) Marino (as in n. 13), 72v.

(25.) Francesco Cattani da Diacceto, Discorso ... sopra la superstizzione dell'arte magica (Florence: Valente Panizzi and Marco Preti, 1567), 23r: "Possono anco formarsi de corpi et mostrarsi a nostri orchi in uarie spezie sendo in lor' potere oprar quelle rose che si conducon' a fine col' moto locale de corpi inferiori. Una delle quali e oprar' corpi che paino d'huomo, o di qual si voglia animale: consistendo la similitudine del corpo nella figura & nel colore. La figura s'induce mediante 'l moto locale, onde i pittori col mezzo de pennelli et d'altri strumenti colorano i corpi. In questa maniera dunque figurano et colorano i corpo, & in essi appariscons hora in forma d'huomo, hora in forma di donna, hora d'animale, o d'altra cosa, seconds che giudicano poter piu nuocer' altrui."

(26.) On species, see Leo Steinberg, "'How Shall This Be?' Reflections on Filippo Lippi's Annunciation in London, Part I," and Samuel Y. Edgerton, "'How Shall This Be?' Part II," Artibus et Historiae 16 (1987): 25-44, and 45-54.

(27.) Menghi, 40: "tutto cio che col moto di questi corpi inferiori puo esser fatto della natura, ii Diavolo lo puo fare, & per che il suo apparere in diuerse forme, & similitudini non e altro che fingere un corpo accio che paia humano, o leonino, ouero d'altro animale, la qual fittione consiste nella figura, & colori, & tutto questo si fa con il motto locale; & che quests sia uero, ce lo insegna l'esperienza dell'arte del pignere, psi che col moto locale, li pittori la fanno, aggiongendo, leuando, mutando, & disponends con tal moto detti colori con lo loro istrumenti." For Menghi's demonology more generally, see the interesting discussion in Armando Maggi, Sates's Rhetoric: A Study in Renaissance Demonology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 96-125.

(28.) The scheme, essentially Ptolemair, on which Diacceto and Menghi depend, might be compared with the diagram Mattaus Merian made for Robert Fludd's 1617 Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica atque technica historia, which locates the artes in the inner rings of the cosmos, separating them from, even while linking them to, the "superior" powers of the planets and of God. On the diagram, see esp. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity end the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art end Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1995), 70-71. On earlier versions of the same scheme, see, for example, Frank Dawson Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences (New York: Dover, 1938), esp. 57-66.

(29.) Weyer, 27 (1.12), writes that the Devil, the "ape of God," uses idols to deceive; Menghi, 100, comments that the Devil is like a monkey because he is forced to imitate human operations. See Clark's chapter "The Devil, God's Ape" as well as Reinhold Hammerstein, Diabolus in Musica: Studien zur Ikonographie der Musik im Mittelalter (Munich: Francke, 1974), 19. For the artist as ape, the classic study remains that of H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952).

(30.) Diacceto (as in n. 25), 21v: "tutta l'efficacia di quest'arte consiste nel far parer' altrui quel che non e."

(31.) Ibid., 27r: "Resta hora che dopo questo diciamo qualmente que marauigliosi effetti che da essi deriuano, come e il far' gittare fuori di bocca altrui, agora, chioui, ossa, spugne, o oprar' cose simiglianti, sono illusioni, tal che ci fanno parer' quel che non e, o mediante alcune qualita naturali attiue, atte a cagionar' simili effetti, mediante la condensazion' dell'aria, o altro mode."

(32.) Cf. Menghi, 43, who writes that demons make their false images by "adding, by diminishing, by changing colors, by hardening, and by condensing the air [aggiongendo, sminuendo, mutando & dispondendo gli colori, indurando, & condensando l'aria....]."

(33.) Clark, 152.

(34.) See Eph. 2:2; biblical citations here are keyed to the Vulgata, ed. Robert Weber (Stuttgart: Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969). The 16th-century physician Johannes Ewich, who served as a judge at witch trials, refers to the Devil as "a spirit and prince in the air [ein Geist und Furst in der lufftl"; see Ewich, Von den Hexen / Die man gemeiniglich Zauberin nennet...., in Theatrun de veneficis (as in n. 11), 328.

(35.) See Augustine, 129v, 157r (De civil ate dei 9.3, 11.23). Cf. Apuleius, Opera (Lyons: Sib. a Porta, 1582), 77: "As you can see, if you consider their characteristics, demons are animal in genus, rational in mind, passive in spirit, airy in body, and unperishing in time [Quippe, vt finem comprehendam, daemones sunt genere animalia, ingenio rationabilia, animo passiua, corpore aeria, tempore aeterna]," and Origen, De principiis 1, Praefatio 8; references in Augustine, City of God, vol. 3, trans. David S. Wiesen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 154, 518.

(36.) On the bodies of angels, see the useful discussion in Marco Bussagli, Storia degli angeli; Racconto di immagini e di idee (Milan: Rusconi, 1991), esp. 81-140. Andrea Bolland discussed a number of related images in an excellent paper delivered at the 2000 Renaissance Society of America conference in Florence, "Making the Visible Invisible: The Depiction of Aria in Early Renaissance Painting."

(37.) See Klein, "Spirito Peregrine" (as in n. 8), 76-77; and Dempsey, 43-45.

(38.) Weyer, 36 (1.12). Cf. Psellus, whom Weyer later quotes to the effect that demons "change their airy body at will into various forms, as when the wind blows the clouds. They contrast it and extend it (as worms are seen to do because of their softness and great pliability); and not only do they show diversity in size, but they also change their shapes and colors in many ways, because a (lemon's body is naturally equipped to do both of these things. Inasmuch as it is by nature yielding, it transforms itself into figures of various appearance; inasmuch as it is airy, it takes on diverse colors like the air"; Weyer, 40 (1.14).

(39.) See Sebastien Michaelis, Pneumology, or Discourse of Spirits, in The Admirable Historie of the Possession and Conversion of a Penitent Woman, trans. W. B. (London: William Aspley, 1613), 26, 28-29; as well as the discussion in Clark, 185.

(40.) Psellus, 7v: "i corpi dclli dimoni son semplici e facili da torcere e distirare, et naturalmente atti a figurarsi in qual guisa lor piace. Onde si come costa su nell'aria uegiamo i nuuoli pigliar sembianza et forma hor d'huomini, hor di orsi, hor di dragoni, et hor di altre maniere di animali; cosi ancho i corpi do' spiriti."

(41.) Klein notes that when Dante describes the shades encountered in Purgatory taking form out of the wet, surrounding air, his terms closely resemble those used by Neoplatonic writers on demons. See Purgalorio 25.88--96; and Klein, "Spirito Peregrino" (as in n. 8), 67-68.

(42.) Cellini (as in n. 21), 211: "ci aveva fatto portare profummi preziosi e fuoco, ancora profummi cattivi."

(43.) Ibid., 213: "Di nuovo io dissi al fanciullo:--Queste creature son tutte sotto a di noi, e cio che tu vedi si e fummo e ombra."

(44.) Vieri (as in n. 9), 20-21: "Quando adunque gli Spiriti si muouono, cio fanno di semplice moto, prendendo alcun corpo d'aria, et entrando in un corpo humano, essendo gli Spiriti, infra le forme, & Anime, terminino, e ristringendo in se stessa formino, e figurin l'aria, per propria natura senza figura."

(45.) For Paul's comments, see esp. 1 Thess. 5.23: "ipse autem Deus pacis sanctificet vos per omnia / et integer spiritus vester / et anima et corpus / sine querella in adventu Domini nostri Iesu Christi servetur"; see also Michael Maher and Joseph Boland, "Soul," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, by Charles G. Herbermann et al. (New York: Universal Knowledge Foundation, 1912), 153-57. For Ficino, see his El libro dell'amore, ed. Sandra Niccoli (Florence: Olschki, 1987), 6.6, and Theologica platonia, ed. Michele Schiavone (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1965), 7.6; as well as Couliano, 28-32; and Tomlinson (as in n. 9), 106.

(46.) Cf. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Carol V. Karske and John R. Clark (Tempe, Ariz." Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), 3.3: "between the tangible and partly transient body of the world and its very soul, whose nature is very far from its body, there exists everywhere a spirit, just as there is between the soul and body in us, assuming that life everywhere is always communicated by a soul to a grosser body. For ouch a spirit is necessarily required as a medium by which the divine soul may both be present to the grosser body and bestow life throughout it [Igitur inter mundi corpus tractabile et ex parte caducum atque ipsam eius animam, cuius natura nimium ab eiusmodi conpore distat, inest ubique spiritus, sicut inter animam et corpus in nobis, si modo distat, inest ubique spiritus, sicut inter animam et corpus in nobis, si modo ubique vita est communicata semper ab anima corpori crassiori. Talis namque spiritus necessario requiritur tanquam medium, quo anima divina et adsit corpori crassiori et vitam eidum penitus langiatur]." As Robert Williams has pointed out to me, Vieri's own close connection to artists in Florence is demonstrated by the reference to "pittori Vostri amici" in the dedication on the title page of Francesco Bochi's "Discorso sopra l'eccellenza dell'opere d'Andrea del Santo." See Williams, "A Treatise by Francesco Bochi in Praise of Andrea del Santo," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989): 111-39, esp. 122 n. 37.

(47.) Weyer, 1998 (as in n. 4), 36-37 (1.12), paraphrases Tertullian on the breath of demons: "The breath of demons and angels causes corruption of tise mind by fits of frenzy and madness and by foul and savage lusts, along with varmous delusions. Of these delusions the greatest is that this demon-breath, capturing and surrounding men's minds, devours these men so as to procure for itself its special sustenance of savors and blood offered to the statues and images."

(48.) Ficino, 1987 (as in n. 45), 124: "Piglia ancora per gli instrumenti de' sensi le imagine de' corpi di fuori, le quale imagine non si possono appiccare nell'anima, pero che la sustantia incorporea, che e piu excellente ch'e corpi, non puo essere formata da lloro per la receptione delle imagine, ma l'anima, essendo presente able spirito in ogni parte, agevolmente vede be imagine de' corpi come in uno specchio in esso relucenti, e per queue giudica e corpi, e tale cognitione e senso da' platonici chiamata." The translation here is quoted from Tomlinson (as in n. 9), 106. See also the discussion in Couliano, esp. 29-32; as well as Dempsey, esp. 63.

(49.) Martin de Castanega, cited in Clark, 166.

(50.) Menghi, 193: "gli occhi loro sendo infetti di mala qualita, infettano l'aria che e fra l'uno, & l'altro; & l'aria infettato poi infetta gli occhi che sono incontro." Cf. Couliano's discussion of Ficino on visual rays, 28-32.

(51.) Menghi, 71, writes that the Devil creates fantasmi in the same manner as one who sees and "who, from the things he has previously seen and contacted with his sense faculties, forms, willingly, using his fastastic powers, or rather, his fastasia, a simulacrum and idol from the phantasms of that thing, and the movement and impression of this can be of such power and vehemence that the simulacrum seems to reads all the way to the internal senses, as can be seen in the experiences of frantic people [il quale dalle cose che prima haura visto, & toccato con gli sensi, formera a suo beneplacito con la virtu fantastica, ouero fantasia, un simulacro, & idolo dalli fantasmi di tal cose, & tanta, & cosi vehemente potra essene tal motione, & impressione che sino a gli sensi insteriori parera giungere tal simulacro, come si puo vedere pen esperienza ne i frenetici]." Weyer, 28-29 (1.2), gives a similarly elaborate account of the way in which the Devil's art allows him to shape phantasms: "He can also use his art to throw before people many and various forms and shapes, which he prepares with marvelous craft, so as to blind time eyes and the sight, to substitute lies and deceit for the truth (with such remarkable agility that one cannot recognize the evil), to hide things that are there in reality so that they seem not to exist, and make what is useful appear I know not what.... It is also customary for him to damage a person's disposition with various phantasms, that is, with sights or apparitions, which make the wakeful sad, which frighten the sleeping with evil dreams, and which lead travelers astray from the correct path [Zu dem kan er noch die kunst, dass er viel und mancherley formen und gestalten demo Menschen furwirfft, welche er mit wunderbarer kunst zubereited, die Augen und das Gesicht dardurch zuverblenden, lugen und betrug an statt der wanheit mit sonderbarer behendigkeit, dass man den bossen nicht merke, furgeben, die ding so in der warheit sind, als ob sie nicht weren, zuverbergen, und das so nutz ist, als ob es, ich wiess nicht was, were, furbilden.... Er hats auch im brauch dass er die gemuter der Menschen mit mancherley phantasmaten, das ist, Gesichten oder erscheinungen verletzt, die wachenden trawrig macht, die schlaffenden mit bosen traumen erschreckt, die so uber Landt reisen, ab den rechten weg fuhrt, die so da irr gehen]." Ewich (as in n. 34), 334, suggests that when the Devil impresses such phantasms on the human imagination, he is effectively shaping a material: "Avicenna, with the poets and common rabble, attribute much marvelous power to the imagination or Einbildung, such that it changes the sound of the elements, transforms rain into drizzle, pulls the moon from the sky, moves grain, makes I know not what out of wolves, rats, or other animals--all of which is a great lie or devilish specter. For the imagination or human Einbildung is only able to move the body in which it is found, just as animals are moved by their own, and net by foreign imaginations. A person's soul, of which the imagination or fantasy is a particular strength and power, is to people what the form is to its material, and only therein does it have any effect. It cannot move an outside, removed thing without transforming the medium between them, nor can it change anything else that is outside its own body or subject, for such a power is given to no creature [Von den Imagination aber oder einbildung der Avicenna mit dem Poeten und gemeinem Pofel niel wundenliche macht zuschreibet, als dass sie die Element tonne verendern, den Regen in diess verendern, den Mondt vom himmel ziehen, das getreid versetzen, auss menschen Wolff, Ratzen, oder andere Their machen (Ja was nicht?) ist alles entweder gnobe lugen, oder Teufflische gespenst, Dann die Imagination der Menschliche einbildung vermag allein die Corper, darinn sie iest, bewegen, wie dann die Their von irer eigener, nicht von fremmder Imagination gefuhrt werden. Dann die Seel dess Menschen, welcher die Imagination oder Phantasey ein besondere Kraft und Werck ist, ist im Menschen als di e Forma in irer materi, darinn sie auch allein wirchet, und ton nicht ein fremmdes weit abgescheidens ding ohn verenderte mittel bewegen, noch etwas anders ausserhalb iren eigenen Leib oder Subject verendern, dann solches ist keiner Creatur gegeben]." Weyer, 23, in De Lamiis suggests that though the Devil's material is air, he nevertheless sends pictures directly to the optic nerve: "Why should the Devil, being an artful spirit, if it be imposed on him and conceded to him from God, not creep into the organa sensuum, craftily drive and move the moisture and spiritus to his bidding, and the air, too, just as, outside [of the body], he is able to throw [the air] that surrounds [his victim] into a form and shape as he desires [warumb soft nicht der Teuffel als ein Kunstreicher Geist, wenn es ihm von Gott verhangt und zugeben wurde, sich in die organa sensuum hinein schleychen, die Feuchtigkeit und Spiritus, zu seinem Furnehmmen tuglich treiben und bewegen, oder auch den Lufft, so ausserhalb denselben, in Form und Gestalt, wie ers begert, entgegen werffen kondte]." The Calvinist theologian Lambert Daneau identified the Devil's phantasms with prestidigitation and with fascination: "The seventh sort are those who are called Mecasephim in the Scripture (Deut. 18, verse 10), praestigiatores and fascinatores in Latin, and enchanteurs in French: those who by illusions, phantasms, and vain images, which they represent to men's eyes, abuse them and seem to make them see or touch whatever they wish"; Daneau, Les Sorciers: Dialogue tres utile et necessaire povr ce temps (Paris: Jacques Bourgeois, 1574), 23: "Le septieme sorte est de ceux qui sont dits en l'Escriture, Deut. 18. vers. 10 Mecasephim, en Latin, Praestigiatores & vaines images qu'ils representent aux yeux des hommes, les abusent, & semblent leur faire voir ou toucher ce qu'ils demandent."

(52.) Johannes Geiler von Kaiserberg, Ausszug etlicher Predigten, so durch Herrn Johann Geylern von Keyserssberg...., ed. Johannes Weyer, in Weyer, 562: "Wie der Truffel zu wegen bringt, dass etwas scheinet und's in den Augen, Soltu etwas sehen, so muss ein mittel seyn zwischen dem das du sihest, unnd den Augen, quia sensibile positum super sensum non fit sensatio, wenn ich die Hande nicht, wenn ich die Hande auf die Kuh lege, so gesihe ich die Kuh nicht, es muss ein mittle da seyn, unnd nach dem als das mittel geschicket ist, nach dem gesihest du, Nimm das Exempel von einem Pfal, oder von einem Stecken in einem Wasser, wann du in sihest, so meinestu er sey gebrochen, unnd ist doch nicht gebrochen, wann warumb, du sihest den Pfal durch zwey Elementen, durch den Lufft, unnd durch das Wasser, unnd das Wasser ist ein dickerer Element dann der Lufft, Also die zwey mittel betriegen dein Gesicht, dass du meynest der steck sey gebrochen, so er gantz ist. Also kan der Teuffel auch wol ein mittel machen, dass ein ding anders scheinet, dann es an ihm selber ist, so die Natur das kan. Darnach so kan er es umb der species corporales willen, wann einer wil etwas sehen, so mussen von demselbigen dinge, dass er sehen wil, striemen gehen biss in sein Auge, sonst geschehe es nicht, wann du eine Kuh wilt sehen, so mussen glantz oder strimen von der Kuh in dein Aug gehen, wann nicht strimen von euch zu meinen Augen giengen, so gesehe ich euwer keines, Also dieselben striemen, di kan der Teuffel verwandelen, unnd andere striemen machen, gehen in dein Auge, als von einem Rossz, darmit du meynest du sehest eins, so sihestu ein anders."

(53.) The character might be compared to that of the lamia in Bronzino's London Allegory, which wears the mask of a female courtier and hides a poison tail behind. The fundamental discussion is Graham Smith, "jealousy, Pleasure, and Pain in Agnolo Bronzino's Allegory of Venus and Cupid," Pantheon 39 (1981): 250-58; though see also the important rethinking of the picture in Robert W. Gaston, "Love's Sweet Poison: A New Reading of Bronzino's London Allegory," I Tatti Studies 4 (1991): 249-88.

(54.) GiovanFrancesco Pico, Dialogo intitolato la strega, overo de gli inganni de Demoni dell'illustre Signor GiouanFrancesco Pico conte de la Mirandola, trans. Turino Turini (Pescia: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1555), 58: "Qual credete uoi che fusse la cagione che si mostrasse houmo nel uolto, e ne gli altri membri e ne pidi Oca? Dica. Tu leggerai questo in tutti i libelli de le querele, il Diauolo o uero il Demonio, o uuoi dire Satanasso, mostrarsi in forma d'huomo eccetto i piedi: di che mi sono spesso marauigliato, & immaginatomi che la causa sia che non possa interamente pigliare la forma humana."

(55.) Weyer translated the title of his De praestigiis doemonim as Von den Blendwerken der Damonen. Cf. Ulrich Muller, Von Hexen unnd Unholden...., trans. Conrad Lautenbach (Cologne: Johannes Gymnicus, 1576), 76: "A Blendung is what I call the art by which someone's core appearance, disguised by another shape, blinds the eyes of the people, as Isidorus says in the Etymology, book 8, and thus maintains that they think they see another shape before them than what is really there [Ein Blendung nenne ich die Kunst, dadurch sich jemands unterm schein in ein ander gestalt verkleidet, den Leuthen die augen verblendet, wie Isudorus Etymologiarum lib. 8 sagt, und also haltet, das sie meinen, sie sehen ein andere stalt vor ihnen, dann es in der warheit ist]."

(56.) On the genre in general, see Enrico Castelli, Le demoniaque dans l'art: Sa signification philosophique, trans. Enrichetta Valenziani (Paris: Vrin, 1958). With regard to Deutsch's picture, Castelli, 14, suggests that the woman is "like a figure bu Titian."

(57.) See his 1565 Rathlich Bedenken Doctor Johann Weiers, welches den beschlossenen Jungfrauwen im Closter zu Nazareth binnen der Stadt Collen, so von dem bosen Feind angefochen gewest, zugeschriben...., reprinted in Weyer, 564.

(58.) See Klein, "Spirito Peregrino" (as in n. 8); and Dempsey, esp. chaps. 3, 4. Giorgio Vasari and Filippo Baldinucci both attest that Durer's Dream of the Doctor was well known in Italy.

(59.) Scot (we in n. 15), 101.

(60.) Giovanbattista Della Porta published the first edition of his Magiae Naturalis in 1558 and expanded it in the decades following. Here I cite he first English edition, Natural Magich (London: Thomas Young, 1658), 220.

(61.) Ibid., 220-21.

(62.) Agrippa, 17; Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, De occulta philosophia libritres (Venice: Curtius Navo, 1551), 5r (1.6): "Ipse enim proxime coelestium omnium influxus in se concipit aliisque cum elementis, tum mixtis singulis communicat; non minus etiam rerum omnium cum naturalium tum artificialium, et sermonum quorumcunque species, velut deificum quoddam speculum, in se suscipit et retinet: illasque secum ferens, corpora hominum et animalium, per poros ingrediens, tam in somno quam in vigilia illis imprimens, variorum mirabilium somniorum, praesagiorum, et auspiciorum materiam praebet.... Hinc multi philosophi arbitrati sunt, aerem causam esse somniorum pluriumque aliarum animae impressionum, per delationem idolorum, seu similitudinum, seu specierum, quae deciduntur a rebus et sermonibus in ipso aere multiplicatis, quousque perueniant ad sensus, & tandem ad phantasiam, & animam recipientis, videlicet que soluta curie, nec impedita, species huiusmodi obuiam expectans, ab illis informatur." Agrippa's text went through at least half a dozen editions in the 16th century. Gilio had certainly read it, and Lomazzo drew on it liberally when writing his art theory. I cite the 1551 edition but base my English quotations on the most recent edition of James Freake's 17th-century translation.

(63.) One of Agrippa's models here must be Lucretius, whose model of vision has objects shedding "simulacra" in the form of membranes, which proceed to strike the eye; Lucretius, like Agrippa, holds that these image skins can enter consciousness even while people sleep. See Lucretius, De rerum naturalibri sex (Lyons: Seb. Gryphius, 1540), 135-43 (4.26-269). Cf. also Weyer, 34-35 (1.14): "Thus, they can transform the subtle, airy body that is given to them into various shapes, according to their will and pleasure, like a cloud driven by the wind, now pulling it together, now dispersing it far and wide.... The polymorphy that can be seen in them, however, arises not only in that they seem larger at one moment, and smaller at the next, but also because they take on many and various figures and colors [so konnen sie doch eben den subtilen, lufftigen Leib so inen gegeben, nach irem willen und wolgefallen, wie ein Wolcken so vom Wind getrieben, in mancherley.... Die vilformigkeit aber, so sich an inen sehen lesst, kompt nicht allein auss der ursach, dass sie ein mal grosser, das ander kleiner scheinen: sondern dass sie auch viel unnd mancherley Figur und Farben an sich nemmen]."

(64.) Scot (as in n. 15), 103.

(65.) Weyer, 163 (3.8), cites Aristotle as an authority on this: "Aristotle also writes, in the works mentioned above, that the pictures that come to a person in a dream travel first to the head and to the sense instruments, just as the clouds in the air climb upward, for one sees, in smoke and steam, as they are pulled up Out of the earth and water by the warm sunshine, into the middle air, which is so very cold, various animals and other things formed: in the same way do dreams also work, for pictures sway before one in sleep after the climbing steam of the body is formed and shaped [Es schreibt auch Aristoteles in vorangezogenem Opere weiters also: Die Bilder so einem Menschen im traum furkommen, fahren den aller nechsten dem Haupt zu, und den Instrumenten der sinnen, nicht anderst, denn wie die Wolcken im Lufft ob sich steigen, da man denn am rauch unnd dampff, so auss der Erden unnd Wassern durch die warmen Sonnenscheinen im mittellufft, so gantz kalt ist, auffgezogen wirdt, viel und mancherlei Thieren, unnd auch anderer dingen gestalten sicht: Gleicher wiese gehet es mit dem Traum auch zu, denn die Bildnissen so im schlaff vorschweben, nach den auffsteigenden dampfen dess Leibs geformiert und gestalt sindt]."

(66.) On these images, see Joseph Leo Koerner, Thie Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 323-53; Patricia Emison, "Truth and Bizzarria in an Engraving of Lo stregozze," Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 623-36; and most recently, Margaret A. Sullivan, "The Witches of Durer and Hans Baldung Grien," in Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 332-401. The identification of witches with sorcerers is made explicit in the 1575 English translation of Daneau's Sorciers, which was entitled A Dialogue of Witches, in foretime named Lot-tellers, and now commonly called Sorcerers. It is not terribly important, for my purposes, to engage Sullivan's question of whether the sources for images like Baldung's are ancient or modern. What is relevant here, rather, is that the operations those illustrations document are consistent with the period's broader understanding of magic.

(67.) On Renaissance fears of witches and storms, see Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Bottles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). On sex between witches and demons, see Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002).

(68.) On artistic fantasia, see the standard discussions in Martin Kemp, "From 'Mimesis' to 'Fantasia': The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts," Viator 7 (1977): 347-98; and Summers (as in n. 8). For the association between the fantasia and the demonic, see Robert Klein, "L'imagination comme vetement de l'ame chez Marsile Ficin et Gior dano Bruno," in Klein 1970 (as in n. 8), 65-88; Emison (as in n. 66), 629; and Dempsey, 94-95, 106.

(69.) On painting uyt den gheest, see Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mender's "Schilder-Boeck" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 66 and passim, with further references. Cf. also Weyer, 35 (1.14), which describes how demonic Geister breathe thoughts into the Geister der einbildung (which he also calls the phantasey): "The spirits approach and act upon the spirit of the imagination or phantasey that is inside of us, and breath a word of joy or sadness into it, not with an audible voice, but without any sound whatsoever [Die Geister nehern unnd thun sick zu dem Geist der einbildung oder phantasey, so in uns ist, unnd hauchen ihm ein, ein wort der frewd unnd dess leids, nicht mit lauter stimm, sander ohn allen thon]."

(70.) On grotesques and fantasia, see Summers (as in n. 8), 103, 135. On grotteschi as "oneiric painting," see Andre Chastel, La grotesque (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1988), 12, 47-52.

(71.) Erwin Panofsky, "Zwei Durerprobleme (Der sogenannte 'Traum des Doktors' und die sogennanten 'Vier Apostel')," Munchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 8 (1931): 1-48. See also the discussion in Koerner (as in n. 66), 189-97; and Berthold Hinz, "Venus im Norden," in Venus: Bilder einer Gottin, ed. Claudia Denk, Eveliina Paul, and Konrad Renger, exh. cat., Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 2001.

(72.) Menghi writes that "the maleficent man, or the sorceress, looking at the body of some young boy, moves him with the gaze, and with the imagination." He does this by using his eyes: "the eyes having been transmuted into some harmful force, it can happen that they transmute the nearby air, which is between them and the eyes of the boy who is being watched; and that contiguous air sometimes works better with material more disposed than with material less disposed, where it is suited to transmuting die eyes of that boy into some bad quality, and by means of that boy's eyes, his other, internal parts"; Menghi, 192-93: "[il] huomo Malefico, 6 la Maga, riguardando il corpo di qualche fanciullo lo muoua col uedere, & con l'imaginatione...sendo gli occhi trasmutati in qualche qualita nociua, puo occorrere che trasmutino l'aria vicina, che e fra se, & gli occhi del fanciullo qual e quardato; quell'aria contiguo potra alle volte meglio oprare nella materia piu disposta, che nella men disposta, all qual conuien tra smutare gli occhi di quello figliuolo in alcuna mala qualita, & col mere de gil occhi di quel fanciullo, l'altre parti interiori." Della Porta's last book was dedicated to the transmutation of airs: see his De aeris transmutationibus, ed. Alfonso Paolella (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000).

(73.) Alexander Nagel notes the polyvalence of the term sfumare, which can suggest both that the painter adds a smoky atmosphere to a painting and that the painter unveils a figure from the mist that envelops it. See Nagel, "Leonardo and Sfumato," RES 24 (1993): 7-20, with further references.

(74.) See The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. J. P. Richter (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), vol. 1, 311-12: "e se tu riguarderai in alcuni mvri inbrattati di uarie machie o pietre di uari misti, se avrai a inuentionare qualche sito potrai li uedere similitudine di diuersi paesi, ornati di montagnie, fiumi, sassi, albori, pianvre, grandi valli e colhi in diuersi modi, ancora vi potrai vedere diuerse battaglie, e atti pronti di figure, stane arie di uolti e abiti e infinite cose." Also Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (1906; reprint, Florence: Sansoni, 1998), vol. 4, 134: "fermavasi talora a considerare un muro, dove lungamente fusse stato sputato da persone malate e ne cavava le battaglie de' cavagli e le piu fantastiche citta e piu gran paesi che si vedesse mai il simile faceva de' novili dell'aria. Diede opera al selerire a olio, avendo visto certe cose di Leonardo fumeggiate e finite." The Leonardo passage is cited in Daniel Arasse, "Le portrait du diable," in Diavoli e mostri in scena del medio evo at rinascimento, ed. M. Chiabo and F. Doglio (Rome: Centro Studi sul Teatro Medloevale e Rinascimentale, 1988), 221; Richter makes the comparison with Vasari in n. 508.

(75.) See David Summers, "Aria II: The Union of Image and Artist as an Aesthetic Ideal in Renaissance Art," Artibus et Historiae 20 (1989): 15-31, with further references.

(76.) Kris and Kurz, 78. Summers (as in n. 75), 22, 26, notes that "aria was always related to vivezza, to the apparent life of the image"; he also points out that Ghiberti used the term aria to mean maniera.

(77.) Filippo Baldinucci, Natizie dei professori del disegna da Cimabue in qua, vol. 2 (Florence: SPES, 1974-75), 556.

(78.) See the discussion in Bredekamp (as in n. 28), 46ff.

(79.) Duorum librorum Mercurii Trismegisti Pimandri scilicet et Asclepii, ed. Lefevre d'Etaples (Paris, 1505), 49v-50r: "Et quoniam de cognatione & consortio homini deorumque, sermo nobis indicitur: potestatem hiominis o Asclepi, vimque cognosce. dominus et pater vel (quod est summum) deus, vt effector est deorum celestium: ita homo effector est deorum, qui in temphis sunt, humana proximitate contenti. & non solum illuminantur: verum etiam illuminant." My translations slightly modify those in Copenhaver, 80.

(80.) Copenhaver, 81; Duorum librorum (as in n. 79), 50r: "species vero deorum, quas conformat humanitas: ex natura vtraque conformata est. ex diuina que eat prior, multoque diuinior: et ex ea que intra homines est, id est ex materia qua fuerunt fabricate. & non solum capitibus solis: sed membris omnibus, totoque corpore configurantur. Ita humanitas, memor nature & originis sue: in illa diuinitatis imitatione perseueat. vt licuti pater ac dominus, vt sibi similes essent, deos fecit eternos: ita humanisas, deos suos ex sui vultus similitudine figuraret."

(81.) Copenhaver, 90; Duorum librorum (as in n. 79), 57v: "quoniam ergo parui nostri multum errabant, circa deorum rationem increduli, et non animaduertentes ad cultum, religionemque diuinam: inuenerunt artem qua deos efhicerent. cui inuente, adiunxerunt virtutem de mundi natura conuenientem, eamque miacentes, et (quoniam animas facere non poterant) euocantes animas demonum, vel angelorum, eas indiderunt imaginibus sanctis, diuinisque misterijs. per quas solas idola et benefaciendi et malefaciendi vires habere potuissent."

(82.) In the 1505 Lefevre edition, for example, all of the passages I have cited were supplemented with editorial commentaries asserting that Hermes was mistaken (in the version of the bock I consulted in the Bayeriache Staatsbibliothek, Munich, a 16th-century reader had underscored these comments). The passage quoted directly above was printed with the words "ALIUS LAPSUS HERMETIS" running vertically in the margin; cf. also Walker (as in n. 9), 169-70.

(83.) Psellus, 11v: "We are accustomed to taking from [these magicians] the wax they use to form certain parts of their statues, and also their mud, seeing as these things have certain properties, when they are properly understood. Often it seems that such works bring fire down from the heavens, and it seems that their statues smile, and that flames light their lamps [Medesimamente si suole tor da loro a formar certe parti delle sue statue la cera, e 'l loto concio che habbino certa proprietga a loro intendimenti. Spesse volte sembra che traggano giuso il fuogo dal cielo, et allora pare che le statue loro sorridendo et con quelle fiamme anchora si accendeno le sue lampane]." For Trithemius, see, for example, his discussion of Orifiel, the first angel of Saturn, in bk. 3, chap. 1 of the Steganographia (Darmstadt: Balthasar Hofmann, 1606), as well as the discussion in Couliano, 172. Notions derived from and comparable to his can be found in Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Bruno, among others. To follow Gilio (as in n. 16), 14v, Renaissance sorcerora typically employed wax statues: "How many false Christians are there today who, in order to apply themselves to the art of magic and to witchcraft, sacrifice human blood and birds to the demon, and make burnings of incense and other herbs to statues of virgin wax, because the great god willed that he be worshiped with these things [Quanti ne sono hoggi de falsi christiani, che per attendere a l'arte magica, et a le stregarie sacrificano al demonio sangue humano, uccelli, fanno a statue di cera uergine, suffumigij d'incensi, & altri odori, che'l grande iddio ne uolle esser adorato lui]."

(84.) Cellini (as in n. 21), 520.

(85.) See Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medi-eval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 338-49.

(86.) The point is made explicitly by Cardanus, Offenbarung der Natur und Naturlichen Dingen...,trans. Hulderichum Frolich von Plawen (Basel: Sebastianus Henricpetrus, 1591), 629: "Trismegistus, however, explains why pictures were originally conceived--namely, that [their creators], through these pictures, understood that Devils existed, and thus converted so the worship of God. Then they realized that they had something before them which their works honored, even though this thing was invisible. Devils, however, for this reason like to enter into human bodies, for just as a person, through looking at divine things, becomes a vessel for rise Gods, so, through evil and useless thoughts, which derive either from evil deeds or from melancholy, does the body become a vessel or home for Devils [Es sagt aber Trismegistus warumb die Bildtnussen seyen erdacht worden, nemlich dass sie durch dieselbigen verstunden das Teufel weren, und also sich zu dem Gottesdienst bekehreten. Dann sie erkanndten dass etwas vorhanden w elches unserer Wercken acht hette, wiewol diese unsichtbar were. Die Teufel aber fahren darum gern in die Menschlichen Corper: dann gleich wie der Mensch aums Gottlicher betrachtung ein behausung der Gotteren wird, also werden durch bose unnd unnutze Gedancken, welche entweders von bosen Wercken, oder von der Melancholey herkommen, diese ein behausung unnd wohnung der Teufeln].:

(87.) On the image as a vehicle for evil spirits, ace Camille (as in n. 85), 58. For his depiction of demons, Jacob Issacsz van Swanenburg was called before the Inquisition; see Ernst van de Wetering et al., eds., The Mystery of the Young Rembrandt (Wolfratshausen: Minerva, 2001), cat. no. 1.

(88.) See Camille (as in n. 85), 58-72, as well as Clark, 172.

(89.) Concern about such proximity is palpable in Ossuna's theological hair-splitting (as in n. 14), 8v: "Satan can (through God's will) take on bodies and appear within them--he does not, however, bring such bodies to life, for he is not joined and unified with that body (as she soul is with the body); rather, he only stands with that body, in she manner of a mover of mobile things. Therefore, he does not truly make the vital operations and living effects in them, but does so only apparently, and seemingly [Zum andern, kan der Sathan (durch Verhengnuss Gottes) an sich nemmen die Corper, und in denselben erscheinen: Aber doch machet er solche Corper nit lebendig, dann er wird mit jnen nit (wie die Seel dem Leib) vniert und verainiget, sonder allain stehet er jhnen bey, sicut motor mobili. Und desswegen machet er in jnen nit warhafftigklich die operationes vitales oder leendige Wirckungen, sonder allain apparenter und zum schein]."

(90.) See Orfeo Boselli, Osservazioni della scoltura antica, ed. Phoebe Dent Weil (Florence: SPES, 1978), fol. 39v: "The [figure's] attitude, in order to be good, ought--beyond being appropriate to the action, as has been said--to be spirited, rather than cold, but with care that it not be possessed [L'atto per esser bono, oltre l'esser proprio dell'attione, come si e detto, si deue fare piu tosto spiritoso, che freddo: ma con reguardo che non sia spiritato]." Giovanni Andrea Gilio da fabriano, De gli errori, e de gli abusi de' pittori circa l'historie: Con molte annotationi fatte sopra il Giuditio di Michelagnolo, & altre figure (Camerino: Antonio Gioioso, 1564), 70v: "Onde mi pare c'hoggi I moderni pittori: quando a fare hanno qualche opera, il primo loro intento e di torcere a le loro figure il capo, le braccia o le gambe. Accio si dica che sono sforzate, e quei sforzi a le volte sono tali, che meglio sarebbe che non fussero, & al soggetto de l'historia che far pensano poco, o nulla attendono." For further discussion of this passage, see Michael Cole, "The Figura Sforzata: Modeling, Power, and the Mannerist Body," Art History 24 (2001): 520-51.

(91.) Weyer, 30 (1.12): "Gleicher gestalt vermag er auch on alle bewilligung dess nechsten, die Nerven und Musculos zerstossen, auch offtermals den Leib dess Mensehen so gar erstarret machen, dass Genick nicht mehr wie vor, auff beyde seiten wenden mag, unnd wie em scheit Holtz reget. Bald zeucht er einem die Adern, welche umb den Hals her seyn, so gar seltzam unnd wunderbarlich zusammen, dass Kopff, Genick, unnd der gantze Leib mit einander vor sich hangen muss. Zuweilen richtet er gar das wiederspiel an, dass Kopff zu ruek abwertz wol etwan biss auff die Schultern sich biegen muss, die Schinbein aber hindersich, uberwertz sich krimmen unnd kehren. Unnd wer kan die wunderbarlichen seltzamen verstellungen der Glieder am Leib alle erzehlen oder aussdencken."

(92.) See Plato, Meno 97 D-E and Euthphro 11 D.

(93.) Francesco de' Vieri, Discorso... delle marauigliose opere di Pratolino et d'Amore (Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1586), 58: "Platone similmente verso la fine del Mennone fa memoria di queste mobili statue di Dedalo, et dice, che si come queste non issanno ferme, so non si legono con le funi."

(94.) Augustine, Dc civitate dei, 126v-127r (8.24): "Nam quid sunt idola nisi quod eadem scriptura dicit: Oculos habent et non vident: & quidquid tale de materijs licet a fabro effigiatis tamen vita sensuque carentibus dicendum fuit: Sed immundi spiritus eisdem simulacris arte illa negaria colligati cultorum suorum animas in suam societatem redigendo miserabiliter captiuauerant."

(95.) Ibid., 127r: "Demon quippe simulacro arte impia colligatus ab homine factus est deus."

(96.) An extremely useful collection of ancient literary sources on binding spells is available in John C. Gager, ed., Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). I owe thanks to Eristina Sessa for this reference.

(97.) Ossuna (as in n. 14), 48v-49v.

(98.) See Weyer, 280, chap. 21 of bk. 4, which is entitled "Von mancherley Ligaturen, das ist, zauberischen verknupffen, binden verstricken: Item von vielerley zufellen der Besessenen."

(99.) Menghi, 13: "alcuna volta con certe cosetta superflue, & di niuno valore facilmente si fanno mancipij, serui de' Maghi, & Incantatori, & alcuna volta gil contringono, o nelle unghie, o nella cern, o nel piombo, ouero con un debile filo si legano."

(100.) Agrippa, 119; Agrippa, 1551 (as in n. 62), 25r (1.40): "Restat nunc videre rem magnae mirabilitatis, & ipsa est ligatin hominum in amorem, vel in odium, in aegritudines, & sanitates, & eiusmodi, Item ligatio furum & latronum, vt in aliquo loco furari non possint: ligatio mercatorum, vt in aliqun loco emere vel vendere nequeant: ligatin exercitus, vt metam eliquam transire non possit: ligatio nauium, vt nulla vi ventorum, etiam infinitis veils per ventum tensis portum egredi minime valeat. Item ligatio molendini, vt nullo impesu volui possit: ligatio cisternac, vel fontis, vt aqua exinde hauriri nequeat: ligatio agri, vt fruges in eo produci nequeant: ligatlo loci alicuius, vt in eo aedificari nihil possit: ligatio ignis, vt in aliqun ben accendi non possit: & quod aliquod combustibile apposito fortissimo igne non ardeat."

(101.) Agrippa, 159.

(102.) Agrippa's discussion of binding, like his discussion of air, may depend on his reading of Ficino. See Couliano, 88.

(103.) Michelangelo: The Poems, ed. and trans. Christopher Ryan (London: Dent, 1996), 6-7, "Chi e quel che per forza a te mi mena, / oilme, oilme, oilme, / legato e stretto, e son libero e sciolto? / Se tu incateni altrui senza catena, / e senza mane o braccia m'hai raccolto, / chi mi difendera dal tuo bel volto?"

(104.) On love's binds, see the discussion in Couliano, 87-89 and passim; and in Dempsey, 73-86. On the artist enamored with his works, see Pfisterer (as in n. 19).

(105.) For Michelangelo on enchantment, see, for example, his poem "I' mi son caro assai piu ch'i' non sogilo," in Ryan, 84-85. For the conflation of Danae and Perseus with Venus and Cupid, see Broozino's poem "Ardea Venere bella, e lui che 'n pioggia," in Ricordi, prosee poesie di Benvenuto Cellini con documenti la maggior parte inediti, ed. Francesco Tassi (Florence: Guglielmo Piatti, 1829), 459. For Dosso's painting, whose exact subject is still a matter of debate, see Peter Humphrey's entry in Dosso Dossi: Pittore di corte a Ferrara nel Rinascimento, ed. Andrea Bayer (Ferrara: Ferrara Arte, 1998), 114-17. See also the suggestive comments on the erotic dimension of Giambologna's Florence end Pisa in Christina Strunck, "Eine radikale Programmanderung im Palazzo Vecchio: Wie Michelangelos 'Sieger' auf Giambologna und Vasari wirkte," in Michelangelo: Neue Beitrage, ed. Michael Rohlmann and Andreas Thielemann (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2000), 265-97.

(106.) Recent writers on ancient binding spells have stressed how desire and impotence could be powerful motivations for magic; see, for example, the important discussion of transference in John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1990), 87-91. The approach offers a helpful model for thinking about the role of magic in a lyric sonnet, where the position of the author is typically that of the captivated, sometimes powerless, victim.

Frequently Cited Sources

Agrippa of Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. James Freake, ad. Donald Tyson (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1998).

Augustine, De Ciuitate dei: Contra paganos ... cum commentarijs Thome Valois et Nicolai Triueth necnon additionibus Jacobi Passauantij atque Theologicis veritatibus Francisci Maronis (Lyons: Johannes Koberger, 1520).

Clark, Stuart, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

Copenhaver, Brian P., ed., Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Couliano, Ioan P., Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Dempsey, Charles, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Kris, Ernst, and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, trans. Alastair Lang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

Menghi da Viadana, Girolamo, Compendio dell'arte essorcistica et possibilita delle mirabili & stupende operationi delli Demoni, & de' Malefici (1576; reprint, Genoa: Nuova Stile Regina, 1987).

Psellus, Michael, Opretta... quale tratta del la natura delli Dimoni et Spiriti folleti. ... (Venice, 1545).

Weyer, Johannes, De praestigiis daemonum, trans. Johannes Fuglin (Frankfurt: Basse, 1636).

Michael Cole teaches late Renaissance and Baroque art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author, most recently, of Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture (Cambridge) [Department of Art, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N. C. 27599].

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