The historian Norman Cohn in his book Europe's Inner Demons called witches "the strange mythic followers of Satan who supposedly held black masses and flew through the night" – meaning that they are imaginary, nightmare terrors. But why did these fantastic women so grip Europe's dreams in the 16th and 17th centuries? And why should a modern art gallery care?
- Witches & Wicked Bodies
- Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
- Starts 27 July
- Until 3 November
- Venue details
Witches & Wicked Bodies at the Modern Two in Edinburgh delves into the darkness of the collective European imagination. In its publicity, the gallery offered a fig leaf for the fact that it was staging a show of premodern art. The press release stressed the involvement of artists from today such as Paula Rego and Kiki Smith. Yeah, well. They are in it, with one or two small works. But in reality this is, overwhelmingly, a historical investigation into images of witchcraft from around 1500 to 1700, when many people were tried and killed for supposedly being witches.
It is all the better for being historical, though – and the connections between then and now, the archaic and the modern, need no explaining, for these images anticipate the most uncanny strains of modern art. What could be more surreal than Francisco Goya's depictions of emaciated witches in his Caprichos prints? Or Hans Baldung Grien's print The Bewitched Groom, in which a man lies supine under the power of a sinister spell? This is an exploration of the primitive at the very heart of high European culture. Paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Salvator Rosa darkly depict the midnight sabbaths and phantom rides that once held the imaginations of learned people. It also shows how terror turned to humour as 18th-century satirists mocked the superstitions of their grandparents.
There are two flaws, though, that make it all a bit too genteel.
The show sticks too rigorously to a theme it illuminates primarily through graphic art. Why not be a bit more imaginative in following the wild ride of the witches? Paintings of Judith and Salome are full of witch-like qualities, not to mention Cranach's sinful Venuses. More might have been made of such metamorphoses.
But sex is kept under wraps in this exhibition. In reformation Germany, "witches" were prosecuted for a crime called Teufelbuhlschaft – having sex with the devil. Sexuality was central to the image of witchcraft. This is not concealed by the exhibition, but it is not stressed either.
It could be darker, then, and considerably more demonic – but this is an intriguing journey through the night side of the mind.