Albrecht Dürer’s The

Witch: The Aged Female

Body, Infertility, and the
Child
KATHLEEN VOIGHT
Yale University, Class of 2019

ABSTRACT

Albrecht Dürer’s The Witch, also known as Witch Riding Backwards on a

Goat, is an engraving dating from circa 1500 and measuring approximately
4½ by 2¾ inches. Although this work of art was created before the height of
witch hunts, the witch was a critical figure to the policing of social standards
and gender norms during this period of time. Witches embodied the
“extremes of human experience, the territory of violence, cruelty, and deadly
sex,” enabling the unmentionable to be rendered as the height of art. Dürer
uses this emerging genre of the grotesque in his engraving, The Witch, to
redefine the figure of the witch, as explored through the aged female body,
infertility, and her relationship to the child.

Albrecht Dürer’s The Witch, also known as Witch Riding Backwards

on a Goat, is an engraving dating from circa 1500 and measuring
approximately 4½ by 2¾ inches (Fig. 1). Although this work of art was
created before the height of witch-hunts, the witch was a critical figure to the

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policing of social standards and gender norms during this period of time.1
Witches embodied the “extremes of human experience, the territory of
violence, cruelty, and deadly sex,” enabling the unmentionable to be
rendered as the height of art. 2 Dürer uses this emerging genre of the
grotesque in his engraving, The Witch, to redefine the figure of the witch, as
explored through the aged female body, infertility, and her relationship to
the child.
Contrary to other contemporaneous works depicting witches, such as
Dürer’s Four Witches, the woman in this engraving does not represent the
ideal female nude Dürer so dedicatedly perfected (Fig. 2). Muscles and
knobby joints protrude from her body and her neck bulges tensely. The
worn, crosshatched skin of her stomach folds over upon itself, defined by
thick curving lines. Her breasts sag downwards without the fertile
plumpness that Dürer’s Eve, of his famous Adam and Eve print, possesses
(Fig. 3). Her face contorts, grimacing into wind that pushes her hair away
from her face, contrary to the direction in which the goat moves. Her power,
strong enough to beckon hailstorms, does not derive from her seduction, as
that of Dürer’s Four Witches does. She is similarly unaware of the viewer,
however, she is not an object of pleasure. Rather, she is occupied by her own
agency, unconcerned with being seen as she stares intensely towards the
direction in which she either travels towards or away from, intent on the
witches’ Sabbath.3
Over her arm, the witch holds a large swath of fabric, emphasizing her
lack of concern for the appearance of her nude body. Her ability, but lack of
attempt, to conceal her body is dissimilar to the coyness of Hans Baldung
Grien’s Weather Witches (Fig. 4). Her body is not for the pleasure of the
male gaze, but instead an active and powerful agent. She tightly grips the
                                                                                                               
1 Sullivan, “The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien,” 393
2 Roper, The Witch in Western Imagination, 84
3 Lorenzi, Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and Enchantress, 78

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horn of the goat with a prominently outlined arm, restraining his movement
and directing him. The calm demeanor of the goat and his human-like eye
show his passivity. The typical male and female roles of active and passive
have reversed. The witch, much larger in scale, dominates the goat that
moves submissively and effortlessly beneath her through her appropriation
of male power.
Although nude, the witch’s leg blocks her genitals from being visible.
The vagina, as the site of creation and fertility, remains concealed. The witch
clutches a distaff to her pelvis, emulating a phallus. The distaff, a stick used
for wrapping wool intended for spinning, was a symbol for the female role
and references the narrative of the unmarried spinster.4 However, in this
case, the distaff functions as a signifier for both sexes. It indicates the
witch’s body as simultaneously female and male, both site of child bearing
and not.
This position of riding backwards on an animal derives from a form of
humiliation used during the Middle Ages. At the time, a man or woman,
often for not acting in accordance with norms of gender, was forced to ride
an ass while facing backwards through town. 5 Those deserving of this
punishment included remarried widows, adulterous couples, men beaten by
their wives, and promiscuous women – all people who failed to uphold
traditional gender roles and, in turn, failed to uphold the order of society.
Dürer’s witch reclaims this symbol of mockery and removes its power to
humiliate. The position does not belittle her, but instead renders her
empowered. In appropriating this symbol of riding backward on a goat,
Dürer rejects the societal reinforcement of gender norms by embracing the
disorder of bodies that are not clearly defined.

                                                                                                               
4 Zika, Dürer and his Culture, 118
5 Ibid., 120

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At the time, the image of the goat held certain connotations when
depicted in accordance with the female figure. Goats were associated with
vices and were often used to represent the seven deadly sins.6 Goats, as
evidenced by satyrs, were thought to be sexually insatiable. When depicted
with a woman, the goat revealed her rampant sexual desire and the
wickedness of her lust. Additionally, during the early 16th century, the horns
of an animal conveyed certain implications. Horns, in practicality used by
goats to battle other males for female attention, were associated with and
used as a form of mockery for men who displayed weakness.7 Instead of
evidencing male dominance, they signified a failure to assert masculine
power and an assumption of the weaker role, allowing the wife to usurp the
superior position, as “woman on top.”8
The characteristic femaleness of witches stemmed from an interest in
and distrust of females’ reproductive capabilities.9 The belief that the devil
manifested in only female bodies was likely heightened by women’s power
over children – the power to both create and to corrupt children. Women’s
close relationships with both their own and other children posited them as
sources of uncontrolled capability and influence. It was believed to be
witches’ custom to seduce children and they were often accused of passing
down knowledge of witchcraft to their daughters.10 Witches were thought to
taint the relationship between mother and child, overcoming this sacred
bond through disdain and, at times, murder of the child.11 The child, still
today utilized as the innocent victim of corrupted society in need of
protection (“Think of the children!”), was a powerful source for rallying
pathos. Similarly, midwives were often accused of killing newborn children,

                                                                                                               
6 Zika, Dürer and his Culture, 118
7 Ibid.
8 Zika, Dürer and his Culture, 123
9 Roper, The Witch in Western Imagination, 85
10 Roper, The Witch in Western Imagination, 36; Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft, 200
11 Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe, 83

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either to eat or to offer to the devil.12 The lack of understanding of the

female body or of the female reproductive system generated formidable
suspicion surrounding them.
The witch’s hair further emphasizes her rampant sexuality and
disorderly body. Her hair flows backwards, implying that she moves towards
the direction in which she faces and that the goat moves backwards.
However, the swath of fabric that flows out away from her implies that the
goat moves in the opposite direction. This contradiction suggests that the
witch’s body operates through governing laws of matter different than those
of the beings around her. Her tresses of hair, like “metaphysical lightning
conductors,” move rebelliously, defying wind and gravity.13 Witches’ hair, as
described in the Malleus Maleficarum, was believed to conceal powerful
secrets and malicious charms, making it the most private part of her publicly
barred body, not yet exposed to the “externalizing gaze of the man.”14 Hair,
as a form of bodily expulsion, was seen as analogous to menstrual blood.
Menses, as Pliny the Elder wrote, had the power to destroy crops on contact
and leave land barren.15 In this work, the extension of the witch’s hair, along
with the entirety of her unruly, sterile body, can be seen throughout the
infertile land.
Although his representations more true to the accused women, Dürer
began the tradition of depicting the witch as an aged, haggard, grotesque
female body.16 Elderly women during the Renaissance, often marginalized
and disadvantaged, were disproportionally accused as witches. 17 These
women embodied a scolding, complaining, irritable reminder of impending
age and mortality. Additionally, interest in the representation of the aged

                                                                                                               
12 Kramer, The Malleus Maleficarum, 66
13 Lorenzi, Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and Enchantress, 94
14 Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, 340
15 Ibid., 339
16 Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe, 17
17 Ibid., 24

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body increased during the Renaissance, harkening back towards the

Hellenistic period of ancient Greece.18
The elderly, infertile female body received a certain disdain from the
public. Although clearly a female-sexed body, the witch lacks the signs of
fertility that epitomize womanhood and ideal female beauty. Her body,
lacking soft curves or plump breasts, is beyond the age of childbearing years.
The barren landscape, in which only intermittent tufts of grass grow,
mirrors this lack of fertility. Sexual desire was believed to be even stronger
in the post-menopausal woman’s body, however, without the ability to
procreate, this lustfulness took on a new level of disapproval and disgust.19
Sexual desire without the capability of serving a patriarchal society was
without tolerance. This interest in the aged, sexual female body, no longer
capable of reproduction, can also be seen in Dürer’s Allegorie des Geizes
(Fig. 5).
Beneath the witch and goat, four putti fidget and fumble in a semi-
circle. Their bodies swell with plumpness in contrast to the witch’s harsh
body. Delicate lines give form to their bodies, unlike the harsher, blackened
outlines of the witch. The two standing putti eagerly offer gifts to the
unaware woman above. The witch’s lack of interest, let alone
acknowledgement, in the putti below her parallels the relationship of
witches to the caretaking of children – “abandonment to instinctive
desire.”20 The putto on the left hoists a potted plant – the only mature plant
in the scene and an offering of fertility – above his shoulder. The standing
putto on the right fondles the lip of a spherical vessel he holds upwards. He
is the only figure of the engraving whose genitals are visible, his nudity
emphasized by the fabric tied around his body, just as is the witch’s nudity.
The left lower putto bends downwards, gazing towards his genitals, unseen
                                                                                                               
18 Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe, 73
19 Ibid., 74
20 Ibid.

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to the viewer, in a position also present in Baldung Grien’s New Year’s Wish
with Three Witches (Fig. 6). The lower right putto is the only one clothed
and, seemingly, the only putto not corrupted through either honoring the
witch or engaging with his genitals. Unlike the others, he does not hold a
staff, an object frequently found in scenes of witches’ Sabbath.21 However,
this illusion of purity is sustained on the edge of corruption. The putto
reaches for his neighbor’s staff-grasping hand with tension reminiscent of
Dürer’s Adam and Eve (Fig. 3). His prelapsarian body borders on the
postlapsarian, a change to be initiated through his interaction with the staff
and, ultimately, with witchcraft. Through the representation of the putti,
Dürer makes present one of the largest fears concerning witches – the
corruption of the innocent child.
Compositionally, this work also references signifiers of witchcraft. The
figure of the witch and four putti form a circular, contained composition that
binds the witch to the putti, and encourages the eye to circumnavigate the
small engraving. This round composition references the circular and
spherical objects associated with witches and often found in images of the
witches’ Sabbath.22 These included convex mirrors, spindles, and vessels,
such as that which is held by the putto. At its center, the scene stretches out
towards the horizon, almost entirely empty, barring the interruption of a
single staff. This central void can be paralleled to the bodily void of women,
its emptiness referencing the ability to procreate. However, in positioning an
empty void at the center, Dürer not only recalls the womb, but also the
vacant womb of the old witch, contained in a body formerly able to create
life, now capable of destroying it.
Dürer radically altered the progression of representations of the witch
in the Renaissance, as the first artist to elevate the grotesque female body to

                                                                                                               
21 Lorenzi, Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and Enchantress, 80
22 Ibid.

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the high art of the elite.23 Alternatively titled Witch as evocation of the
world turned upside down, Dürer turned upside down the representations
of witches, giving women power not reliant on male-validated appeal. Dürer
“visualized a female threat to patriarchal authority” and materialized it
through a female body not dependent on a valuing system of sexual appeal,
fertility, or child rearing.24

                                                                                                               
23 Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, 238
24 Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe, 65

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Bibliography

Hults, Linda C. The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early
Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German

Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Kramer, Henrich. The Malleus Maleficarum. 1928. New York: Cosimo, Inc.,
2008.

Lorenzi, Lorenzo. Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and

Enchantress. Trans. Ursula Creagh. Firenze: Centro Di, 2005.

Roper, Lyndal. The Witch in Western Imagination. Charlottesville:

University of Virginia Press, 2012.

Sullivan, Margaret A. “The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien.”

Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 2, 2000. 333-401.

Zika, Charles. Dürer and his Culture. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1998.

—. The Appearance of Witchcraft. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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Images

Figure 1: Albrecht Dürer, The Witch, 1500

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Figure 2: Albrecht Dürer, The Four Witches, 1497

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Figure 3: Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1507

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Figure 4: Hans Baldung Grien, Weather Witches, 1523

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Figure 5: Albrecht Dürer, Avarice (Allegorie des Geizes), 1507

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Figure 6: Hans Baldung Grien, New Year’s Wish with Three Witches,
1514

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