The Witches of Durer and Hans Baldung Grien 

Margaret A. Sullivan

This study seeks to demonstrate that the timing, subject, and audience for the art of
Durer and Hans Baldung Grien all argue against the view that the witches in their prints
and drawings were a reaction to actual witch-hunts, trials, or malevolent treatises such
as the Malleus maleficiarum. The witch craze did not gain momentum until late in the
sixteenth century while the witches of Durer and Hans Baldung Grien belong so an
earlier era. They are more plausible as a response to humanist interest in the poetry
and satire of the classical world and are better understood as poetic constructions
created to serve artistic goals and satisfy a humanist audience.

When a reasoned and quantitative study of the witchhunts in northern Europe is

illustrated with Baldung's drawing of naked witches "playing leapfrog," [1] the
juxtaposition suggests that his art can serve as an insightful source for historians
studying the witchcraft epidemic. Art historical studies that account for Durer's
introduction of the witch in terms of the witchcraze assume a similar relation between
actual events and these artistic creations and emphasize demonological texts, such as
the misanthropic Malleus maleficarum, [2] that were important to the rabid witchhunters.

Timing, subject, and the audience for the art of Durer and Baldung all argue against the
introduction of the witch in art as a reaction to witchhunts, trials for witchcraft or didactic
treatises, and the purpose in this study is to suggest that this new and fantastic subject
is better understood as a response to humanist interest in the literature of the ancient
world. Durer's introduction of the young female witch in the Four Witches (fig. 1) of 1497
and the old and ugly witch in Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat (fig. 2) from around
1500, [3] precede by more than a generation the widespread persecution of witches and
sorcerers. [4] Hans Baldung Grien's Bewitched Groom (fig. 3), the last work to be
considered in this study, was probably created a year before his death in 1545, and it is
only in the latter part of the sixteenth century and during the seventeenth century that
witchhunting became widespread and virulent. The work of Durer and Baldung belong
to an earlier era, they testify to a different sensibi lity and were produced by artists who
could not have foreseen the terrible times to come. Their innovative images of the
female witch make a significant contribution to the history of art. They are less useful as
a guide to widely-held beliefs and their value for the historian studying the outbreak of
the witchcraze in the years after 1560 is limited. Although one author has termed
Durer's innovations "realistic pictures of witches" [5] they are more plausible as poetic
contructions motivated by artistic goals and a fascination with the underside of the
ancient world rather than an interest in witch manuals or a compelling concern with
witchcraft as a punishable offense.

TIMING
As many historians have observed European witch-hunting follows a somewhat
surprising course. "Instead of slowly gathering strength and leading into the large panics
of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the number of trials leveled off
during the first half of the sixteenth century and in certain areas actually declined." [6]
This hiatus was even noted by contemporaries. Writing in 1516 Martin Luther observed
that witches and sorcerers were "not so commonly heard of" anymore. [7] As there was
"a lull in the production and publication of works of demonology," as well as "curiously
little persecution in the first half of the sixteenth century," Briggs maintains that the
"time-lag before really intensive persecution began is far too great to be disregarded"
(1996b, 58). Although the Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), the virulent
diatribe written by the Dominican monks Jacob Sprenger and Jacob Kramer, was
published at Cologne in 1486 there is no evidence that the Malleus "generated any gr
eater persecutions for witchcraft and magic than had already occurred by the end of the
fifteenth century" according to Peters, and it "made no discernible impact on the
prosecution of magicians and witches for nearly half a century." [8] Midelfort expresses
a similar view and says that despite its subsequent fame the witch manual had relatively
little impact early in the century with only "the rarest mention of the Malleus in German
sermons and trial records of the period." [9] As the first significant witch hunt in the
German southwest with twenty or more executed in one year did not occur until 1562,
[10] and there are "only a handful" of witch trials for Germany in the fifteenth century
and first half of the sixteenth, [11] "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the early
sixteenth century was a period of relative tranquillity as far as witchcraft was
concerned." [12]

The dramatic escalation in the number of witch trials toward the end of the sixteenth
century and the process by which the traditional maleficium of everyday village life was
demonized is a problem that historians have approached from a variety of perspectives,
often with conflicting results. The explanations advanced include crop failures and other
traumatic calamaties, [13] the fusion of heresy with sorcery, [14] the role of torture in
shaping confessions, [15] substitution of a written and secret procedure for an oral and
public debate, [16] the difficulties of establishing a line between lick and illicit devotion,
[17] the need for an antifigure (the Devil and his protege, the witch) to vouchsafe the
existance of God, [18] the impact of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic
response. [19] Some studies have emphasized gender and power considerations
including same-sex competition, [20] changes in medical professionalism that widened
the gap between official and unofficial medicine, [21] male aggres sion heightened by
excessive religious zeal and the requirement that priests be celibate, [22] the effects of
Roman legal theories and the "demonical illusions of learned jurists." [23] Others have
suggested that efforts by increasingly centralized governments to extend their control
over the countryside disrupted the internal equilibrium of peasant villages and
substituted a governmental system for the local and summary justice formerly meted out
spontaneously with the peasants dispatching anyone they thought was using magic to
kill their cattle or otherwise disrupt their lives. [24] Still others have countered that the
instigation often came from below, [25] and the "active, dynamic force in most witchcraft
persecutions were local authorities and members of local elites," [26] with the greatest
problems arising when the state administrations were unable to hold the populace in
check. [27] The tendency in most recent studies is to avoid over-reliance on the Malleus
maleficarum, [28] and "monocausal theories" that "simply do not work," [29] and instead
explore regional and temporal variations, emphasizing the interaction of a number of
different factors and avoiding broad and inclusive generalizations.

Fewer explanations are advanced for the curious paucity of trials for witchcraft in the
early years of the sixteenth century -- "explaining why things do not happen is inherently
difficult" [30] as Briggs observes, and yet it is during this period of relative inactivity that
Durer and Baldung made the witch a significant subject in northern art. Levack suggests
that the "spread of Renaissance humanism throughout Europe" may have had an effect
and that "learned scepticism," exemplified by writers such as Erasmus, Agrippa, and
Alciati, created a climate of moderation. [31] Rummel's recent study, The Humanist-
Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation, is suggestive in this regard as
it traces a progressive hardening of attitudes and shift from the use of wit and humor
early in the century to a more violent and abusive adverserial style from about 1520, a
change that reflects heightened tensions in the religious, political, economic, and
academic spheres. Attitudes toward witchcraft may have evolved a long similar lines
with the more temperate rhetorical strategies favored early in the century overshadowed
by the use of harsh invective and the dangers of witchcraft made more palpable and
public by one-sided polemics and an increase in sensationalist broadsheets, such as
the Curious Execution of a Witch at Schilta (fig. 4) published at Zurich in 1533, that use
picture and text to report in lurid detail actual witch trials, confessions, and burnings.

In the first quarter of the sixteenth century the humanists tend to take a moderate
position, on occasion even ridiculing a belief in the efficacy of witchcraft as in the
satires, Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum (Letters of obscure men), Eccius dedolatus, and
Erasmus's Moriae Encomium (Praise of Folly). In general, a distinction is made between
good and bad magic -- in 1516 the Strasbourg lawyer Sebastian Brant was "still arguing
that white or harmless sorcery should not be punished" [32] -- and the majority continue
to hold with the Canon episcopi, the tenth-century text that said no credence should be
given to the dreams of woman "seduced by diabolical fantasies and deceits"
(daemonum illusionibus et phantasmatibus seductae). [33] Women who believe "they
ride at night-time with Diana, goddess of the pagans ... astride certain beasts, in a
company of innumerable other woman, traversing immense spaces and obeying
Diana's orders" are misguided and the witch, in this view, is a soul in thrall to the Devil
that on ly "imagines that it is accomplishing in the body things that take place only in the
mind." [34]

Witchcraft as a fantasy and mental abberation remained the dominant perspective

among elites in the latter years of the fifteenth century and first half of the sixteenth.
Johannes Nider's witchcraft treatise, Formicarium seu dialogus ad vitam christianam
exemplo formicae incitativus, first appeared in 1437 with a second edition published at
Strasbourg in 1517, and while Nider is credulous in many respects he favors the view
that Diana and the night ride are delusional. [35] Ulrich Molitor's De laniis et phito nicis
mulieribus published in 1489 and reprinted at Strasbourg in 1500 is constructed as a
dialogue arguing such questions as whether a witch and enchanter ("lania et
incentatricu") can take other forms, harm infants, cause impotence ("hominem sterilem
facere"), predict the future and whether coitus with a demon can generate sons.
Responding to this last question Lunardus cites the "alamanico ydeomate wechselbalg
appellantur" (the German idiom that calls the deformed child produced of such a union a
cha ngeling), but Ulrich, expressing Molitor's own viewpoint, takes a more skeptical
position and counters by saying "ex incubo & muliere no creat homo." After debating
whether "maleficarum mulierum" can provoke tempests and perturb the air
("tempestates et aeris turbationes provocare"), it is concluded that witches need divine
permission and if they have any effect on the weather it is because God wishes to
correct sin. [36] Classical literature plays an important part in Molitor's dialogue, and he
refers to Socrates, Apulieus, Aristotle, Plautus,

Plato, Virgil "in bucolicis egloga octave," and Circe who uses "malefica" to change men
into pigs. Even twenty-two years later, in the Lenten sermons delivered by Geiler von
Kaysersberg in Strasbourg Cathedral and published as Die Emeis in 1511, the preacher
adopts much the same view. It is "em fantasei" and a "traum" when women believe they
ride out at night to meet with other women and dance and eat, and these fantastic
dreams are caused by the devil. [37] Geiler is learned and familiar with ancient literature
but as his sermons were delivered in German and directed at a broad audience he does
not follow Molitor in identifying his classical sources aside from an occasional reference
to Seneca. [38]

Peters questions the extent to which learned rhetoricians and monastic moralists writing
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries actually depicted "popular or folk customs" and
warns against "assuming a non-literary source for the marvelous when it is described by
literary figures," [39] and this caution applies with even greater force during the
Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Folklore appears to play a part in
Geiler's Die Emeis, with one illustration showing a witch milking an axe, [40] another a
werewol, [41] but the distinction between traditional natural magic and the conception of
witchcraft derived in large part from classical sources is increasingly confounded. Like
the witch, the werewolf appears in ancient poetry as in Petronius's satire where a soldier
is transformed into a werewolf at Satyri con 62 -- in a graveyard about cockscrow with
the moon still high the soldier strips naked, piddles all around his clothes, turns into a
wolf, howls and runs off into the woods, and then ravishes a farm letting the blood of the
sheep like a butcher, [42] or in Propertius where the bawd Acanthis can "hide her shape
under the form of the night-prowling wolf." [43] As "self-confessed werewolves" were
rare and the number of cases involving this accusation were small, [44] the illustration in
Geiler's Die Emeis as well as Lucas Cranach's sensational print of an attack by a
werewolf may owe as much to ancient poetry as they do to any oral tradition. [45] The
maleficium of village life with its dead cows, spilt milk and mysterious illnesses can
seem tame in comparison with the gruesome excesses and dramatic intensity of the
poets as when the witch in Lucan vents her rage on the dead and mangles a carcass
that dangles on the gallows -- "thrusting her fingers into the eyes, scooping out gleefully
the stiffened eyeballs, and gnawing the yellow nails on the withered hand." [46]
THE WITCH AS INHERITED FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD

The revival of antiquity included Diana and her minions, Hecate and the underworld,
witches and magic potions, miraculous transformations and night flights, the demonic
and irrational as well as the idealized and heroic. "Witchcraft was frequently exploited in
both Greek and Latin literature," [47] and during the period when Durer was creating his
engravings, The Four Witches and Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, he had an
audience deeply involved with this colorful and exciting literature. Although humanist
fascination with the magic and occult has received much attention there is no detailed
study of the female witch as inherited from the ancient world [48] and the influence of
this voluminous and highly dramatic literature on Renaissance conceptions of witches
and witchcraft is probably underestimated. [49]

Even a brief survey of the female witches in Greek and Roman literature underscores
their potential as exciting, new subjects for an aspiring artist. Circe, the beautiful
enchantress who turned the companions of Odysseus into swine by means of her drugs
(book 10 of the Odyssey), and Medea, priestess of Hecate (the goddess often
associated with witchcraft), [50] are examples of the seductive witch. Lucan's
cannibalistic night-witch Erichto ("Terribilis Stygio") - "haggard and loathly with age ...
her awful countenance overcast with a hellish pallor and weighed down by uncombed
locks," [51] is a memorable example of the horrible old hag. Ovid's Metamorphoses are
filled with magical transformations and in book 6 of his Fasti Ovid tells of the striges,
bloodthirsty birds, or old women transformed into evil owls. "They fly by night looking for
children without nurses, snatch them from their cradles and defile their bodies." [52]
Festus refers to the "night-roaming Syrnia" and "the savage strix," and attests that in
antiquity, the Lamia, another ancient word for witch, was called Volatica (she who flies).
[53] In Apuleius's Metamorphoses women change their shapes by rubbing themselves
with ointment, there are lamiae noxiis (horrible witches), taeterrimaeque Furiae (hideous
Furies), [54] cantatrices anus (old enchantresses), [55] Thessalian witches who bite the
face of a corpse, [56] and have the supernatural power to bring down the sky, raise the
spirits of the dead and make men fall in love with them. [57] In Propertius, the bawd
Acanthis can make standing crops dissolve in water with her magical herbs, put spells
on the bewitched moon, "hide her shape under the form of the night-prowling wolf," and
affect love magic by gathering "the charm that drips from the pregnant mare." [58]
Theocritus, in his second Idyll describes various kinds of magic incantations as the
spurned woman prepares a magic ritual to bring her lover back -- "I'll bind him fast with
my fire-sorcery. Shine clear, Moon ... Hail, dread Hecate! Attend us to the close,
working direr magic than any Circe worked: than any of Medea, or blond-haired
Perimede." [59]

Many of the most vivid descriptions of witchcraft and sorcery are found in ancient satire,
a genre the early generation of German humanists found especially attractive. [60]
Petronius in the Satyricon says -- "ah, yes, I would beg you believe there are wise
[mulieres plussciae, sunt nocturnae] women and night-riders who can turn the whole
world upside down," [61] and his witches include the old woman (aniculam) who
concocts an elaborate spell and reveals she is a sorceress employed by Circe
(Petronius's ribald version of the beautiful Homeric witch) to restore the virility of
Eumolpus. [62] Lucilius satirizes "Sharp-toothed Lamia and Bitto ... those wretched little
gluttonous villainous stupid old hags," [63] and Varro's cannibalistic witch says, "In my
mystic caldron I shall cook pieces of flesh, with which I may satisfy everybody's hungry
stomach." [64]

In Lucian's satires the witches are skilled at working love magic and this aspect of
witchcraft is treated in great detail in his Dialogues of the Courtesans with one
courtesan saying to another,

"Don't you know that her mother... is a witch who knows Thessalian spells, and can
bring the moon down? Why, they say she even flies of a night. She's the one who's sent
the fellow out of his senses by giving him a drink of her brew, and now they're making a
fine harvest of him." [65]

In another dialogue Melitta asks Bacchis if she knows "any old woman of the kind called
Thessalians" who "can make a woman to be loved, no matter how much she is hated
before," and Bacchis refers "to a most useful witch ... who's still very fresh and firm,"
who brings lovers back by her magic spells using something belonging to the man
himself, such as "clothing or boots or a few of his hairs," sprinkling salt on the fire, using
her magic wheel and "rattling off an incantation full of horrible outlandish names" (371-
79).

Poetic evocations of the witch in ancient poetry were familiar to all humanists. In the
Praise of Folly Erasmus refers to Horace's eighth satire and "the nocturnal rites of
Canidia and Sagana" (91), and has Folly claim for herself the powers of the witch. Folly
mocks foolish mortals who "vainly seek for your Medeas and Circes and Venuses and
Auroras, and the unknown fountain in which you may restore your youth" when "mine
are those herbs (if they exist), mine that fountain, mine the spells which not only bring
back departed youth but, still better, preserve it in perpetuity" (19-20). In his adage, "In
tuum ipsius malum lunam deduces" (you will bring down the moon to your own hurt)
Erasmus says it was "widely believed in Antiquity...that witches by the use of certain
spells could bring the moon down to earth," and he quotes Horace and Juvenal as well
as Virgil,

And Horace in the Odes, "And by your books of magic, which have power / To loose the
stars and call them from the sky," and again in the Satires: "And the blushing moon, in
fear to see such sights, lies hid behind the massive tombs." Juvenal too: "Unaided she
will save the labouring moon.

Horace is perhaps most surprising as an important source for vivid witch imagery.
Horace's tone is moderate and reasonable in most of the satires, and this stance, as
well as his statement that witches are merely figments of the imagination, tends to
obscure his more horrific descriptions of the occult including the story of the pitiably boy
who is murdered by witches in Epode 5. Horace refers to "Night and Diana...mistress of
the silent hour when mystic rites are wrought," [67] to the "dire philtres of the barbarian
Medea" and her revenge with the gift of a robe steeped in poison gore, [68] Circe
magically transforming men into "shapeless and witless vassals of a harlot mistress,"
[69] the witch Sagana "who bristles with streaming hair" and Folio "the wanton
hag...who with Thessalian incantation bewitches stars and moon and plucks them down
from heaven." [70]

Horace's most striking creation, the fierce Canidia, the source for the goat-riding witch in
the satire, Eccius dedolatus, is especially memorable. With poisons, malignancies and
breath "more deadly than African serpents," [71] "gnawing her uncut nail with malignant
tooth," [72] the witch Canidia is the principal witch in Horace's fifth Epode (Canidia's
Incantation). Her "locks and dishevelled head entwined with short vipers," she uses "the
blood of a hideous toad," bones, poisons, and deadly herbs to work her magic. [73]
Featured again in Horace's eighth satire hideous, sallow-hued Canidia walks with "black
robe tucked up, her feet bare, her hair dishevelled, shrieking with the elder Sagana."
[74] Serpents and hell-hounds roam, the witches call on Hecate and Tisiphone, vex
human souls with "spells and drugs," gather bones and harmful herbs by moonlight,
throw wax images on the magic fire, and "bury in the ground a wolf's beard and the
tooth of a spotted snake." The scene is treated humorously -- Horace uses hyperbole
and the satire ends with the two witches frightened and sent flying by the loud noise
when the buttocks of the wooden statue of Priapus crack open -- but his witches made a
great impression on the humanists. Rabelais, for example, refers to Thessaly, traditional
haunt of witches, in the third book of Pantagruel and to "Canidia, une Sagane, une
phitonisse et sorciere" (chap. 16).

Images from ancient poetry are a staple in the literature on witchcraft published in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, repeated in great detail by writers no matter what their
views on the witchcraft issue and often treated as more fact than fiction, a testament to
the hold the ancients had on their imagination and the strength with which the
humanists believed that "philosophy" -- that is, serious matter -- was hidden in the
ancient poets. [75] In a work on demons and witchcraft Georg Pictorius, a doctor and a
classicist in the arts faculty at Freiburg with 'interests ranging from folk medicine to
mythology...drew largely on classical authors to prove that the devil did work true
miracles and could actually subvert nature." [76] Bernard Basin, a noted preacher and a
doctor of the University of Paris, expressed his belief that woman were more
superstitous than men and more prone to engage in magic and he invoked "the
authority of the pagan classics" in his De artibus magicis et magorum maleficiis, publi
shed in 1483 and 15O6. [77] All those who remarked a resemblance between the
deviant behavior of women in their own time and the ancient "game of Diana," [78] and
who argued about the existence and efficiacy of witches, were familiar with ancient
descriptions of witchcraft, and no writer, not even Kramer and Sprenger, authors of the
virulent Malleus maleficarum could do without them. The Bible and the Fathers are the
primary authorities in the Malleus, but the German friars also quote Horace (25), cite
misogynist passages from Cicero, Terence, Cato, Valerius Maximus, and Seneca,
including Seneca's description of "raging Medea" (4346) refer to "Satyrs" -- called "Pans
in Greek and Incubi in Latin" (24) -- and make comparisons between the pagan festivals
of the Romans, the corrupt Carnival celebrations in their own time and "the revelries of
witches." They castigate "bad Christians" who "imitate these corruptions, turning them
into lasciviousness when they run about at the time of Carnival with masks and jests
and other superstitions," adding that "witches use these revelries of the devil for their
own advantage" (116). Dominican witchhunters were dearly familiar with ancient
literature and Scobie makes the revealing observation that one supposedly authentic
description of witchcraft appears for the first time in the north in the Malleus maleficarum
and the only known source, oral or literary, is a fictional tale found in Apuleius (264-66).

This familiar process of appropriating ancient sources when engaged in a controversy

about witchcraft is evident in many of the witchcraft treatises including Johannes Weyer,
De praestigiis daemonum published in 1563, even though he adopts a very different
position than the authors of the Ma/Zeus and favors a more moderate attitude toward
witches. Weyer insists that credence should not be given to poetry such as the
"metamorphosis" of Apuleius and Lucian (193), and describes the "people of Antiquity"
who would have it that "many men are changed into beasts by the evil-doing of witches
[sagae]," as "credulous and superstitious" (337), but in spite of his reservations he cites
a wide range of ancient references to witches. Weyer says "You will find women
magicians and poisoners mentioned everywhere in Horace" (560) and his own citations
include Horace's "evil-doer" Canidia (168). He refers to Ovid's gruesome description of
the Striges who fly by night and defile the bodies of young children "snatched from thei r
cradles" (165). He quotes from Virgil in book 4 of the Aeneid and the priestess who
works charms that can "stay the water in the streams, and turn the rivers back... stir the
souls of the dead at night," and "make the earth groan underfoot," and refers to the
charms of Circe that magically transform the companions of Ulysses into pigs as
described in Virgil's eighth Eclogue (166-67). Although Weyer considers the eleven
books of Apulelus's Metamorp hoses, or Adventures of an Ass as "stories more mythical
than the myths themselves," deserving a place among poetic fictions, it does not
prevent him from relying on Apuleius and describing the enchantments of the witch
Meroe in graphic and colorful detail. [79]

When Weyer notes the scarcity of biblical evidence -- "one can find nothing definite and
relevant on the subject of Lamiae in the true histories written at the time" -- it underlines
the importance of the ancient poets in elaborating the image of the witch. Weyer
contends that "Later poetic writing on the subject of Lamiae are for the most part empty
fictions and pure fables -- or rather lies" -- but when his "evidence" includes Virgil,
Aeneid 4, Ovid, Metamorphoses 7, Horace, Epode 5, and Tibullus, book 1, Elegy 2, he
ends by perpetuating the fictions he deplores. And when Weyer explains these poetic
fictions with Horace's proverbial line, "Painters and poets have always had equal power
to dare whatever they please," [80] the net result is to underline the importance of the
ancient poets even as he questions their veracity. He may dismiss the images of the
poets as fictions and say with Horace, "I accept with laughter the dreams, magical
terrors, miracles, witches [sagae], nocturnal ghosts, and Thessalian p ortents" [81] -- but
Weyer's descriptions of witches are colored with the imagety of the poets and at times
his skepticism seems to falter. Explaining why Horace's witches in the eighth satire
"began to dig the earth with their nails, and tear a dark-colored lamb apart with their
teeth," he says Horace's "witches were wont to do sacrifice to the nether gods in pits, as
we have it in Ovid" (168). For Renaissance humanists, even skeptics like Weyer, the
line between fact and poetic fiction could be elusive.

Sermons delivered in the vernacular were composed by men like Geiler who were
familiar with ancient literature and their sermons are an obvious route by which learned
views could be assimilated into the belief systems of the general population. [82] Levack
says "the belief that witches could fly had much more distinctly popular origins than the
belief they made pacts with the Devil or participated in nocturnal assemblies," [83] but
when one of the ancient words for witch is Volatica (she who flies), [84] the flight of
witches is a common theme in ancient poetry, the writers of medieval sermons knew
(and used) this literature and much of what is known about popular culture comes
through learned sources, even this "popular" aspect of the witchcraft question bears
signs of being contaminated by ideas found in ancient literature. [85] And when the
entry for "Lamia" in the Dictionarium seu Latine linguae thesaurus published by
Robertus Stephanus in 1543, identifies them as witches who suck the blood of children,
and his only sources are Horace, Juvenal, Apuleius, and Philostrarus, it seems clear
that the poets served Renaissance writers as a primary source for their conception of
the witch (2.823v.). The full-fledged and widely disseminated stereotype of the demonic
female witch, with witch sects and "sabbats," [86] is a relatively late development and in
many respects these elaborations betray the literary character of their sources -- the
fictions of ancient poetry accepted as fact by aggressive, fearful and humorless men --
rather than any genuine concern with actual folk beliefs and the traditional maleficium of
village life.

A perceptible change occurs during the sixteenth century with the traditional authorities
on witchcraft, the Bible and the Fathers, increasingly augmented by classical sources.
[87] A comparison of Weyer's De praestigiis daemonum, written in 1563, with the
Malleus written by the Dominican friars in 1486, suggests that during the relatively quiet
period prior to the escalation of the witch trials in the second half of the sixteenth
century classical conceptions of demonology, derived in large part from the poets and
satirists, were being incorporated into the controversies about witchcraft. The diffusion
of humanist interests throughout a much broader sector of society, the increased
availability of ancient texts, and enthusiastic efforts to track down every reference to
witchcraft in the literature of the ancient world, [88] made a whole array of ideas about
magic, the occult, and witchcraft available to a larger segment of the population and
were probably instrumental in the integration of ideas derived fro m books with
traditional oral beliefs about natural magic, the learned infiltrating the folkloristic.

DURER'S WITCHES.

Inspired in large part by Conrad Celtis, [89] with the "the Poet's School" in Nuremberg
one indication of its importance, poetry was a compelling interest for the German
humanists in the years around 1500, [90] and this enthusiasm coincides with Durer's
introduction of the witch as a subject in his art. Durer's participation in this humanist
culture -- including his friendship with Celtis and Willibald Pirckheimer [91] -- the vivid
descriptions of magic and witchcraft available in the poetry of the ancient world, and the
scarcity of actual witch-hunting activity in these years, make the assumption that the
Malleus maleficarum lies behind Durer's witches highly problematic. In the decade
preceding 1497, the date on Durer's Four Witches (fig. 1), the accusations of witchcraft
in Nuremberg have more to do with "natural magic," thwarted love and the animosities
of neighbors rather than conspiracies instigated by the devil. In 1471 the municipal court
banished a woman for sorcery (theft and poisoning), another was banished for love
magic in 1474, while in 1477 a man was apprehended for "knowledge of [and
presumably complicity in] his parents' magical theft of a neighbor's milk," and in 1486
two women were tried by the Nuremberg municipal court for "taking potententially
magical pieces of clothing from people executed on the wheel." [92] The penalties were
relatively light and this moderation continued into the sixteenth century with the anti-
Dominican Nuremberg City Council refusing to respond to the witch-hunting mania
when it was "stirred up in Cologne and elsewhere." [93]

During Durer's lifetime there were few witch trials, few witch manuals of any note, and
as Davidson observes Durer's witch prints are "scarcely representative of the
iconography which could have been suggested by contemporary literature such as the
Malleus maleficarum or Molitor's De Lamiis." [94] The Malleus was available with two
editions published at Nuremberg in the 1490's, [95] but if we accept the view that Durer
could not read Latin and had to rely on the expertise of humanist associates we must
imagine a friend such as Willibald Pirckheimer devoting time and effort to
communicating the contents of the Malleus, a long-winded work written in a difficult,
relatively inaccessible Latin, [96] when Pirckheimer's consuming interest lay in the
literature of the classical world. Pirckheimer would certainly have been more interested
in the witches described by Theocritus in his Idylls and Durer illustrated Pirckheimer's
copy of Theocritus. [97] Molitor's De Lamiis was also available, and while it is smaller, i
llustrated and easier to read than the unwieldly Malleus there are only ten crude
woodcuts in Molitor's little book; they are executed in a summary fashion, males are as
important as females, [98] and the female witches are fully dressed (fig. 5) while nudity
is central to Durer's conception. Molitor's witches are similar to the "sorciere" in the
woodcut from Guy Marchant's Grant danse macabre des femmes of 1491 (fig. 6), a
woman of indeterminate age shown in a long gown, wearing a headdress and holding a
broom. [99]

Durer's witches do not simply continue a medieval tradition. Examples in art are rare
before 1500 and when the female witch appears, even in a late work such as the danse
macabre des femmes, she is fully dressed. [100] Although a German misericord carving
from around 1430 shows a young woman naked and riding backwards on a goat the
association is with lust and adultery and there is no indication that witchcraft is involved.
[101] A nude female on horseback illustrates an occult story in Hartmann Schedel's
Liber chronicarum (Chronicle of the world) published at Nuremberg in 1493, and it is
probable that Durer knew this woodcut because Michael Wolgemut, responsible in part
for the illustrations, was Durer's master, the neighbor to whom he was apprenticed at
age fifteen. [102] However, the ancient poets are well represented in Schedel's
Chronicle and an innovative spirit is already in evidence. Schedel refers to Horace
("poeta laudatissimus"), Lucian, Varro ("erudite and ingenious"), Apuleius, Lucan, and
Juvena l ("poeta satyricus"), and the woodcuts incorporate novel artistic ideas -- for
example, "numerous city panoramas ... something new in the illustrations of world
chronicles." [103] Durer's own innovations in the Four Witches and in Witch Riding
Backwards on a Goat exhibit a similar desire to exploit ancient literature and break new
ground. He later said that in this period of his life he loved "extraordinary and unusual
designs," [104] and as vivid descriptions of witches in ancient literature far outweigh
those available in the witch manuals it suggests that the introduction of the witch as a
subject in Durer's art owes more to humanist enthusiasm for classical literature -- in
particular, the poets and satirists -- and here, by comparison, the number of imprints is
significantly larger.

In Durer's first print with the witch as subject, his 1497 engraving of the Four Witches
(fig. 1), a grotesque devil framed in the doorway to the left peers at four nude women.
One woman is seen from back, the others face the viewer, and they stand with a skull
and bone at their feet and an ornament resembling a pomegranate -- symbol of fertility
in ancient literature [105] -- hanging above their heads. For Durer's audience the print
was more evocative of the world of temptation and dreams rather than the courtroom,
more plausible as a poetic fantasy representing the dark but fascinating underside of
the ancient world, perhaps, more specifically, the image of Diana Triformis (Triplex
Diana, Dea Triformis), or the triple Hecate (Trivia Hecate). [106] As Hecate's name on
earth Diana had a close association with the underworld where she was identified with
the goddess of hell, fertility; and death, patroness of evil magic and transformations, and
the mother of lamias. [107] A triform conception is fundamental w ith Hecate
represented as having three faces and three bodies to symbolize the three forms of
Diana. Virgil refers to the "tria virginis Dianae," [108] Propertius to Diana, the "goddess
Trivia," [109] Varro to "Trivia Diana," [110] and Ovid to "triplici... Dianae" as well as
Hecate's three faces. [111] For Horace Diana is "goddess of the triple form" (diva
triformis), [112] and Weyer quotes a passage from Virgil in which the priestess invokes
"Erebus and Chaos and triple Hecate -- the three countenances of the virgin Diana."
[113] In the context of this ancient poetry the beautiful female seen from the back in
Durer's print is plausible as a figure of Diana while her "three faces," visible to the
viewer, expose her true nature, malevolent and dangerous. [114]

An interpretation such as this is consistent with the interest in Diana, Hecate, and in
ancient triads evident among the German humanists, most especially Conrad Celtis, in
the years around 1500. Celtis wrote a Ludus Dianae, replete with Bacchus, satyrs,
fauns, and Silenus that he and members of the Danubian Sodality performed before the
court of Maximilian in 1501. [115] As published under the auspices of the Sodalitatis
Celticae in 1502 Celtis's Ludus Dianae indicates his familiarity with Horace's references
to Diana, [116] and in addition, his Oeconomia XII is dedicated, "Ad Dianam" [117]
Equally important, Celtis had a special interest in triads and in ancient triform images
displaying his knowledge of the pagan trinities in "a tailpiece of Tritonius's Melopoiae, a
book of songs composed for the scanning of Horace's meters, but supplied by Celtis
with didactic illustrations, the printing of which he supervised." [118] Humanist
participation was clearly a factor in artistic productions. Celtis composed th e Latin
captions and helped create the decorations in Scheyer's house with its classical scheme
of Muses and classical philosophers, [119] and when Celtis was cooperating with Hans
Burgkmair on another tripartite image in honor of Maximilian he gave instructions to the
artist in a letter written in 1495. Celtis said the figures should be rendered by the painter
"in philosophic and poetic attitudes" corresponding to the inscriptions Celtis proposed
"so that when I come to you I can pass judgment on what should be added or left out."
[120] Durer's 1500 Self-Portrait and Celtis's epigram about the painting suggest a close
relationship between the two men at this time, and if the great self-portrait is "the
appropriate emblem for that great year" of 1500, as Koerner argues, a response to
Conrad Celtis's fashioning of the year into a testament of the German artist's ability to
appropriate the past, [121] Durer's Four Witches of 1497 may constitute an example of
another such appropriation. It is the first of Durer' s prints to bear a date as well as a
signature and the first in which his exploitation of the underside of the classical world
can be reconstructed with so little difficulty.

Durer's second print with the witch as subject, the Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat
(fig. 2) from around 1500, is also appropriate as a response to humanist interests, her
storm-raising powers (indicated in the upper left corner) owing as much to witchcraft
descriptions in classical literature as to contemporary village beliefs. [122] Although a
Lucianic spirit is rarely associated with Durer's art this second print was created at a
time when the German humanists saw themselves as "Poets" pitted against the
"Schoolmen," with satire one of their principal weapons and the satires of Lucian a
recent enthusiasm. [123] Rudolf Agricola made Latin versions of Gallus and De
calumnis as did Melanchthon and Petrus Moselanus, and Johannes Reuchlin wrote a
German version of Dialogi mortuorum xii. [124] Durer's friend, Willibald Pirck-heimer,
was particularly attracted to the satires of Lucian. He possessed the first Greek edition
of Lucian's Opera (Florence, 1496), a copy "decorated with a Durer miniature," [125]
and P irckheimer translated six of Lucian's satires from the Greek as De ratione
conscribedae historiae, Piscator seu reviviscentes, Fugitivi, Rhetorum praeceptor, Navis
seu vota, and De luctu. [126]

Their enthusiasm for ancient satire inspired the German humanists to create new
satires in which they freely appropriated the characters and strategies of the venerable
genre. Ulrich von Hutten, "one of the most satirical members of one of Germany's most
satirical generations," [127] is indebted to Lucian's Charon in his satire Phalarismus and
his Marcus heroicum is a mock-heroic satire with Venice personified as a
megalomaniacal toad, an image he repeats in his satirical epigrams that include France
portrayed as a cock (gallus). [128] The anonymous satire, the Eccius dedolatus, is
described by Best as "a small satirical comedy, an Aristophanic play in prose," a satire
formed in part "from the first half of Plutus." [129] It resembles the satires of Lucian in
some of its dialogue as well as its dialogue form, includes lines from Seneca and
Horace, [130] ancient proverbs such as Varro's, "like an ass to the flute, [131] a
repulsive scene that recalls Apuleius' Metamorphoses, [132] and the witch Canidia, one
of its principal characters, is obviously derived from Canidia, the infamous witch in
Horace's satires. [133] Pirckheimer was considered responsible for the satire and
threatened with excommunication in the bull Exsurge Domine, [134] and while the
author of the Eccius dedolatus remains an open question a manuscript written in
Pirckheimer's hand is, in fact, a continuation of the satire. [135]

As she clutches the horn of the goat the old woman in Durer's Witch Riding Backwards
on a Goat evokes the inverted world of Lucian with Durer adding a witty and appropriate
touch by reversing his own initials. Mesenzeva has related the old woman to Roman
terra cottas and cameos in which Aprodite Pandemos is shown riding on a goat and
accompanied by a winged Eros. [136] These are classical images with positive
connotations and at odds with the ugliness and age of the woman in Durer's engraving,
but if given a different generic orientation and related to ancient satire -- the genre in
which it was traditional to parody the goddesses, show the bad rather than the good and
a world upside down and out of joint -- Durer's witch is plausible as an upside down
version of the beautiful Aphrodite. It would be consistent with the other reversals in the
print and relate it to the riding backwards motif already established in northern art as a
satirical subject. [137]

Rather than the dour seriousness of the witch manuals Durer's print exhibits the kind of
ironic Lucianic humor that found favor with the German humanists and delighted the
artist himself apparently as it is in this period that Durer was trying his hand at writing
satirical and humorous poems. [138] Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat is related to
satires such as the Eccius Dedolatus in which the witch Canidia is asked if she will "ride
a fork, or a bundle of hay," and answers that she is "going to mount a hairy goat." [139]
It is closer in spirit to the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum with its mockery of lusty
clergymen who think they can attain the object of their desire using witchcraft--waxen
images woven with hair from the head of the beloved, incantations, magic names and
other mumbojumbo. [140] Durer's innovative print had obvious attractions for humanists
who enjoyed satires, ancient and contemporary, and the discrepancy between the witch
as a folkloristic figure and the classical putti in the foreground o f Witch Riding
Backwards on a Goat vanishes when the witch, like the putti, is understood as an
inheritance from the ancient world.

The witches depicted in Durer's art are suitable for an audience with humanist interests.
Lucilius, who established many of the themes in Latin satire, attacks the superstituous
who are frightened by "Terriculas Lamias" when "these things are a painters' gallery,
nothing real, all make-believe." [141] The witch was a classical subject fit for "the
painters' gallery," and a Renaissance artist was fully justified in excercising the freedom
of poets and painters and rendering his own poetic version of a subject found in ancient
literature. In his analysis of the themes in Roman satire Rudd says it is well known that
in "ancient poetry originality was achieved by making innovations within a traditional
genre," [142] and the same process of innovation within a traditional framework is
evident in the Renaissance. Creativity was valued and slavish adherence to the
ancients, as Erasmus pointed out, was not true to their spirit or their precepts. [143]
When Sebastian Brant's readers understood the Ship of Fools as an original satire
based on ancient models, [144] and the German humanists recognized the classical
references in Eccius dedolatus, it is reasonable to assume that Durer's audience could
recognize and appreciate the classical associations in his Four Witches and his Witch
Riding Backwards on a Goat.

BALDUNG'S WITCHES

Although it is Durer who leads the way with this new subject the witch receives a more
extensive and elaborate treatment in the work of Hans Baldung Grien. Two young and
beautiful witches are the focus of one of his most striking paintings, the Weather
Witches of 1523 (fig. 7), witches appear in many of his drawings and in two of his most
remarkable prints, the Witches' Sabbath (fig. 8) of 1510, and the Bewitched Groom (fig.
3) probably created shortly before his death in 1545.

Like Durer, Baldung's interest in the witch as a subject is usually assumed to reflect folk
sources and customs, the 1484 encyclical of Pope Innocent VIII, Summis Desiderantes,
the Malleus maleficarum, [145] and actual incidents involving witches -- trials for
witchcraft and the testimony they produced. These assumptions are at odds with the
low level of witch-hunting activity during Baldung's lifetime and the fact that the
bibliography of Strasbourg imprints prior to 1547 lists only four entries under the
heading "Witchcraft" with not a single publication of the Malleus maleficarum. [146] In
spite of the fact that Baldung was living and working in Strasbourg at a time when the
city was renowned as a center for humanist activities -- Erasmus visited the city in 1514
[147] and his work was frequently published there -- most studies of Baldung's witches
focus on the witch manuals and folk culture rather than the significance of this humanist
milieu. There is wit and humor in Baldung's drawings of witches, qual ities not
characteristic of the witchcraft manuals and folklore stories although these have
remained the focus of scholarly attention. Koerner remarks the "comic tone" of
Baldung's witches and states that "few interpretative tasks are as necessary and as
neglected as determining the tone of an image," [148] but continues to favor the
investigation of "popular culture" rather than "classical myths, humanists allegories, and
'high' literature." [149] Baldung's art has elicited phrases such as "satirists like Baldung,"
[150] but his art is not related to the literature and traditions of ancient satire or the
popularity of this genre in the north. The witches in Baldung's Witches' Sabbath (fig. 8)
of 1510, for example, are assumed to have their source in folk stories rather than
ancient literature even though they look much like the women in Baldung's Three Fates
(fig. 9) where one woman holds a spindle while the other cuts the thread and the
classical connection is inescapable.

Just as Durer's exploitation of the witch as a new subject is congruent with humanist
interests in Nuremberg in the years around 1500, Baldung's innovations are consistent
with the humanist climate in which he lived, worked, and found patrons. Even a brief
survey of his art, early training, and the audience available to him make this humanist
orientation apparent. Baldung was born around 1485 [151] and raised in academic and
intellectural circles with his family occupying an important place in Strasbourg society.
His father was a university-trained jurist in the service of the Bishop of Strasbourg, his
brother succeeded Sebastian Brant as city advocate in the same city, later becoming a
judge in the Imperial Chamber Court, his uncle was a doctor of medicine and honorary
personal physician to the emperor Maximilian I, his cousin taught law at Freiburg and by
1527 was chancellor of the Tyrol, and his brother-in-law was a mathematician and
"long-time teacher in the new classical gymnasium of Strasbourg." [152]

As a young man Baldung worked with Durer at Nuremberg from around 1503 to 1507,
[153] during a period when the "Poets" and humanist sodalities were active in the city,
and Durer had just broken new ground with his witch prints. These were among the first
of Durer's works to which the younger artist was exposed, a time when he might be
especially susceptible to the older artist's influence, and Durer remained a central point
of reference for Baldung, [154] an interest that was reciprocated as Durer gave away
prints by "Hans Grien" during his visit to the Low Countries in 1520-1521 and when
Durer died in 1528 it was thought appropriate to send Baldung a lock of his hair. [155]

After leaving Durer's workshop and returning to Srrasbourg Baldung prospered,

purchasing annunities and speculating in real estate, and he remained an establishment
figure throughout his lifetime. By 1527 at the latest, and for the next twenty years, he
and his wife had a home in the Brandgasse with neighbors who were "the cream of
Strasbourg society,"nobility, patricians, and wealthy merchants. [156] Working for "all
sectors of of the urban and rural ruling classes" in this period of social upheaval,
Baldung stood "on the side of property, respectability and order," [157] and his
prominent role in the guild, Zur Steltz, and election as their representative to the privy
council in 1545, [158] as well as various economic documents, attest to his wealth,
reputation, and prominence.

Chrisman has documented "the soaring humanist interest" in Strasbourg in the period
1508-1530 with dozens of humanist publications and a market for them that was not
limited to scholars when a "furrier could own a Latin Virgil." [159] The Strasbourg
humanists in these years included Jacob Wimpfeling, Sebastian Brant, Johann Geiler
von Kaysersberg, preacher for the cathedral, Thomas Wolf, who received his degree in
Italy, Thomas Vogler, Beatus Rhenanus, and Hieronymus Gebweiler, who became
director of the cathedral school. Describing their activities Chrisman writes,

The group was scattered throughout the city in different posts, with diverse functions,
but centered around Wimpfeling and Brant. A loosely organized sodalitas literaria was
founded, modeled on that of Conrad Celtis, and it gave the humanists an opportunity to
pursue their common interests. The group would gather at one place or another to read
classical works, present their own poetry, or discuss new editions of classical authors to
be brought out by one of the Strasbourg presses. [160]

The proselytizing efforts of the sodalitas literaria included bringing in scholars in 1509 to
instruct members of the monastic orders. One humanist lectured on Latin literature,
another gave instruction in Greek. [161] It was a culture in which one could learn by
listening as well as reading.

This first generation of humanists were "primarily interested in poetry and literature"
[162] and their output was prodigious, an indication of the vigor of the movement as well
as "their efforts to reach beyond their own group to a larger audience." [163] In the
earliest decades of the sixteenth century Latin literature was dominant in Strasbourg
with vernacular books constituting only one-fifth of the output, [164] there was a large
group familiar with the poetry of the ancient world, [165] and some knowledge of Latin
remained important throughout the period when Baldung was working. "By 1538 the
aristocracy and upper middle classes educated at the newly established humanist
schools became deeply involved in the Latin culture," and one of their educational goals
was to provide "two schools for young boys wherein two languages, Greek and Latin,
are taught." [166]

Erasmus's Moriae encomium (Praise of folly) was published at Strasbourg in 1511,

1512, 1514, 1517, 1519, 1521, 1522, and 1523 [167] -- hardly a year passed in which it
did not appear -- and the ancient poets were a staple with the satirists represented by
an edition of Juvenal "per Sebastianum Brant" in 1508, another edition of Juvenal Inter
Latinos satyrographos consummatissimi Satyrae in 1513, 1518, and 1527, Persius's
Satyrarum opus in 1517, and Martial's Epigrammata in 1515, [168] The complete works
of Horace were published at Strasbourg in 1498, the satires and the Ars poetica in
1514, Horace's Sermonum seu Satyrarum Libri Duo in 1514, the Epodes and Ars
poetica in 1515, 1516 and 1520, and the odes in 1516, 1517, and 1520. [169] Lucian's
satires were much in demand with Latin editions in 1515, 1517, 1518, 1519, and 1530,
[170] a German version in 1512, [171] and Lucian's Podagra Laus (In praise of gout), as
translated by Pirckheimer, published in 1529. [172] Lucan's Pharasaliae seu billi civilis
with it s horrible night-witch Erichto was published in 1509. [173] Apuleius was also
represented with a German translation, Ein hubsche history von lucius apuleius,
appearing in 1499, 1506, and 15O9 [174] -- a small volume illustrated with crude
woodcuts in which Meroe, the evil witch, is shown fully clothed and using a magic potion
to turn her victim into an ass (fig. 10). [175]

These are local publications that do not take into account the activities of publishers in
Nuremberg, Basel, Venice, or Paris, the enthusiasm for the poets and satirists
throughout Europe, the international nature of the book trade and Srrasbourg's position
on the Rhine, one of the great trading routes, or its proximity to Selestat one of the most
important humanist centers in Europe. The popularity of ancient poetry suggests that
although Wimpfeling proposed to "confine the study of Virgil, Lucian, and Horace to the
elementary schools" because they were too sensual and would corrupt the thoughts of
adolescents, [176] this restriction did not apply to sophisticated members of a sodalitas
literaria. For men who felt themselves capable of ferreting out the "Wdden philosophy"
in the ancient poets, and not above enjoying adult entertainment, there was clearly a
high level of interest in these authors and ample opportunity to gratify it.

Throughout his lifetime Baldung was an active participant in this humanist culture. [177]
His portraits of the Strasbourg humanists include a 1522 portrait of Johannes Indagine,
author of a popular treatise on physiognomy, [178] the 1534 portrait of Johannes
Rudaiphinger, chaplain at the Cathedral of Strasbourg, a well-known musican,
composer and member of the Sodalitas Literaria Argentinensis, [179] and in 1543, his
portrait of Caspar Hedio, an important theologian and moderate reformer who improved
and reorganized the Strasbourg schools. [180] Baldung also designed a large number
of woodcurs for the Strasbourg printers. For a volume by Laurentius Valla published at
Strasbourg in 1521 Baldung illustrated "Hercules Gallicus" as described by Lucian.
[181] For the title page of Pliny's De viris illustri bus, published in 1521, he created a
border of playful putti, several wearing the traditional eared cap and and carrying the
bauble of the fool (fig. 11). His frontispiece for Conrad Celtis's Libri odarum quatu or
pictures the humanist in his study surrounded by pagan gods -- Mercury, Pallas
Minerva, Hercules, and Bacchus -- with volumes by Virgil, Horace, Persius, and Ovid on
the shelf behind him. [182]

Baldung's familiarity with ancient art and literature, and in particular the less heroic side
of the classical world, is evident throughout his work and aside from biblical subjects the
ancient world served as his primary source. His Centaur and Putti (fig. 12), a large
drawing on tinted paper, is an example of the artist in his element depicting an ancient
and poetic subject that gave scope to his imagination and allowed him to employ his
calligraphic line with great economy and assurance. His 1533 drawing of Hercules and
Omphale, [183] a subject popular with the ancient poets is a mock-heroic satire in which
Hercules plays the part of a fool taken in by the wiles of a woman. [184] The sloe-eyed
Omphale holds the hero's club and wears his lion's skin while the befuddled hero does
"woman's work" pulling the thread of the distaff. Baldung decorated a page of the prayer
book of Maximilian with a drunken Bacchus, [185] there are vomiting, gluttonous,
combative putti in his chiaroscuro drawing Drunken Bacchus wi th Putti of 1517, [186]
and in the Drunken Bacchus (fig. 13) Eros holds a burning brand and urinates on the
head of the drunken god. Although this coarse detail may not amuse a modern viewer
the emphasis on defecation and emasculation in a humanist satire such as Eccius
dedolatus, and the coarse ribaldry of some of Durer's letters to Pirckheimer, [187]
suggests that the underside of classical art was relished as much for its amusement
value as for any serious, moralizing message.

The personae of the ancient world appear throughout Baldung's work as in his
paintings, Pyramus and Thisbe from around 1530, and Mucius Scaevola and Hercules
and Antaeus, of 1531. [188] Phyllis and Aristotle, the satire of the old man who falls prey
to the charms of a young lady, appears in two versions, [189] SATURN is written above
the head of an old man with disheveled hair in Baldung's 1516 drawing in the Albertina,
[190] and Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos appear in his print of The Fates (fig. 9) from
1513. The Fates are featured in Lucian's satire, Zeus Catechized, in which Lucian uses
the dialogue to discuss the issue of free will and the role of Fate and Destiny. Debating
whether the poets "talk nonsense," or tell the truth when they say that "nothing can
come to pass outside the control of the Fates, nor beyond the thread they spin" (2:62-
63), Lucian's satire raises questions about the veracity of the ancient poets, a matter of
some moment to those arguing whether the poets were to be believed when they told
their tales about witches.

The female witch makes an early appearance in Baldung's art with his woodcut, the
Witches' Sabbath (fig. 8) of 1510, the impressive chiaroscuro woodcut created during
his first working period in Strasbourg. It was a groundbreaking work for the artist, the
first time his monogram appeared on a print and apparently his first published work as
an independent master after leaving Durer's shop. His subject, following Durer, was
suitably ancient and exotic, [191] his choice of a night scene was original, and his
depiction of a witches' meeting or "sabbath" equally innovative unless Baldung knew
Altdorfer's drawing, Hexensabbath of 1506. [192] Lucan's night-witch Erichto may have
inspired the night setting as his Belli civili was published at Strasbourg just the year
before, [193] and a new medium, the chiaroscuro woodcut, made it technically feasible.
Invented just two years earlier and first seen in the color prints of Lucas Cranach the
Elder and Hans Burgkmair, [194] the use of a second woodblock to add color t o the
traditional black and white print made it possible to create a dramatic night scene that
heightened the emotional charge of the print. Ambitious in composition and execution
the Witches' Sabbath is an impressive, large woodcut, a virtuoso display appropriate for
presenting the credentials of a newcomer and establishing his reputation. Baldung's
choice of subject matter was also astute, his wild and lascivious nude females a
guarantee that the woodcut would not go unnoticed by viewers more accustomed to the
female nude presented as Eve or a classical figure such as Venus. Considerations such
as these -- an artist establishing himself with a bravado presentation of an exciting and
poetic subject with authorship clearly indicated -- have little to do with the inquisitors
who authored the Malleus or events taking place in the courtroom, but they are matters
of real concern to a young and ambitious artist.

As Gert von der Osten has pointed out Baldung treats his witches humorously, an
attitude that reflects the dominant viewpoint of the humanists in Strasbourg at this time
who viewed witchcraft as "lustig," a matter that was more amusing than serious (1983,
162). The Witches' Sabbath appeared during a period when there were few witch trials
or burnings and witchcraft had yet to become a life-and-death issue. If Baldung's
images intersect with the witchcraft issue at all it may be that his poetic fantasies had an
influence on clerics and others whose involvement with the witchcraft issue was
potentially more dangerous, men who were in positions of power and able to influence a
larger segment of the population. [195] The first illustration of naked witches in a serious
publication dealing with the witchcraft question appears in Die Emeis (fig. 14), the
edition of the Lenten sermons of Geiler von Kaysersberg published at Strasbourg in
1511. This volume was published one year after Baldung's innovative woodcut of the
Witches' Sabbath but there is no evidence that Baldung was the artist responsible for
this illustration. [196] Baldung's monogram does not appear in Die Emeis although he
signed the woodcuts he created for Geiler's Grantapfel (Pomegranate) published by
Jean Knobloch in 1511, and compared with the fantastic and high-flying females in his
1510 print the nude witches in Die Emeis are relatively mundane. The anonymous artist
has also added a voyeuristic male perched in a nearby tree, [197] and while the nudity
of the witches may be derived from Baldung's 1510 woodcut the addition of a male
onlooker suggests the influence of Erasmus's Praise of Folly. Geiler's Die Emeis and
Erasmus's satire were both published at Strasbourg in 1511 and while Erasmus says
nothing about nudity he does refer to the over-sexed male figure in Horace's eighth
satire -- "shoddy Priapus who to his own great hurt witnessed the nocturnal rites of
Canidia and Sagana." [198]

This does not preclude the possibility that in the course of pursuing goals that were
primarily artistic, poetic, and perhaps personal (the freedom of poets and painters
included the sexual, especially when construed as a dream, and was clearly within the
domain of a humanist artist) Baldung may have furnished reformist preachers such as
Geiler with new and provocative ideas for the visual presentation of "ein fantasei" and a
"traum." The explicit sexuality of Baldung's witches, as in his 1515 pen and ink drawing,
Witch and Dragon in Karlsruhe, [199] was suited to the interests of a male audience,
and the ironic line at the bottom of his 1514 pen and ink drawing with its nude witches,
DER COR CAPEN EIN GUT JAR (to the cleric a good year) (fig. 15), suggests that
clerics were not excluded. [200] Generically, these drawings are a far cry from witch
trials and a serious, legalistic concern with heresy. They have more in common with the
mocking description of lusty witches in the Reformation satire Epistolae Obsc urorum
Virorum -- "when wanton wenches see a proper man" they immediately desire him, but
if he is "virtuous, and a man of learning ... who pays no heed to their follies and wiles"
then, according to the text "they resort to magic arts, and at night, mounted on besoms,
they ride thereon to the comely man of their heart, and visit him in his sleep -- but to him
all is naught but a dream" (82).

Baldung's painting of the Weather Witches (fig. 7) of 1523, with its two beautiful, young
witches, seductively posed and displaying their naked bodies against a dramatic and
stormy sky, recall poetic descriptions of the beautiful witch in ancient literature and just
as Baldung's old witches are reminiscent of such venerable models as Horace's
Canidia, Lucan's Erichto, and Petronius's old hag, his young and beautiful witches
evoke Circe and her kindred. In Petronius's Satyricon 126, the beautiful witch Circe is
described as a woman "more perfect than any artist's dream," and after saying "there
are no words that can include all her beauty," her enthralled admirer goes on at length
about her wavy hair flowing over her shoulders, small forehead, nose with a little curve,
eyes "brighter than stars when there is no moon," her mouth "the kind that Praxiteles
dreamed Diana had," exquisite chin, neck, hands and so forth (328-31). Baldung follows
Durer's example and takes his inspiration, and perhaps, on occasion, sp ecific details
from poetic evocations of the witch in ancient literature. In the Weather Witches the
witch on the right holds up a jar with a strange creature inside it and a similar image
appears in a magical context in Petronius's Satyricon 48 where Trimalchio says he saw
a Sibyl inside a jar -- "Yes, and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl at Cumae
hanging in a flask" (100-01). [201] As they contort their naked bodies, concoct their
magic potions, conjure up their storms and fly through the air Baldung's witches capture
the eroticism, liveliness, and ribald humor that characterizes much of this ancient
literature.

Long before the sixteenth century the poets of Greece and Rome credited witches with
power over the weather and Baldung had ample precedent for emphasizing this aspect
of the occult in his Weather Witches. The power of the witch Medea makes "the grain,
blasted by enchantment," change to hay." [202] Martial, in the Epigrams, refers to the
cunning witch who "with Thessalian wheel" can "draw earthward the moon," [203]
Apuleius's witch can "bring down the sky, suspend the earth, harden fountains, melt
mountains," [204] Horace's Folio, "the wanton hag ... bewitches stars and moon and
plucks them down from heaven," [205] and in the seventeenth Epode Canidia with her
"book of incantations has the power to unfix the stars and call them down from heaven."
[206] Understood as a painted poem created for the "moderns" -- that is, an audience of
Poets rather than old-fashioned Schoolmen -- Baldung's Weather Witches is consistent
with the interests of his humanist contemporaries. In a perceptive study of Baldung's art
Hult s emphasizes his concern with formal matters and relates the Weather Witches to
an Italian work, Parmigianino's Cupid Carving a Bow of 1535, on stylistic grounds (1982,
128), but they may be related in other ways as well. The humorous tone of the Italian
painting with its quarreling putti has all the hallmarks of poetry painted according to
ancient criteria and its relation to Baldung's Weather Witches may be generic as well as
stylistic.

Baldung's most striking innovation, the strange imagery of his woodcut The Bewitched
Groom (fig. 3) is one of the more enduring enigmas in northern art and one of the last
prints the artist made before his death in 1545. An entirely original creation for which
there is no precedent in either northern or Italian art, The Bewitched Groom bears only
a tenuous relation to Durer's prints. The incongruous association of groom, horse, and
old woman has no place in the Malleus maleficarum, the pope's encyclical, or folk
sources, and it does not lend itself to any obvious narrative interpretation. The
arrangement with both groom and horse radically foreshortened is equally unusual, the
visual information disquieting and in spite of the simple interior setting of the stable,
somehow unreal. The groom lies on the floor apparently unconscious, a wooden
pitchfork beneath him and a curry comb next to his hand, the comb replacing the hat
lying next to the foreshortened figure in Baldung's drawing of 1544 (fig. 16), a sketch
often considered a study for the Bewitched Groom. [207] The horse, his tail in motion,
mane untended and in disarray, is framed in a doorway and looks back, wide-eyed at
the viewer, as alert and active as the groom is immobile. On the right an old woman,
one breast bared and scraggly hair visible beneath her headdress, leans in at the
window. She holds aloft a flaming brand and looks down with apparent satisfaction at
the prostrate groom, the corner of her mouth turned up in a macabre and toothy grin.

The Bewitched Groom is so exceptional it has led one scholar to conclude that "the
meaning of this powerful image may never be adequately deciphered." [208] Hults has
argued that "the form and iconography acquire new meaning when understood as
Mannerist." [209] More recently, noting similarities with a woodcut in Olaus Magus's
Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus published at Rome in 1555, she has suggested
that Baldung was illustrating the "general idea of demons invoked by witches to harm
people" [210] and couching ideas about melancholy "in the language of northern
folklore" (278). Von der Osten suggests it may be an allegory of untamed lust and
emphasizes its dreamlike quality (1973, 245). Koerner believes the woodcut represents
"Baldung himself, placed within an assemblage of demonic motifs loosely culled from
popular folklore, as well as other images by Durer and by Baldung himself." [211]
Although suggesting classical sources for Durer's Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat,
Mesenzeva proposes that Bald ung's Bewitched Groom illustrates a German legend,
[212] and Hoak, adopts a similar view and sees Baldung's images as a "play upon the
familiar folkloric figure of a shape-shifting sorceress who first appeared to men in the
guise of a horse" (1985, 490-5 10). For Radbruch the subject is allegorical and the
scene is an adaptation of a woodcut from a German edition of Petrarch's De remediis
utriusque fortunae in which a figure identified as Anger enrages a horse and the horse
throws its rider (39-41). None of these interpretations has produced a consensus,
perhaps because no single interpretation accounts for all of the elements -- groom,
horse, and old woman -- and relates them in a coherent way.

Restricting Baldung's options to folk tales, witchcraft treatises, and literature written in
the vernacular underestimates the importance of the ancient poets in establishing
stereotypes of the witch, the interests of the Strasbourg humanists, the availability of
Latin literature, and the degree to which it dominated the publication lists in Strasbourg
as elsewhere. The investigation of popular folklore continues to be the preferred
research strategy although its potential is limited by the fact that classical and biblical
subjects dominate in Baldung's art and conceptions of witchcraft in this period exhibit
the influence of ancient literature rather than any close observation of folk customs and
the malficium of village life. The mental condition of melancholia was certainly of interest
to artists with Durer's great print of the allegorical figure of Melancholia the most
important example, but witches have no part in Durer's conception and his
gregariousness and the humorous letters he wrote during the tim e he was creating his
witch prints "cast doubt," as Hutchison says, on the frequent portrayal of Durer "as a
habitual melancholic himself" (121). On occasion, melancholia is linked with witchcraft,
most notably in Lucas Cranach's paintings where the allegorical figure of Melancholy is
accompanied by demonic dream riders in the sky, but these bear no resemblance to
Baldung's Bewitched Groom. [213] A mental state is involved -- as Hults notes, it seems
to be "the mind of the groom that is in danger" (1984, 273) -- but the visual information
is ambiguous. There is no assurance that the groom is a melancholic or that the woman
is a witch. The fact that she is old, ugly, and malevolent does not preclude other
identifications. Baldung's allegorical use of old women as in the Three Fates suggests
other possibilities. The pitchfork that lies beneath the groom relates to his duties -- a
large amount of hay is visible beyond the horse -- and nothing suggests it has served as
transportation for the old woman.

On the other hand, when the Bewitched Groom is considered within the context of
Baldung's own time, place, the interests of his potential audience and his prior use of
the three protagonists -- horse, groom, and old woman -- the literature of the ancient
world provides a viable source for his highly original conception. Two fragments from an
enigmatic ancient satire, Varro's Eumenides, describe the horse, groom, and old woman
just as they appear in Baldung's extraordinary print and they even account for the
setting and the position of the horse facing the interior of the stable.

Old women are given a variety of roles in Baldung's art and the woman in the Bewitched
Groom continues Baldung's long-standing interest in depicting female figures. Old
women have an allegorical role in paintings such as his Death and the Maiden from
around 1510, and Death and the Ages of Woman, in the Prado from around 1542, [214]
and an old woman cuts the thread of life in his woodcut of the Three Fates (fig. 9). The
withered witch past her prime appears with younger and more attractive witches in his
1510 woodcut, the Witches' Sabbath (fig. 8), and in drawings such as his Witches'
Sabbath of 1514 in the Louvre or, from the same year, the Witches' Sabbath in the
Albertina. [215] Usually the old witch is shown naked, head bare and long hair
streaming behind her, but in the Bewitched Groom there are significant differences --
the old woman's hair is covered, she is fully dressed although one breast is bared, and
she holds a flaming brand.

The second major component in the Bewitched Groom, the wild-eyed horse, has an
equally venerable place in Baldung's art, an interest that culminates in his depiction of
wild horses in the three prints, "unprecedented both in form and iconography," [216]
created late in his career (for example, fig. 17). Comparing the passions to a "furious
horse" [217] is frequent in ancient literature with a visitor to a whorehouse called a
"horseman" and references to "shameless mounting and riding," [218] and it is a
commonplace in humanist writings. Erasmus refers to the Greek adage, "To go a-
horsing," and says it is "a proverbial term of abuse applied to women with a strong
sexual craving for men and exceptionally aroused by lust," and he cites Aristotole in
book 6 of his On Animals -- "So mares go a-horsing in frenzy." This is the only animal,
according to Erasmus, whose "name is used as a term of abuse applicable to human
beings whose sexual appetites are under no control" (34:220), and it is this violent and
sexual b ehavior of the horse that commands Baldung's attention. In his drawing for the
Book of Hours of the Emperor Maximilian (1515) the horses bite and nip each other
while a putto with a burning brand clutches the mane of one of the rearing animals.
[219] A centaur -- half-horse, half-man -- prepares to attack, arms raised high and
wielding a big branch while a putto clings precariously to his back in one of Baldung's
drawings (fig. 12). [220] Four horses fight in a tangled pile in a 1531 drawing now in
Karlsruhe, [221] and the three famous prints of wild horses from 1534 are a dynamic
and explicit expression of the sexuality and violence that the ancients associated with
the horse.

The horse as a metaphor for human passions is found throughout ancient literature and
collecting references to a single subject was a characteristic humanist activity. Lazarus
Spengler, writing to Durer around 1510, says that "Reason's rules are best deduced
from classical examples and should be collected and published for the common good,"
[222] and the work of collecting a wide range of references to the "furor" of the horse
was already accomplished when Baldung was at the beginning of his career. On a
single page in Sebastian Brant's edition of Virgil published by Gruninger at Strasbourg
in 1502, the line -- "Furor est insignis equarum" -- from book 3 of the Georgics (xciii) is
surrounded with an array of references to the horse. Aristotle and Pliny, Columella, and
Varro are among those cited, and the central conception "ab equorum furore & insania"
makes an explicit connection between horses, madness, and insanity with a woodcut on
the following page showing one horse biting another.

The combination of horse and groom also has a precedent in Baldung's art with his
print, Groom Bridling a Horse (fig. 18) from around 1510-1511. A study in ideal
proportions with the horse seen from the side and the inclusion of a single, auxiliary
figure it is similar to Durer's Small Horse of 1505 although Baldung has replaced Durer's
fantastic figure with a groom, or trainer, in conventional dress. Horse and groom
together is an unusual subject that has no place in the Malleus and other witch manuals
and aside from the ancient satirists and the elder Pliny who places them in an art-
historical context the combination is rare in ancient literature. In his Natural History Pliny
relates the story of Apelles outdoing his rivals by painting a horse and says that for the
artist the horse is "a sound test of artistic skill." [223] Pliny also identifies a painting by
Athenion that especially contributed to the fame of the artist as a "Groom with a Horse"
(agasonem cum equo). [224] Varro uses a related image in his satires when he writes "I
have never given free rein to my anger, nor failed to put a curb on [my] passions," [225]
and Horace, taking his cue from Varro, uses the same imagery to convey a similar
message. Horace begins with the much quoted phrase -- "Anger is a short-lived
madness" (Ira furor brevis est) [226] -- and follows it with the image of a groom bridling
a horse.

Anger is short-lived madness. Rule your passions, for unless it obeys, it gives
commands. Check it with bridle -- check it, I pray you, with chains. While the colt has a
tender neck and is able to learn, the groom trains him to go the way his rider directs.
[227]

Horace's "anger is a short-lived madness," is proverbial in the Renaissance and his

horse-taming image a commonplace with Spengler, in his letter to Durer, likening "inner
desires" to the "untamed horse" and claiming that one can tame desire as one can tame
a wild horse. [228] As Baldung's Groom Bridling a Horse was created during his first
period in Strasbourg when there was a particularly high level of interest in the writings of
Horace, [229] his viewers could understand the print as the visual counterpart for
Horace's well-known lines in which groom and horse, bridle and chain, are used as
metaphors for training and controlling the passions. Horace uses real-life experiences to
make his satire salient for the reader and Baldung's print, Groom Bridling a Horse is
similarly grounded in reality. The groom, one hand on the horse's muzzle, the other
grabbing his mane, digs his heels into the earth in his effort to bridle and control a
young and obviously unruly horse. The bridle is prominently displayed and a length of
chain hangs down loosely, [230] a detail that may have been suggested by Horace's
catena or, equally appropriate, the short chain attached to the bridle, image of restraint,
in Durer's Nemesis.

When horse, groom, old woman, and the stable setting itself are considered within the
context of Baldung's own art and the interests of his audience -- contemporaries
fascinated by ancient poetry and energetically engaged in combing ancient literature for
every phrase relevant for their concerns -- ancient satire again suggests a plausible
explanation for Baldung's extraordinary conception. All three appear in Varro's
Eumenides, his famous although fragmentary satire about "furor" and madness. The
Eumenides of the title is the euphemistic name the ancients gave to the Erinyes, the
spirits of punishment that work by disturbing the mind (Odyssey 15. 233-34), and they
appear in a tragedy by Aeschylus that had a long history of being adapted by satirists
and comic writers. [231]

Two fragments from Varro's Eumenides are placed in close proximity in most
reconstructions of the text, and they include the combination of groom, horse, and evil
woman that appears in Baldung's Bewitched Groom. The first fragment reads: "nor will
the groom who excercises the horses ever lead out a wild Damacrine colt since the
groom is insane from the very disturbances of disease." [232] The second fragment
reads: "third of the Furies, Infamy, standing striving in the crowd with loose flowing
breast, uncut hair, soiled garb [and] severe mien. " [233]

The probability of finding groom, horse, and an evil woman in a single source is
sufficiently remote that the similarity between Varro's Eumenides and Baldung's print
cannot simply be dismissed as a coincidence. And when the groom is "insanus" and
unable to care for the horse, the horse is "wild" (furentem), and Infamia, the vengeful
Fury, is described with "loose flowing breast and uncut hair," dressed, with a "severe"
expression, and the verb "educet" -- leading out -- refers to the horse that will not be led
out of its stable, [234] when even the interior setting of Baldung's print is suggested, the
resemblance is remarkable. In a highly specific way these two fragments from Varro's
Eumenides evoke the setting, the personae, and the arrangement of the figures in
Baldung's extraordinary print.

Holding aloft her burning brand the old woman in Baldung's Bewitched Groom is fitting
as a Fury, a witch-like creature of the night, and her fierce expression is appropriate for
the vengeful Infamia, the spirit of punishment who disturbs the mind and causes
insanity. Although the expression on the old woman's face bears a resemblance to the
nude female Fate who cuts the thread of life in Baldung's print of the Three Fates (fig.
9), here she is shown clothed and only a figure wearing a garment could meet Varro's
requirement that Infamy appear with "one breast bared." In Baldung's drawing Study of
an Old Woman, [235] the old woman has one breast bared, but her air of quiet
resignation, reticient and with downcast eyes, makes her a pathetic figure in contrast to
this aggressive old hag in the Bewitched Groom with her malevolent leer and flaming
torch.

There was ample reason for Baldung to be attracted to these fragments from Varro
Eumenides. First, there was simply the coincidence, the extraordinary conjunction of
horse, groom, and malevolent female figure in a single source, three subjects that had
engaged the artist's attention on earlier, and separate, occasions. Second, Varro was
an important author for the humanists. Petrarch had placed Varro among the three most
important Roman writers, and Varro's De lingua latina continued to be a staple in
humanist libraries. [236] His De re rustica (On agriculture) was an essential text on
farming and published frequently in the sixteenth century. [237] Most important for
Baldung, Varro was an author with special significance for artists and those who
patronized them. "Humanitas," in Varro's view, presumed an understanding and
appreciation of art. Aulus Gellius quotes from the first book of Varro's Rerum
humanarum --"Praxiteles, who because of his surpassing art is known by everyone of
any liberal culture [human iori]" [238] -- and Varro was a primary source for information
about the art of the ancient world, the authority cited most frequently in Pliny's books on
the history of art, and the ancient author whose name was associated with the first
illustrated volume, the Imagines vel Hebdomades. [239]
A third consideration is Baldung's long-standing interest in psychological states. It is one
of the dimensions on which his work differs most markedly from that of Durer. The
accurate portrayal of the human body remains a primary focus for Durer with his
scientific concerns tempering his early enthusiasm for the fantastic and unusual, while
Baldung is equally concerned with emotional states and psychological interactions
communicated through facial expression, gestures, and physical relationships. [240] His
drawing of a fool is a subtle study that suggests both stupidity and aggression. [241]
The face of "Doubting Thomas" in his drawing at Strasbourg captures an emotion in the
process of change -- skepticism on the verge of belief. Lot (or "Lott" as it is written on
the painting in Berlin) with its sly old man is a disquieting and perceptive study in
lechery. [242] His various images of Adam and Eve elicit a complex response, raising
psychological issues [243] and often evoking emotionally descriptive adject ives, as
when Adam is described as "satyr-like" and Eve "sly and knowing." [244] Responses
such as these are not solely the imposition of a modern viewpoint on a sixteenth-
century work of art. Physiognomy, understood as the relationship between outward
appearance and inner state, was an important subject for Renaissance humanists. The
many editions of the physiognomy books of Indagine and Codes testify to a high level of
interest, [245] and one of Baldung's most compelling portraits is of Johannes Indagine,
author of a famous physiognomy book published at Strasbourg in 1522. Pirckheimer
translated Theophrastus's Characteres ethici in 1527 inscribing the work to

Durer in his dedication and recommending it for "the masterly way in which
Theophrastus has depicted human appetites and propensities." [246] A deliberate effort
on Baldung's part to engage the viewer in a complex, psychologically oriented dialogue
would be entirely consistent with humanist interests in this period.

More specifically, Varro's subject in the Eumenides -- madness and insanity -- had a
special claim on Baldung's attention. He had personal experience with the condition of
insanity. His print of the Margrave Christoph I. von Baden, one of his most important
patrons in his early years, was done in 1511 when the Margrave was sane, but when
Baldung painted his portrait in 1515 the Margrave had begun to go mad, abdicating to
his sons the same year and dying in 1527 without regaining his sanity. [247] Irrationality
and madness ("furor") are central to Baldung's conception of the violent, sexually
aroused horses in his three late prints and an interest in this extreme mental and
emotional state was shared by many of Baldung's contemporaries especially those
attracted to ancient Stoicism. [248] For the Stoics madness resulted from a failure to
control the passions and for Varro, as for Horace -- satirists often admired for their Stoic
perspective -- madness and folly are central issues they explore throughout their
satires. Horace's phrase aut fanaticus error et iracunda Diana (a fit of madness and
Diana's wrath) in the Ars poetica, [249] for example, associated madness with the moon
and moon-goddess Diana and in the Eumenides Varro "deals in large part ... with the
Stoic idea of universal madness." [250]

One of his most important works, Varro's Saturae Menippeae, consisted of 150 books of
which 90 titles and around 600 fragments survive. [251] By the early years of the
sixteenth century the Satires were well known with some of Varro's titles and phrases
acquiring proverbial status -- in his Adages Erasmus refers to the Satires of Varro over
30 times. [252] The majority of these fragments are found in the writings of Nonius
Marcellus, [253] and the enigmatic fragments from the Eumenides received particular
attention because in it are preserved the largest number of fragments from Varro -- 49
in all. [254] When Stephanus published his Fragmenta poetarum veterum latinorum
quorum opera non extant in 1564, which included the first attempt to publish Varro's
Saturae Menippeae in their entirety, he was putting in order fragments already
assembled by his father Robertus. [255] As this was often a competitive enterprise it
suggests that Robertus was not alone and other humanists were also collecting and
arranging the se fragments during the period in which Baldung was creating his
unprecedented print.

Considering the importance of Varro for the humanists and the fascination with which
they studied each fragment of ancient literature it is reasonable to conjecture that a
friend or acquaintance, remembering Baldung's long-standing interest in horses and
witches -- perhaps even aware of his earlier print The Groom Bridling a Horse as a
Horatian satire on the passions -- brought these fragments to the artist's attention.
Erasmus, in his edition of St. Jerome, includes a story that illustrates how powerfully
these remnants of the past affected the humanists. Erasmus's friend Pietro Santeramo,
"a man whose wit was not less than his learning," related how he composed a fake
epigram, even leaving "some letters mutilated, as if they had been damaged by the
passage of time," and presented it to Fausto Andrelini who lectured on the art of poetry
in Paris, explaining that he found that "small, fragment among some very old remains of
antiquity." Erasmus says,

Fausto read it again and again, and it is difficult to describe the amazement he
experienced and the admiration he felt and the feeling, almost of adoration, with which
he viewed that learned and inimitable relic of antiquity. There was no end or limit to his
admiration of antiquity, until Santeramo, giving himself away, turned it all into a laughing
matter (61:85).

As the humanists discovered the enigmatic fragments from Varro's Eumenides and
puzzled over their meaning they must have elicited a similar response although, in this
instance, their excitement and enthusiasm was more justified.

Locating an ancient source that can account for the setting and three principal images in
Baldung's Bewitched Groom still leaves unanswered the provocative question -- was
there a personal motive that might have led Baldung to create a print on the basis of
these fragments from Varro's Eumenides? Was the Bewitched Groom created for a
humanist working on the fragments of the satire, or to satisfy a patron, perhaps
someone with an interest in Stoicism and the relation between the passions and
madness, or did it have some personal meaning for the artist? The precise meaning of
the wild horse, insane groom, and Infamy (third of the Furies) is enigmatic in Varro's
Eumenides, and they remain mysterious in Baldung's print.
One detail tends to support the hypothesis that this late print had a personal meaning
for Baldung. The shield with the unicorn that appears on the wall above the figure of the
old woman is an extraneous element not found in Varro's satire and much scholarly
attention has focused on this detail because the unicorn appears in the coat-of-arms of
Baldung's family, [256] and a graceful unicorn is the subject of Baldung's late drawing
dated 1544 (fig. 19). Bold in execution and large in scale the Bewitched Groom has
much in common with his earlier, self-advertisement in The Witches' Sabbath, and as a
recapitulation of three subjects Baldung had exploited previously the artist may have
intended the print as a summation, a reminder to his audience of the important
contributions he had made to the art of his time. This hypothesis would account for the
tour-de-force nature of the print with its demanding artistic problems and calculated
construction. Foreshortening was a challenging problem for all Renaissance artis ts with
many examples including the extreme foreshortening in Durer's chalk drawing, the Dead
Christ of 1505. [257] The technical aspects of the Bewitched Groom certainly engaged
Baldung's attention because there is not just one example of radical foreshortening, but
two -- horse and human figure -- and the entire print is executed with a powerful sense
of compression and control with the artist exhibiting an authoritative command of his
medium. Baldung, in this interpretation, has no surrogate in the print -- neither groom,
horse, or Fury -- he is present as himself, the artist, with his family emblem, the unicorn,
affirming his prestigious place in society; and his initials in the cartouche communicating
with pride that I, Hans Baldung Grien, created this extraordinary work of art.

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