Research Guides: HIST 237: Geographies of Witchcraft and the Occult in Early Modern Europe (HC): Visual Sources

Visual Resources

ARTstor
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A digital library that provides access to thousands of digital images derived from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images support a variety of disciplines including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design. Coverage varies.

Europeana
Ninety-three visual results for the subject witchcraft. Includes engravings, title pages and objects drawn from libraries and archives across Europe.
Witch Images from the Wellcome Library
This search was limited to the time period 1500 to 1730.
Witch/Sorcerer Images from the British Museum

Journal Articles in Art History

To find journal articles about art history topics, use these indexes for art:

Bibliography of the History of Art, its continuation, International Bibliography of Art, and Art Index

as well as these multi-disciplinary databases: JSTOR and Proquest Research Library.

Examples of journal articles from Proquest that combine historical issues with art or images include:

"The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium." Michael Cole. Art Bulletin 84, 4 (2002): 621-640.

Abstract: Although we tend to treat the medium as a modern notion, it was possible to think about the topic in earlier periods as well. This essay looks at one place where that possibility emerges, in the discussion of art that appear in the literatures of magic and demonology. The article considers two models on which both demonologists and artists understood the medium: as the usually invisible yet always perceptible "air" that joins all things, and as the "binds" that could ensnare and move the targets of one's spells.

Books in Art History

The Witch as Muse by Linda C. Hults
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ISBN: 0812238699
Publication Date: 2005-06-15
"Occult topics have long fascinated artists, and the subject of witches - their imagined bodies and fantastic rituals - was a popular one for painters and print-makers in early modern Europe. Focusing on several artists in depth. Linda C. Hults probes the historical and theoretical contexts of their work to examine the ways witches were depicted and the motivations for those depictions." "While studying the work of such artists as Durer, Baldung, Jacques de Gheyn II, and Goya. Hults discerns patterns suggesting that the imagery of witchcraft served as both an expression of artistic license and as a tool of self-promotion for the artists."--BOOK JACKET.
Witches by Lorenzo Lorenzi; Ursula Creagh (Translator)
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ISBN: 8870384306
Publication Date: 2006-07-01
This book features the iconographic evolution of the witch over an extensive period of European culture: from the days of Classical Greece to the Romantic age. The study includes some of the most famous images in the history of European art, and focuses
The Appearance of Witchcraft by Charles Zika
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ISBN: 0415082420
Publication Date: 2007-12-04
Explores how visual representations of witchcraft contributed to the widespread acceptance of witch beliefs in sixteenth-century Europe and helped establish the preconditions for the widespread persecution of witches. Focusing on the visual contraction, or figure of the witch, and the activity of witchcraft, Zika places the study in the context of sixteenth-century withcraft and demonological theory, and in the turbulent social and religious changes of the period. Zika argues that artists and printers used images to relate witchcraft theories, developed by theologians and legitimated by secular authorities, to a whole range of contemporary discourses on women and gender roles, sexuality, peasant beliefs and medical theories of the body. He also examines the role of artist as mediators between the ideas of the elite and the ordinary people.

Woodcut

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A 1642 engraving presents the Essex witch hunter, Matthew Hopkins, with two witches and their familiars.