Search This Blog

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Witches Embraced in Art History

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

I first saw this image [in print] in Koerner's The Moment of Self-Portraiture of German Renaissance Art (1993). There, he used it as part of a larger argument that the self was ingrained in art, and that the viewer became the subject in that he/she had to contend with their own thoughts on the artwork at hand.

Claudia Swan used witchcraft as a way to show the imagination of, mostly, Jacques de Gheyn II in Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629). (She also has a wonderful academic fascination with both blowfish and scientific representation).

And this filters (anachronistically) into Lyndal Roper's Oedipus and the Devil, which uses testimony of women accused of witchcraft to show, through their imaginative stories, how gender is constructed and reconstructed in a social context.

No comments:

Post a Comment