Unpacking the Symbolism in Salvator Rosa's Witches at their Incantations, 1646

Salvator Rosa, Witches at their Incantations, ca. 1646, National Gallery, London

     Dawn breaks on an eerie scene in a wasted landscape. Rocky and barren, a disparate group of macabre figures engage in enigmatic endeavors, each seemingly more gruesome than the next. On the rightmost-hand side of this alarming composition, the tableau begins with an aged crone leading a blindfolded young woman holding a silver vessel. The aged figure, naked from the waist up, points towards a tree at the center of the composition from which a twisted corpse hangs, its neck contracted into an alarming angle, as one woman clips the corpse’s toenails while the other, completely nude, fumigates the body with some sort of incense in an earthen pot.

Traveling leftwards through the composition from the blindfolded figure, we are greeted by a shrouded, wreathed being clutching a lit candelabra, recalling the hooded costumes of Catholic penitents, below whom a man and a woman guide a cadaver in a coffin’s hand to sign some nefarious document.  Below the hanged man in the tree, two nude women gaze into a mirror, which is clutched by the younger of the pair, who also holds a wax poppet festooned with nails. Sitting to their left on the ground, an ugly middle-aged woman, completely naked, surrounded by bizarre and horrible props, squeezes something horrid into a mortar for which she clutches a human bone to use as a pestle.  Behind her, a bearded man looks at her enterprise with interest as a wreathed figure uses the sword he holds to skewer a heart with one hand while beating the back of an armored knight with a broom held in the other. The knight is holding two torches in his hands, and with one, he is burning a small, white rabbit who is seated within a circumscribed circle of candles that contains an apparently mystical text on parchment. Behind the knight, a huge, skeletal bird looms large, followed by a number of grotesque creatures ridden by hags, one of which seems to be offering a sacrifice of an infant child to its open maw of indeterminate function. The subtle line of a platform or stage runs the length of the bottom of the composition. Titled Witches at their Incantations, this bizarre scene, painted by Salvator Rosa in 1646, was one of a number of compositions that he created on this theme.

      Looking at Witches at their Incantations and the other scenes of witchcraft painted by Salvator Rosa, one has to ask - who was the audience for these kinds of pictures? Were these genre scenes illustrations of popular and perhaps lost narratives that would have been understood and recognized? Or were they warnings - frightening depictions of the horrific workings of cabals of witches working for Satan’s army on earth?  The painting is thought to have been created for the Florentine banker and collector Carlo de’ Rossi around 1646 and, according to a letter written by Rosa, would have been concealed behind a curtain so that it could be dramatically exposed to unsuspecting viewers visiting his collection of art. Rosa himself was an actor and poet, as well as a painter, and the theatricality of this scene, as well as that of other contemporary paintings on the subject by other painters, suggest a use of the visual language of the stage as a screen to mask the skepticism and critiques that such artists many have been communicating to their audiences. It is generally accepted that from the early 14th century until the mid-17th century, tens of thousands of people were prosecuted and executed for the crime of witchcraft in mainland Europe (perhaps numbering up to a hundred thousand), with the majority of those subjected to torture and execution being women. Rosa’s painting was created at the tail end of this climate of persecution and paranoia. This paper will examine the occult themes depicted in Witches at their Incantations within that context, as well as the various tropes and roles that the figures presented enact, especially in reference to particular descriptions of witchcraft that Rosa himself would have been exposed to.  This paper will argue that rather than performing a warning to its audience against the nefarious lure of witchcraft, Rosa’s painting represents a skepticism particular to Italy of the era, as well as a critique of the hysteria and brutal prosecution that attended the persecution of those accused of witchcraft during that period. This skepticism is performed through the language of the theater, a trope that Rosa used to screen his critiques, both of the true believers of witchcraft and of those in positions of authority and influence,  in a hidden language that those who were in the know would have appreciated immediately.

     Northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries was plagued by witches. To the people who described, prosecuted, tortured, and executed those charged with the crime of witchcraft, this was not just some metaphor for sin. Witches, to many Northern Europeans, were real. Many truly believed that witches really communed with the devil, literally rode on broomsticks, actually killed babies for their blood, bewitched innocent Christians and threatened the very existence of every Christian alive in the world. To these people, the threat from Satan was real, and it was existential. By contrast, in general, Italians of the period had a more ambiguous approach to the existence of witches. Yes- they were real, but their midnight flights to coven meetings were delusions or perhaps metaphors for their own descent into sin and damnation. Italian jurists were more apt to find that those accused of witchcraft were disordered, poor people - not powerful practitioners of the dark arts. The popular  and influential Italian jurist, Andrea Alciato (1492-1550), dismissed the hysteria around the belief in witches, famously stating that witches were “poor deluded women” who needed to be “treated rather with hellebore than with the fire.” This is not to say that those accused of witchcraft in Italy were not subject to horrible punishments, but rather that the hysteria present in much of Northern Europe was tempered some in Italy- the threat was less existential and more akin to a social ill, and those afflicted were as likely to be pitied as persecuted, though they certainly faced prosecution, torture, and death. In short, the Italian position was that while witches were real, and their pact with the Devil a true crime, the position, even of the church in Italy, was best summed up in the Compendium Maleficarum, published in 1608 and reissued in 1626:

“...[a]ny man who maintained that all the effects of magic were true, or who believed that they were all illusions, would rather be a radish than a man. Most often the devil, being the father of lies, deceives us and blinds our eyes or mocks our other senses with vain illusory images: and not seldom God prevents him from achieving on behalf of witches what he would and could truly essay...so he has recourse to glamours so that his impotence may not be perceived.”

     Rosa would have been aware of the consequences of being a witch, and he would have known, like most people of his place and era, what it was that witches did to deserve such consequences. A poem by Rosa, titled La Strega, gleefully lists the components of a witch’s brew, many of which are present in Witches at their Incantations. 

"I have magical ways To tempt, profane notes, Different herbs, and knots That which may arrest the heavenly wheels, A magic ring… Various fish, Chemical waters, Black balms, mixed powders. Mystical stones, Snakes, and moths, Rotting blood, guts, Dried mummies, Bones, and worms, Fumigations That blacken, Horrible voices That frighten…” 

The prose of the poem echoes the actions of the actors in Witches at their Incantations, who, aligned like players on a stage, perform all the nefarious behaviors of a witch, including the most important - communing at a midnight sabbath. Rosa’s image is graphic, but it is also theatrical. This does not look like a natural scene that one might walk in upon, but rather,  it is highly staged, its participants carefully posed. The theatricality of these images serve a two-fold purpose. On one hand, framing these grotesque scenes as a sort of stagecraft firmly places their thematic origin and the particulars of the imagery into the imagination of the artist, and like with any piece of theater, the understanding of such an image is dependent on an audience that agrees to suspend their own disbelief,  or in this case, perhaps their true belief, in order to be transported into a space that all parties agree is imaginary. On the other hand, Rosa’s framing of this scene onto a stage deftly melds all of the products of his talent as a painter, actor, and poet into one composition. The scene is pulled, in many places, from his own poetic description of a potion’s recipe. The faint ledge of the stage at the foreground of the painting forces us to acknowledge ourselves as an audience- the grotesque figures before us are no longer depictions of real devotees of Satan, but rather players in a performance orchestrated to illuminate Rosa’s many fine talents. Framed as a scene in a play,  it also allows Rosa to slyly critique the grotesque absurdity of what those accused of witchcraft were actually supposed to have done.

     Individuals accused of witchcraft were usually tried by the Papal Office, in the form of  the Holy Office of the Inquisition. While the Inquisition dealt with crimes punishable by the most severe consequences, such as heresy and witchcraft, it also was responsible for policing behaviours such as adultery or cohabitation outside of marriage. It was for this last crime that Rosa himself ran afoul of the Holy Office, and it was only through the intercession of powerful friends that he was spared a stint in prison. He was living as man and wife with his muse and lover, Lucretia, his life-long partner, who was married to another man who had abandoned her and disappeared, making annulment impossible. Fearing imprisonment, he wrote to a friend about his anguish at having sent Lucretia and their son away from Rome, where they had been living.

“So here I am alone...with no more company than a cat, which, to add to my woes, turns out to be a tabby, which means that it is undomesticated… And all this comes of being afraid of running into some misfortune in prison or into some damned cuckold of a spy from the Holy Office - a thousand curses on the soul of who ever devised [the Holy Office].” 

Rosa’s attitude towards the Inquisition is clear here, and his opinion, based on the real effects that the Holy Office's intrusion into his life had had, is perhaps reflected in the almost comically obscene grotesqueries of Witches at their Incantations. His use of the symbolism of the stage merely places the critique as a defensible fantasy, rather than  a scathing assessment. Alluding to the stage also provided a defense for Rosa to excuse the scene depicted as fantastical, rather than as a vision of something he actually witnessed. This was not an idle concern, as it was only 40 years earlier, in 1608, when a Dutch artist, Jacob van Swanenbergh, who was living and working in Naples, had exhibited a scene of witchcraft that included a “crowd of witches, flying through the air, emerging from chimneys, brandishing flaming torches, astride demons in the forms of dragons. Others carried stolen babies, while still more rode monstrous skeletons…” Despite his claims that this composition was merely a copy of another painting that he had seen, van Swanenbergh was brought before the Holy Office, under the suspicion that this painting was the result of events that he had actually witnessed. Claiming his innocence, van Swanenbergh kept to his story that the painting was a copy of an earlier work that he had seen, though he had added some figures as a joke to amuse the viewer. This episode, though occurring earlier  than Rosa’s creation of Witches at their Incantations,  speaks to the real power that the Holy Office exerted, even over seemingly fanciful themes in compositions related to magic. Rosa’s canny insertion of the margin of a stage, along with the theatrical posing of the groups of witches, provides both a critique of the belief in witchcraft, and a defense against charges that this scene would be anything other than an artistic conceit.

     Rosa had used the language of theater to pose critiques of his contemporaries in the past. While living in Rome he had been well known for his dramatic roles in the theater as an actor, as well as his original theatrical compositions and satiric verse. It was there that he had used the vehicle of the stage to launch a critique of Bernini’s recent (and revolutionary) stage productions that had utilized quotidian street persons as part of the stagecraft. In a blistering rhyming verse he had taken aim at the unusual (and to Rosa’s mind) unseemly use of people of low pedigree to enhance the realism of the performance.

“I don’t want us to act comedies like some people who spread dirt about all and sundry, because in due course, you can see that the dirt spreads faster than the poet’s ink. And I don’t want us to bring on stage couriers, brandy-sellers, goatherds and rubbish of that sort, which are the folly of an ass.” 

It was perhaps a result of this performance that Rosa found himself unwelcome in Rome and was driven to relocate to Florence to reestablish himself in an environment less hostile to his caustic and public opinions. Bernini was a celebrity of his time, as well known then as he is today for his skill as a sculptor, architect, and artist. Along with his work in the plastic arts, Bernini was also well regarded in the dramatic arts, having designed stage productions and produced a number of theatrical works, writing verse for comedic performances. Bernini was known for his own satires that often lampooned prominent individuals, but was himself often protected from such types of invective. Thus, Rosa’s satirical pasquinade at Bernini’s expense, was, at the least, an act of self-sabotage on Rosa’s part. The year before Rosa’s performance, a group of students from the Palazzo Capranica had caricatured Bernini, and had faced Papal pressure to withdraw their performance as a result. Rosa would certainly have known about the student’s situation, which makes his own critique of Bernini seem even more so a reckless act, knowing the potential consequences as he did.

     Once in Florence, Rosa continued to openly criticize those around him that he found offensive, regardless of their position of power or influence. Unusual for an artist of his time, Rosa preferred to live independently of his patrons. It was the custom of the time that artists attached to patrons would be given both a stipend and living quarters provided by the patron, often in their own court. Rosa did not enjoy the idea of being confined to his patron’s curtilage, and so, despite it having the result of a lower financial allowance, Rosa lived on his own, in a house of his own choosing. It was in Florence that Rosa matured into the style of painting that he would become best known for - theatrical and dramatic landscapes that inserted touches of verisimilitude, such as dying foliage or the broken limbs of trees. One of Rosa’s main patrons, Cardinal Gian Carlo, owned a number of paintings by the artist Filippo Napoletano, who was both a printmaker and painter. Several of Rosa’s paintings from the early 1640s would seem to show the influence that Napoletano had on Rosa’s craft, and it is especially apparent in the skeletal bird that appears in Witches at their Incantations and bears a remarkable similarity in form to one of Napoletano’s illustrations for a book of zoological prints published in or around 1620 titled Diversi Scheletri di Animali . This tendency of Rosa’s to reference or imitate was a normal function of being an artist at the time, though he did face some criticism from his enemies (some of whom had been the object of his satires) that he did not produce his own work, or if he did, he was merely a copyist. Regardless of these claims, one can clearly see in Rosa’s work, especially in Witches at their Incantations, the influence that the works of other contemporaneous artists had on his practice. This influence is particularly obvious in the magic-themed works of the Bamboccianti, a group of genre painters, many of whom were Dutch, that were active in Italy during Rosa’s lifetime. He himself had dabbled with the Bamboccianti style, but ultimately rejected it, describing their choice of subject matter in a satire written in the late 1640s or early 1650s as:

“street porters, ragamuffins, petty thieves… a crowd of drunken sots and greedy-guts, gypsies, tobacco touts and stable boys, mudlarks, eavesdroppers and day-labourers, activities like catching bugs and fleas… or pissing, shitting, selling tripe for cats, or making music fit to wake the dead… Such paintings are so very highly prized you see them in the princes’ galleries resplendent in the finest gilded frames. The portraits of these filthy vagabonds they hang, perhaps, just to remind themselves that they’re descendents of such sans culottes.” 

Regardless of this rather unflattering description of the Bamboccianti, one can clearly see the influence that their distinct style had on Rosa’s own, especially in Witches at their Incantations. Paintings of necromancers, such as those done by Caroselli and Paolini , as well as Self Portrait with Magic Scene by Van Laer, all Bamboccianti artists and painted in the 1620s-1630s, utilize the same style of theatricality that acts as a shield between the subject and the artist, absolving them of the implications of the content of the composition and its significance to those who would be inclined to prosecute any implication of a connection to the art of witchcraft. This theatricality, combined with the realism of the figures, is evident in many of Rosa’s works related to the theme of witchcraft. That these Bamboccianti artists referenced the stage is evident both in the outlandish posing of their human subjects, but also in more subtle ways, such as the architectural scene in Paolini’s Negromante, which recalls the architecture of the Teatro Olimpico di Vicenza, in Vicenza, constructed in 1580 - 1585, which had been designed by Andrea Palladio. Likewise, the composition of Witches at their Incantations owes much to the famed French printmaker, Jacques Callot, who lived and worked in Florence and produced a print titled The Temptation of Saint Anthony in 1635, a print that clearly alludes to the optics of a stage. This combination of the language and visuals of the stage would have been a familiar one to Italian audiences of the period. Theater was a popular medium, and in fact, the 16th and 17th century saw a number of plays produced and performed on the subject of journeys through hell, the temptation and torture of various saints, and other such religo-macabre subjects. Rosa, as an actor, a playwright, and an artist, would certainly have been aware of theatrical productions of this sort, as well as popular prints, like those of Callot, and perhaps even more pertinent to the subject of Rosa’s Witches at their Incantations, prints like those of Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien (Figs. 9 and 10), which were widely circulated throughout Europe and depicted witches engaged in their craft, though perhaps with a more erotic cast than in Rosa’s depiction of a sabbath scene. For these Northern printmakers, witchcraft may have been a suggestive and even bawdy subject, but their approach to the subject was serious in the sense that the scenes they described were not satirical, as in Witches at their Incantations. 

     It was not only themes of witchcraft that Rosa used the mask of the theater to protect his potentially critical attitudes and opinions. In a painting from the early 1650s titled La Menzogna or Falsehood , a seated figure points to a literal mask that he holds in his right hand, gesturing to his companion in the composition the need to wear a disguise of disingenuity and intrigue in order to succeed at court. Falsehood was painted during the period that Rosa enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal Gian Carlo, and was almost certainly meant as a barb against the dissimulation required to advance position at court. Rosa was not a good courtier, and his barbed criticism (though similar in theme to many popular depictions of the chicanaries of court) was not appreciated by his benefactor, who subsequently cut him off the year after Falsehood was painted. Thus, even with the protective skrim of the stage as a mediator to his critiques, one can see the tension in how an artist’s perceived message might be received, regardless of compositional affect to mitigate the meaning.

     Overall,  Witches at their Incantations provides an interesting example of a genre of witchcraft images that became much more widespread in Italy in the 16th and 17th century. Devils and demons appear frequently in medieval art, but witches were considered a  much more immediate , real threat, and were not depicted often, until the early  16th century when witches, as a subject, began to be depicted in serious art. In Italy, artists often depicted Circe or Medea or demons (usually in the context of temptations), but it wasn’t until Veneziano’s Lo Stregozzo (ca. 1515-1525) that images of witches begin to appear as subjects in Italian art, and the works of the Bamboccianti artists as well as images by Rosa of witches are examples of this theme becoming more widespread as the 17th century drew to its conclusion. Using distancing techniques, like the language of the theater, artists like Rosa were able to indulge their imaginations, while protecting themselves from the attentions and suspicions of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. It is perhaps no accident that when originally displayed,  Witches at their Incantations was described by Rosa himself as “...exceedingly curious and, as such, is the last thing you are shown [in his gallery], and is covered with a taffeta [curtain].” Even in the act of revealing the scene from behind a curtain, a certain theatricality is emphasized, allowing the wealthy gentlemen who would be its audience to enjoy its prurient content without fear of risk of impugning their reputations or their souls.

Selected Bibliography

Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. “The European Witch Craze of the 14th to 17th Centuries: A Sociologists Perspective.” American Journal of Sociology 86, no. 1 (1980): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/227200.

Brown, John Russell. The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Duni, Matteo. Under the Devils Spell: Witches, Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in Renaissance Italy. Florence, Italy: Published for Syracuse University in Italy, 2007.

Guaccio, Francesco Maria. Compendium Maleficarum. Translated by Montague Summers and E. A. Ashwin. London: John Rodker, 1929.

Hults, Linda C. “Baldung and the Witches of Freiburg: The Evidence of Images.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 2 (1987): 249. https://doi.org/10.2307/204283.

Langdon, Helen, Xavier F. Salomon, and Caterina Volpi. Salvator Rosa. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2010.

Rosa, Salvatore and  Alexandra Hoare. The Letters of Salvator Rosa: an Italian Transcription, English Translation and Critical Edition. London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2018.

Rosa, Salvatore, and Giovanni Alfredo Cesareo. 1892. Poesie e lettere edite e inedite di Salvator Rosa. Napoli: Tipografia della Regia università.

Roworth, Wendy Wassyng. Pictor Succensor : A Study of Salvator Rosa as Satirist, Cynic, and Painter. Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts. New York: Garland Pub., 1978.

Scott, Jonathan. Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Sullivan, Margaret A. "The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien." Renaissance Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2000): 333-401. doi:10.2307/2901872.