Albrecht Dürer Bewitched

Albrecht Dürer's witch engravings seem to be emblematic of the European witch trials. But could they be about something else entirely?

The Witch or Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, Albrecht Dürer ca. 1500. Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A naked woman, broom in hand, rides backwards on a goat. Her hair flows in the opposite direction of the creature’s fur, suggesting something deeply unnatural. Magic is afoot.

She is surrounded by putti: one carries an alchemist’s pot, one holds a highly-poisonous thornapple plant, and one appears to be passing gas as another tries to grab the magic wand from his hand. It is an image wild and wicked, clearly meant to illustrate the popular perception of witches at the height of the European witch trials… right?

Except this engraving was created in the year 1500 by Albrecht Dürer, and the witch craze wouldn’t begin in earnest until the mid-sixteenth century. Witch trials did exist, but they were scattered events compared to the widespread panic that would engulf the public decades later. When evaluating Dürer’s witch engravings, we have to ask: from whom did he derive his inspiration?

Many readers will be familiar with Albrecht Dürer as an icon of the Northern Renaissance and German humanism. Though the Renaissance arrived later to Northern Europe, its adherents were no less enthusiastic in their passion for rediscovered Classical texts, which they integrated with their Christian worldview. Rooted in a philosophy that championed the individual, humanists emphasized the importance of a broad, humanities-based education and an understanding of ancient philosophy and literature. In the North, humanists sought to make primary and secondary education available to a wider share of the public. Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press facilitated this spread of knowledge.

Dürer was deeply ensconced within the humanist community in Nuremberg. As historian Margaret A. Sullivan notes in her research on Dürer’s witches:

Inspired in large part by Conrad Celtis, 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, and this enthusiasm coincides with Dürer’s introduction of the witch as a subject in his art. Dürer’s participation in this humanist culture—including his friendship with Celtis and Willibald Pirckheimer—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 Dürer’s witches highly problematic.¹

The Malleus Maleficarum is a treatise on witchcraft and demonology written by the German priest Heinrich Kramer in 1486. Notably, it asserted that women are more susceptible to demonic influence than men. Though the text would eventually become one of the most famous works on witchcraft, it didn’t possess the same influence when it was published. The Protestant Reformation and subsequent religious conflicts were still decades away. The Catholic Church roundly condemned Kramer’s text for its advocacy of unethical tactics to coerce confessions from victims. Kramer’s tirade was born of his own failed attempts to prosecute “witches” in Tyrol; he was actually kicked out of Innsbruck and dismissed as a madman.

The Four Witches or Four Naked Women, Albrecht Dürer ca. 1497. Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Dürer’s day, most people believed in magic, but their views were more nuanced than one might expect. Coming out of the medieval period, there remained a belief that some magic was “good” (such as folk charms intended for healing or protection), and some was “bad” (such as necromancy or summoning demons).

As Sullivan suggests, Dürer’s inspiration was therefore not likely based on the Malleus Maleficarum, but on his knowledge of Greek and Roman poetry, throughout which magical women feature prominently. German humanists were extremely interested in the works of Roman poets like Horace and Lucan, both of whom wrote satirical works involving witches. In particular, Horace’s evocative descriptions of Canidia, Sagana, Circe, Madea, and more would shape the perception of witchcraft in the Western canon.

Sadly, some readers in the Early Modern period missed Horace’s sense of humor. The witchy-imagery of his poetry and that of his peers “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.²

For Dürer’s purposes, I should note that not only did he create his witch engravings prior to the escalation of the witch trials, but he produced these works for an educated, humanist audience. Therefore, when we examine The Witch (1500), we can see his work in a new light: the prominent putti are a clear Classical reference as mischievous representations of Cupid, and the humor of their vulgarity makes sense given their satirical context. Few images of witches can be found in medieval art, and the ones that do exist depict them clothed. The hag’s nudity in The Witch gestures to her roots in the Classical tradition, as in other mythological artworks produced during the Renaissance. Even Dürer asserts his own sense of humor by writing the letter “D” backwards in his signature—a play on the “unnaturalness” of the scene.

With this in mind, Dürer’s earlier (and only other) witch drawing can be evaluated from a Classical lens. The women in Four Witches (1497) are also nude, conducting a ritual in a circle that evokes dancing muses or goddesses. The ornament above them resembles a pomegranate, a symbol of fertility in the ancient world. Meanwhile, a demon peeks around the corner with its mouth gaping open. This naughty, voyeuristic scene speaks more to the fantasies of Dürer’s educated, male audience than it does to the horrors of the witch trials.

Dürer’s engravings are therefore emblematic of an elite stratum of society fascinated by Classical literature and mythology. However, we know where this story is heading: within a few decades of Dürer’s death, witch trials would sweep across Europe, claiming tens of thousands of victims.

As we sink deeper into autumn, we’ll revisit the topic of witches in art—but next time, our vantage point will be on the other side of the trials.

1. Margaret A. Sullivan, “The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien,” Renaissance Quarterly 53, no. 2 (200): 351, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2901872.pdf.

2. Sullivan, “The Witches of Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien,” 347.