Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art by Yvonne Owens;

Author:Yvonne Owens;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Figure 6.2 Albrecht Dürer, The Fall of Man (Adam and Eve), 1504. Engraving.

In Baldung’s 1514 Witches Sabbath held at the Louvre (Figure 4.4), the orifice of the cat in the right foreground vomits a flame-like substance or volatile fluid, mirroring that of the witch’s vagina and giving a definite clue as to which way the incendiary dynamic is streaming. This feature is perhaps a prompt to interpretation in other ways. In case the viewer should entertain any doubt that it is the witch’s vulva we are to be concerned about, and not the anus or urethra between the witch’s thighs, we are given to know that this is a gender-specific efflux. The feline gesture of vomiting suggests sickness, poisonous substance, toxicity or miasma. The cogent elements of the 1514 drawing are flesh, hair and fire, with some incidental steam and smoke. The two sausages serve as camouflage for the one, clear male member that exhibits a sore or canker, or perhaps an eye. This might signify a male organ sacrificed to syphilis, thought to be one of the new plagues brought by witches,59 or some other witch-induced overturning. Baldung’s sausages represented witchcraft as such an inversion, and more. The drawing here is exquisitely fine, with delicate cross-hatching and highlighting. The hands, feet and limbs of the witches are eloquent of gesture, accurately rendered, with a grip of anatomy purposefully obfuscated in Baldung’s later, more idealized, mannerist figures, like his Allegory of Music, c.1529.60

A covered, lobed vessel, vase or ‘jar’ sits upon the ground in the immediate, central foreground, near to where the cat vomits its fiery ‘aecidia’ – its saturnine, ‘melancholic bile’. Above it, at the top of the frame, is another vessel with which it is equated in a direct, vertical line. This is a shallow, open dish holding what look like rendered limbs and/or bones, held high in a hieratic gesture by the standing witch on the left of the figural group. Next to the vessel on the ground is an opened book bearing what resemble magical sigils or signs, perhaps Hebrew letters or Arabic script, or astrological symbols. Almost discernible in the book that the witch consults to guide the lighting of her torch or wand are the symbols for Saturn, looking like an ‘h’, the symbol for Jupiter, looking like a ‘4’, and the sign for Neptune, resembling an upraised pitchfork. These are also the rulerships of poisons, metals and minerals in alchemy. One of the tropes surrounding the famed ‘Poison Damsels’ was that they were fated to become fatally toxic from birth as a result of their astrological circumstances. Their ‘venomous’ destiny was forecast in their natal stars.61 Aristotle, having knowledge of this, was able to save Alexander from the Venomous Virgin assassin who had been sent to him as a murderous ‘gift’. By legend, Aristotle saw the poisonous mission of the new concubine as clearly indicated in her astrological chart, where malefic stars were threateningly prominent.62

The hair of the other witch connected to this

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