In Jewish and Christian thought there are not only good angels but evil angels. These last, once the servants of god, though fallen are still mighty. Since they were once heavenly beings, they have wings; since they rebelled against god and rejected his gifts, they have been transformed into figures as hideous as they were formerly beautiful. Once noble, the devils are now foul and grotesque.
After Duccio's Temptation of Christ, devils were almost invariably given batlike wings as in this pandemonium imagined by the seventeenth-century French etcher Jacques Callot in The Temptation of Saint Anthony
The tragic satan whom Milton describes as looking like the sun in a cloudy dawn or the moon in eclipse, sad but sublime, is not the devil as conceived by most Christian poets, artists and thinkers. For there is still something left to admire , even to pity. No, Satan is either the cruel tempter, jester and liar of Job and Faust or a monster like the Lucifer whom Dante saw at the very root of hell; with three faces: black, red, and pallid yellow- three mouths chewing the bodies of archsinners, and three pairs of wings, not like those worn by angels but like those night-flying, blood sucking bats, ” and he was flapping them to make three separate blasts of icy wind.”
---The story of the temptation of Christ appears in Matthew and Mark but only very briefly in Luke. It marks one of the relatively few appearances of Satan in Scripture, and it’s noteworthy that the word used in the original text, διάβολος–though rendered as “devil” in the King James Bible–by the consensus of modern scholarship actually means “slanderer.” Whether this arose from a misunderstanding or not, in the Middle Ages, this passage provided the basis for the graphic portrayal of the devil. Here we see one of the most striking of those, the thirteenth century Sienese painter Duccio, whose devil has many of the characteristics of the modern iconography. Boticelli’s famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel shows the slanderer as a Medieval wizard. Juan de Flandes’s painting showed him as a wily monk, and a painting I remember seeing in the Rheinische Landesmuseum from around 1520 showed him as a monk with the facial characteristics of Martin Luther (Lutherans, of course, reciprocated by showing the devil with the pope’s triple tiara).--- Read More:http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002248
Hatred, not pity; disgust, not admiration; yes, and fear-these are the three cold emotions which are stirred in most poets and artists by the sight, the very thought, of the foul fiend and his angels. There is a terror which Jacques Callot depicted in his Temptation of St. Anthony. Young men, distracted by their new sexual urge, often imagine that the worst affliction of the saints was their enforced celibacy, the worst temptation visions of beautiful, naked, accessible women.
---James Barry Satan and his Legions Hurling Defiance Toward The Vault of Heaven circa 1792-1794 Etching,and engraving 746 x 504 mm © Copyright the Trustees of The British Museum--- Read More:http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/gothicnightmares/rooms/room3_works.htm
But the hardest temptation for many saints has been the sense of hopeless terror in the presence of real, powerful, strong-willed, all but ubiquitous evil. And so, in Callot’s picture, we see the wretched saint alone, with no church, no sanctuary, no visible companion, surrounded and all but overwhelmed by the forces of unreason and utter disorganization, dominated for a time at least by the Prince of the Powers of the Air.
---Artist: Bartolome Esteban Murillo Completion Date: 1667 Style: Baroque Genre: religious painting Technique: oil Material: canvas Dimensions: 236 x 261 cm Gallery: National Gallery of Canada ---
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