Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi

CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD

books, classical philology, and growing doubts about the long-term success of the Crusades. Unlike the oral The emerged as a subject in European art in the tradition that carried the Roland legend for three late fifteenth century, at the very moment when the centuries until it was written down around 11 00, sacred image was beginning to lose its automatic Ariosto's poetry understands too well its own origins in centrality within the careers of artists and the mere authorship. His poem, disillusioned, knows itself imaginations of patrons. The witch of painting, engraving, to be a ~ounterfeit.~Later Ariosto points out that or woodcut figured a lost ground of powerful mimetic magical, prophetic painting has become equally rare, an to which the modern cult image no longer seemed art "extinguished in our day" (33.5). Romanticism may securely connected. The profane, disenchanted artwork have invented the idea of a secularized, disenchanted offered a different kind of magic. The Enchantress Renaissance. And yet secularization and disenchantment painted by the Ferrarese court painter Dosso Dossi, were already aspects of early sixteenth-century culture's datable to the second half of the 1510s, is the ideal test self-understanding. of this historical model (fig. I).' Once there was magic, Ariosto says, and now no Dosso's colleague at the court of Duke Alfonso d'Este longer. Another, metaphorical sort of magic, however, was the poet Ludovico Ariosto. In the Orlando Furioso, sexual enchantment, might not be entirely a thing of the published in in 151 6, Ariosto reports that the past (8, 1): deceptive arts of enchantment, the arts of his fictional witches Alcina and Melissa, are arts "to our age Oh quante sono incantatrici, oh quanti unknown," arti . . . a1 nostro tempo ignore (7.73).2 incantator tra noi, che non si sanno! Ariosto so numbers magic among the institutions and How many enchantresses among us! oh, folkways of the chivalric past now receding with all How many enchanters are there, though unknown! swiftness into oblivion. Such a measuring of the gradient between the present and a is virtually the Ariosto's tone is suspect. He speaks as if magic did signature device of epic poetry. The Orlando Furioso once exist, but undercuts himself with jocularity, hinting tells of love adventures in the framework of the Frankish that he believes no such thing. If so, then it is impossible Charlemagne's contests against the Saracen to take seriously Ariosto's profession of regret. He might kings of Spain and North Africa in the late eighth really be saying not that the debased modern form of century, a pre-history of the Crusades. The poem's magic is sexual enchantment, but that magic was only internal is an illogical dreamtime suspended ever a way of describing the art of allure, indeed only between two remotenesses, temporal antiquity and the ever a way of accounting for art in general, the various cultural east, places of splendid fabrics and efficacious technologies of illusion and fictionalization. "Magic," his witches and sibyls. Yet in the verse quoted, Ariosto text allows, is just a way that some cultures have of concedes that his own poem belongs to-would be read designating such thing^.^ Ariosto is offering sexual within-a temporality all too rational. The world enchantment and art, it would seem, as rational external to the poem is the modern saeculum of printed explanations of magic that would level the gradient between enchanted past and disenchanted present. Instead of a lost past, he is offering an explained past.

1 am grateful to Stephen Campbell, Joanna Cannon, Charles Dempsey, Beate Fricke, Jeffrey Hamburger, Kristina Herrmann-Fiore, Eberhard Konig, Thomas Lentes, Lea Mendelsohn, David Nirenberg, 3. David Quint, Origin and Origii~alityin Renaissance Literature David Quint, Francesco Pellizzi, Tom Robisheaux, and Joneath Spicer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. x-xi, 3-6, 23-24, and for information, advice, and comments. The paper is in many places generally ch. 1 on the predicament of a Renaissance literary culture closely dependent on conversation and collaborative work with trying to grasp how poetic intervention in a sequence of texts of Nagel. merely human fabrication could be construed as "original." 1. Rome, , oil on canvas, 176 x 174 cm. 4. Cf. the dictum of Ren6 Girard: "Magic is never more than a 2. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Stewart A. Baker and poor use of the dangerous properties of mimesis," Things Hidden since A. Bartlett Giamatti (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), the Foundation of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, in the nineteenth-century translation oi William Stewart Rose. 1987), p. 14. 152 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

Figure 1. Dosso Dossi, Enchantress, ca. 151 5-1 520. Oil on canvas, 176 x 174 cm. Rome, Galleria Borghese. Photo: ScalafArt Resource, N.Y. Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 153

There are then two kinds of disenchantment, na'ive and cent~ry.~If Ariosto was right that was a thing knowing.The first kind regrets what we have lost, while of the past, then what were all the interrogations and the second realizes that we never were enchanted. The treatises about? poem makes both kinds available. It is almost as if the secularization of the fine arts, Not everyone in Ariosto's society was ready to accept involving the institutionalization of artistic authorship the absolute pastness of the witches' arts. In these very and of the poetic work, entailed a drastic "looking years witchcraft was emerging out of a long shadowy awayf' from violence, power, error, reality. By taking up existence in biblical and pagan texts and in popular witchcraft as one of its glamorous themes, the imagination and re-materializing in courtrooms. In the autonomous artwork would seem to mock the trial- fifteenth century, after centuries of and victims by transposing their mostly unseen bodies into hesitation, the papacy formally accepted the argument fictional apparition, mimicking the accusations of the that local incidence of witchcraft was to be treated as a inquisitors by representing the witch as alluring. For form of heresy and so subject to clerical prose~ution.~ unlike the harrowed body of the Christian martyr, the The Dominican inquisitorial handbook Malleus punishable body of the witch was unrepresentable. The maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches," published in first images of the witches were the woodcuts illustrating 1486 and frequently reprinted, gathered and ratified German printed books on witchcraft in the wake of the and hearsay, so initiating a vicious cycle of inquiry, Malleus. In an example from Ulrich Molitor's De lamiis, discovery, judgment, and yet better-informed inq~iry.~ a handbook that went through several Latin and Clerical and civic authorities sought to unmask and try German-language editions beginning in 1488, the the witches who hid behind ordinary social and familial women are feasting a1 fresco, roofless and masterless- roles. Witches had been persecuted and even prosecuted the nightmare of husbands, for they are obviously throughout the , but the fearsome chain of plotting something (fig. 2).9Such an image is not an judgments began in earnest in the 1480s. The identification guide. It does not help anyone recognize purported to expose an invisible community of witches the witch beneath the housewife's wimple. The woodcut in league with and the devil in villages in , indeed has no content other than the unreliability of the France, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, , and witch's outward appearance. eventually in Brazil and Massachusetts. By the end of the The witch showed her true face-she was given her madness one hundred thousand or even two hundred face-in only two places, on the scaffold and in elite, thousand witches, three-quarters of them women, had collectible artworks. The violent extraction of the witch been tried for the heresy of intercourse with the devil from social life, involving an enforced passage into a and for experimenting with magical rites and spells. textual existence as doctrinal question and a subsequent Many thousands of witches, perhaps ten thousand, were incarnation as a judicial subject, coincided historically executed.'Trials in Ariosto's northern Italy, and indeed with her apparition in art. The two sets of phenomena all over Europe, were far more numerous in the second were complementary. The works of art, poems and half of the sixteenth century, and no one in 1515 could have foreseen the extent of the catastrophe. Still, the trials and the debate about the reality of witchcraft were 8. For the reports of heresy and sorcery in Lombardy from 1486, well under way already in the first decades of the see Montague Summers, The Geography of Witchcraft (London: Kegan Paul; New York: Knopf, 1927), pp. 537-538. See also Albano Biondo, "Streghe ed eretici nei domini estensi all'epoca dell'Ariosto," in I1 rinascimento nelle corti padane: Societi e cultura (Bari: De Donato, 5. On the series of medieval papal bulls dealing with witchcraft, 1977), pp. 165-1 99, and the discussion of the evidence in Peter see Henry Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, vol. 1 Burke, "Witchcraft and Magic in Renaissance Italy: Gianfrancesco Pico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939), pp. 220-229. and his Strix," in Sydney Anglo, ed., The DamnedArt: Essays in the 6. Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, , Literature of Witchcraft(London: Routledge, 1977), pp. 32-52, esp. trans. Montague Summers (London: Arrow, 1971). The actual impact of 44-48. the handbook is disputed by some, however: see Margaret A. Sullivan's 9. Charles Zika, "'Magiel-'Zaubereil-'Hexerei': Bildmedien summary of the debate, "The Witches of Dijrer and Hans Baldung und Kulturelle Wandel," in Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky, eds., Crien," Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000):332-401, here 337. Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformation im Umbruch 7400-7600 7. For these estimates, which are conservative, see Brian P. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1999), pp. 31 7-382, is the Levack, "The Great Witch-Hunt," in Thomas A. Brady, Jr., et al. eds., most substantial discussion of these woodcuts. See also Zika, Handbook of European History 7400-7600, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, Exorcising our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early 1995), pp. 607-640; generally a concise and reliable orientation to Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 244-246, 258-259, and the topic. 282-283. 154 RES 49/50 SPRINGIAUTUMN 2006

It is the sort of beauty that painters offer, as Ariosto points out: "As best to feign the industrious painter knows" (quanto me' finger san pittor industri) (7.1 1). It was the artistry of painters like or Dosso Dossi, their control over the blandishments of touch and color, that encouraged writers to adduce painting as a metaphor for what enchantresses do to men's reason.I0 In the third edition of the Orlando Furioso (1 532), Ariosto again compared the art of the to the art of the painter, singling out for mention, alongside the luminaries of art ancient and modern, the two artists closest to him, the brothers Dosso and Battista Dossi (33.2).11The tautological circle was closed a few decades later when the Venetian critic Ludovico Dolce, in his treatise on painting, invoked Ariosto's description of the witch Alcina's appearance as an example that painters might emulate." The enchantress, creature of pure surface, pure aspect, emblem of female mutability (6.50-52), the purest test of descriptive power, was serving simultaneously as the paradigm for pictorial versifying and for word-painting. Ariosto's friend and colleague Dosso painted two pictures of enchantresses, one in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, magnificently clothed, and the other in the in Washington D.C., nude (figs. 1, 3).13 Both date most likely from the second decade of

10. Ariosto's verse was echoed by Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, a Figure 2. Ulrich Molitor, De lamiis etphitonicis (Cologne, Ferrarese scholar and friend of Pico, in his treatise on witches; see Giancarlo Fiorenza, "Studies in Dosso Dossi's Pictorial Language: 1489), fol. dl r. Woodcut, 12.2 x 7.4 cm. Photo: Christopher S. Painting and Humanist Culture in Ferrara under Duke Alfonso I dlEste" Wood. (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2000), p. 270. 11. On this mention, and on Vasari's opinion that Ariosto had overpraised Dosso, see Patricia A. Emison, Creating the "Divine"Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), pp. 134, pictures, came at the core issues of the social witchcraft 144. The conceit of the painter as enchanting deceiver, significantly, crisis but from the opposite direction, as if in protest breaks both with the older "Daedalian" tradition of the artist as against the Dominican inquisitors' exclusive and manipulator of technology and with the idea of the artwork as a arbitrary focus, out of the entire range of possible modes magically efficacious mimetic double of the real. On these traditions, of magic, on the reality of the witch's pact with the see Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (1 934; reprint New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. devil. Although the devil is completely absent from the 61-90. poems and pictures, the thematics of illusion are 12. Dolce's 'Aretino' and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, central, just as they were in the contemporary treatises ed. Mark W. Roskill (New York: College Art Association, 1968), pp. and trials. 130-135: "If painters want to find without effort a perfect example of Ariosto treatshis evil witch Alcina, who transforms feminine loveliness, they should read those stanzas in which Ariosto describes quite marvelously the beauties of the Enchantress Alcina." into animals, plants, and rocks the love-sick soldiers of See the discussion of this passage in Rensselaer W. Lee, "Ut pictura the heathen prince Ruggiero, to a full-dress description poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting," Art Bulletin 22 by body parts in the Petrarchan manner (7.1 1-1 5). A few (1940):197-269, here p. 198. The locus classicus is Gotthold Ephraim stanzas later he reveals that Alcina's appearance is a Lessing, Laokoon (1 7661, section XX, who invoked Ariosto's pure deception that masks her aged and repulsive body description of Alcina in order to warn poets not to try to paint. 13. For dating, provenance, and histories of interpretations of the (7.70-74). Cosmetically produced beauty is the poem's two pictures see Felton Gibbons, Dosso and Battista Dossi: Court figure par excellence for the powers of the enchantress. &inters at Ferrara (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), nos. Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 155

Figure 3. Dosso Dossi, and her Lovers in a Landscape, ca. 151 5-1 520. Oil on canvas, 101 x 136 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection.

the century, around the time of the publication of the earliest mention of the Rome picture, in an inventory of Orlando Furioso.14 They both hold tablets bearing 1650, describes her simply as maga, female enchantress. cryptic writing or diagrams and are accompanied by Julius von Schlosser in 1900 first saw her as Ariosto's animals, apparently men they have transformed. The Melissa, the benevolent witch who undoes Alcina's spell, reversing the bad magic and converting Ruggiero's men back into human beings. The suit of armor on the 59 and 80, also pp. 121-122; Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the ground suggested the chivalric context. Italian Paintings (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1979), no. The Borghese maga wields a -like torch and her 716; Mauro Lucco, "Due capolavori di Dosso Dossi: L' e la foot rests on a book of spells. She seems to have Melissa (gii Maga Circe)," in Kristina Herrmann-Fiore, Apollo e Dafne unmanned the soldier, separating him from his metallic del Bernini nella Galleria Borghese (Milan: Amilcare Pizzi, 19971, pp. 64-69; and the exhibition catalogue by Peter Humfrey and Mauro shell, his social identity. She has in effect "exploded" the Lucco, Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara (New York: man into his bestial and spiritual selves: the animals Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), nos. 3 and 12, pp. 89-92, below, principally the dog, the souls imprisoned in the 114-1 17 (both entries by Humfrey). Both pictures very likely came tree above. She is a witch who has the power to from the ducal circle in Ferrara if not the palace itself. The Borghese separate soul from body. The curious doll-like figures picture probably came to Rome with other Ferrarese pictures in 1598. It was first noted in 1650 in an Inventory of thevilla Borghese. hanging from the tree in the upper left, homunculi in 14. Dosso was working in Ferrara from 1513. fringed white skirts, with hands clasped in front as if in 156 RES 49/50 SPRINGIAUTUMN 2006

prayer, are the disembodied souls of the soldiers, In the narrative and the available role, witchcraft was a suspended as if in an embryonic state.15 They are related mimicking and ironizing of society's ways. the rural to the small naked figures that sometimes stood in for witch who summoned destructive hail with the jawbone souls in Christian iconography.16The dog, meanwhile, of an animal mocked the rain of the hopeful appears to retain some dim consciousness as he farmer.lg The picnicking wives occupied the aristocratic scrutinizes the empty cuirass." Alcina does all this to topos of the love garden, from tapestries, her lovers in the poem. Later her spell is undone by frescoes, and engravings. It is not clear exactly who was Melissa's countermagic. The painting does not in fact holding up the mimic mirror, whether it was the accused make it clear which direction the charm is working in, witches, an internally "colonized" population, or the that is, whether the maga has just unmanned the society itself somehow placing the mirror in the victims' soldier or whether she is a good witch practicing a hands, a society at once requiring critique and working metamorphic countermagic, undoing a prior spell and to dispel it. Witchcraft was a sacred war between the so liberating the man from his canine prison. It is not sexes, between an inside and an outside, waged at the clear, in other words, whether she is Alcina or Melissa heart of society. or even if she is one of Ariosto's witches at all. By swerving into irresponsible freedom, the court Witchcraft, to adapt the formula of Michael Taussig, poet and court painter would seem to have relinquished was a "savage mirror" held up to mainstream society.18 any capacity they might have had to register reality. Art appears to wash its hands of the real matter of witchcraft, founding itself as an institution on its 15. They are not representations of puppets or effigies of the sort sometimes used in sympathetic magic, nor are they people whom prerogative of "looking away." And yet it can also be Alcina has transformed into plants, as some have argued. The skirts are argued that such a painting as Dosso's extends the a puzzle, however; they suggest a relation to the cult images of the mimic work of witchcraft. 'the work turns back New World, in particular the zemi of the Caribbean peoples, effigies witchcraft's question, perhaps, with a question; meets made of wood or cloth. Columbus brought examples back to Europe. witchcraft's mirror with a mirroring of its own. Dosso, The zemis and the cult practices associated with them were described by the Milanese humanist Peter Martyr d1Anghiera. Peter Martyr's like the narrative of the sabbath, the gioco della donna, accounts of the discoveries circulated since the 1490s and were well ironizes the ethos of social love. Duplicitous, his known to every lettered person in early sixteenth-century Italy. No paintings also turn on witchcraft and ironize society's known zemi wears a skirt like these, nor are their hands clasped in this critics, the witches themselves. Once there are two manner. Nevertheless, a possible association with the zemi cannot mirrors, there is no end of it. Art, ungrounded and in quite be ruled out. For the original descriptions of the zemi by the Catalan priest Ram6n Pan6 and Peter Martyr's adaptation, see Fray perpetual motion, suspends the question of the reality of Ram6n Pane, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, ed. Jose the witch by provisonally occupying the same kind of Juan Arrom (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 21, 35-37, "space between" that witchcraft had claimed for itself.20 47, 51-52. For further descriptions by Peter Martyr, see The Discovery Apart from the few German book illustrations, the of the New World in the Writings of Peter Martyr ofAnghiera, ed. surviving images of witches from this period were Ernest Lunardi et al. (Rome: lstituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato and Libreria dello Stato, 1992), pp. 92-95. On the zemi themselves, see collectible works of art. The earliest was Albrecht Dijrer's Ricardo E. Alegria, "An Introduction to Taino Culture and History," in so-called Four Witches, his first dated engraving (14971, Tai'no: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean (New York: apparently a rendering of a of mature witches Museo del Barrio, 1997), pp. 18 ff. initiating a youthful bride (see fig. 10 below).2' Durer's 16. Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, vol. 4 (Freiburg: Herder, 1972), s.v. "Seele." Nude figures in wax, sometimes with hands clasped in prayer, were suspended near altars as votive 19. This act was illustrated in the early editions of Ulrich Molitor, offerings; see, for example, the scene represented in the altarpiece at De lamiis; see the publications of Charles Zika (see note 9). St. Wolfgang in Pipping, ca. 1480; Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck, Ex voto: 20. Taussig (see note 18), pp. 78-79; and 86: "Mimesis sutures the Zeichen, Bild, undAbbild im christlichen Votivbrauchtum (Zurich: real to the really made-up." , 1972), plate 1 and p. 76. 21. Interpretations are legion; see Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, 17. Cf. the painting in Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Kunste and Anna Scherbaum, Albrecht Diirer: Das druckgrapische Werk, vol. (Lower Rhine, 1470s), never satisfactorily explained, representing the 1, Kupferstiche (Munich: Prestel, 2001), no. 17. See the discussion of same triangle: the woman performs a magical ritual, a love charm, in Durer's witches in Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, the nude, in order, effectively, to reduce the man entering the door to and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadephia: University of the docile state of the dog curled at her feet. Dietulf Sander, ed., - Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 57-74. Hults's important study reveals Katalog der Gemalde (Leipzig: Museum der Bildenden Kunste, 1995), the extent to which the misogynistic iconography of the witch served no. 509, ill. 479. as a framework for male artistic self-fashioning. Still fundamental on 18. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (London: Routledge, the involvement of art with witchcraft is Eugenio Battisti, 1993), p. 78. L'Antirinascimento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), pp. 138-1 57. Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 157

Figure 4. Agostino Veneziano or Marcantonio Raimondi, "Lo stregozzo," ca. 1520. Engraving, 30.3 x 64.5 cm. Photo: Christopher S. Wood.

engraving of an ugly, distaff-wielding witch riding airborne, one of them balanced on Durer's goat. backwards on a goat dates from a few years later. The Scattered on the ground are the apparatus of witchcraft Italian engraving known as Lo stregozzo, a grotesque as attested by the handbooks and the testimony they cavalcade, not easily deciphered, cites D5rer1s rider (fig. elicited: human and animal remains, a cat, a mirror, 4).22The German artist Hans Baldung Grien, a pupil of forked sticks for cooking and flying. 'The devil is absent. Dijrer, commented on the topos of the witches' sabbath Baldung left several collectible drawings on colored in a series of works on paper. His chiaroscuro woodcut paper of similar scenes.24 In these drawings he develops of 1510 both complied with and derided the folkloric- the themes of masturbation and lesbianism, interpreting inquisitorial account of the nocturnal flights and the witches' sabbath psychosexually as a lurid gatherings (fig. 5).23A pair of fleshy nudes tend to the generated by the lower body. urn, the , and the row of phallic sausages draped Margaret Sullivan argues that the true context of on a cooking-stick-the recipe for impotence. A Durer's and Baldung's images was not the real-life holds an unsavory dish aloft. Two witches are already persecutions and trials, but rather scholarly and humanistic interest in classical witch lore.25Patricia Emison makes exactly the opposite case, arguing that

22. The engraver is usually judged to be AgostinoVeneziano or Marcantonio Raimondi; Patricia A. Emison, "Truth and Bizzarria in an Engraving of Lo stregozzo," Art Bulletin 81 (1999):623-636. Among 24. The survival rate of works on paper is low; these must other interesting arguments, Emison attributed the design to Battista or represent a small sample of a much larger body of witch-related work. Dosso Dossi. Fiorenza (see note 10, p. 309) immediately disagreed. On the series of Baldung drawings and their copies by other artists, see Emison's proposal is suggestive but not conclusive. For a recent Carl Koch, Die Zeichnungen Hans Baldung Griens (Berlin: Deutscher defense of Konrad Oberhuber's attribution of the design to Girolamo Verein fiir Kunstwissenschaft, 1941) nos. 62-65, A16-A17, and pp. Genga, see Roma e lo stile classico di Raffaelle, 1515-1527 (Milan: 30-31. See also Zika, Exorcising our Demons (note 9), pp. 260-262, Electa, 1999), no. 128, p. 192. Cf. also Hults (see note 21), pp. 39-46. 277, 283-292. Earlier than any of Baldung's witches is the drawing of 23. Matthias Mende, Hans Baldung Grien: Das druckgraphische a WitcheslSabbath by Albrecht Altdorfer (Paris, Louvre), dated 1506; Werk (Unterschneidheim: Uhl, 1978), no. 16. Hans Baldung Grien: see Franz Winzinger, Albrecht Altdorfec Zeichnungen (Munich: Piper, Prints and Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1981), 1952), no. 2. Baldung must have known it or an image like it by or no. 18. See Zika, Exorcising our Demons (note 9), pp. 241-244, but after Altdorfer. Baldung made one painting of the subject, the so-called see also pp. 271-272 where he revises part of his earlier reading of the Weather Witches (1523) located in Frankfurt, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut. image; and Hults (see note 2 I),pp. 15-26, 74-1 04. 25. Sullivan (see note 6). 158 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

dimensions embedded in vernacular lore. The form of his witches may strike modern beholders as unclassical, but this is our misconception. Baldung himself probably recognized no clear distinction between sources classical and vernacular, high and Baldung's images comment on the inquisitorial fascination with witch lore in the sense that they expose the textuality of the witchcraft phenomenon. They mirror the inquisitorial narratives back onto the society that invented them and unmask the entire witchcraft phenomenon as a massive fiction. These images move in Taussig's "space between"; they mimic and mock in both directions, first toward society, rhyming with the work of the witches and then immediately recoiling on and doubting the witches. The mimetic practice that such pictures parodically mimic is the inquisitorial persecution that in fact created witchcraft. For witchcraft was not a reality, but a narrative about women's lives and experiences that society compelled women to tell about themselves. The witchcraft narrative forced women by cruel persuasions to perform the identity "witch." The persecution produced the witch. Many women, it seems, chose voluntarily to perform that identity discursively, on a public stage, and so fling themselves self-destructively into the arms of justice, perhaps because it was one of the few discursive identities available to them. Retelling the witchcraft narrative was in many cases the only chance they had to tell anything at all. It allowed them to assume the role of the clear-seer, or the mystic, or the provocative Figure 5. Hans Baldung Grien, Witches' Sabbath, 1510. antagonist, even for just a brief moment.28 Chiaroscuro woodcut, 38 x 26 cm. Photo: C. Jean. Louvre, The early sixteenth-century images of the witch Paris, France. RPunion des Mus6es NationadArt Resource, N.Y. appeared mostly in the small-scale and replicable media: woodcut, engraving, and bronze. These were artifacts that instantly signalled their independence from the Italian engraving Lo Stregozzo, so obviously laden with classical erudition, in fact registers anxieties 27. The complexity of the "combinatorial" interplay between classical and "Germanic" or folkloric sources is brought out by Dieter provoked by the recent trial in Mirandola. She sees the Harmening, "Hexenbilder des spaten Mittelalters-Kombinatorische print as an attempt to envision the unseen horrors of the Topik und ethnographischer Befund," in Peter Segl, ed., Der sabbath, even as a kind of "fabricated" evidence of the Hexenhammer: Entstehung und Umfeld des ~alleusmaleficarum von sabbath's reality.26 Surely both are right. Lo Stregozzo 1487 (Cologne and Vienna: Bohlau, 1988), pp. 177-193. Sullivan, too, was a shaping of text-based erudition to the description stresses the interaction between the traditions and the misleadingly "popular" tone of Baldung's images (see note 6, pp. 342-351, of the corso or sabbath as it was emerging in testimony 363-364). and in print. Baldung's scenes, meanwhile, were ribald 28. On the performative aspects of the testimonies, see the and ludic, but also in their own way scholarly. His insightful analysis of Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, milieu and clientele in Strasbourg were erudite and Sexualit& and in Early Modern Europe (London and New sophiticated. Baldung was excavating the pagan York: Routledge, 1994), chs. 8-10. On the "sadistic, circular logic" that is both the condition for and the subject of Baldung's drawings, see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19931, pp. 26. Emison (see note 22). 323-357. Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 159

devotional or liturgical contexts. Dosso's Borghese picture was bolder in that it took over the scale and format of the sacred image, the altarpiece. Its immediate model was 's Madonna of the Meadows in Vienna (ca. 1505), not only for the pose and the landscape setting but for the red and blue layers of clothing (reversed by Dosso) and the hair braided like a turban (fig. 6).29Before 151 5, independent paintings on panel or canvas of that size and format, with non- religious subject matter, were scarce.30All these images, large and small, were distinguished from cult-based pictures by their fictionality. They make no reference to anything real. Interest in fictionality was dialectically coupled with elite skepticism or impatience with the witchcraft phenomenon. The public for the artwork defined itself as the public capable of exercising independent, skeptical judgment about, for instance, the reality of witchcraft. To take a case from contemporary court culture: Queen lsabella of Castile was consulted about one of her nieces whose apparent sexual recalcitrance had been attributed to the influence of demons, perhaps summoned by a maleficent brother-in-law. Isabella, however, was skeptical, unwilling to resort to explanations for her niece's behavior. Such practices, she protested, "should not be asserted or believed among Catholics. It is a wrongheaded opinion of the common people [vulgi]." The Archbishop of Seville and Figure 6. Raphael, Madonna and Child with St. John inquisitor-general Diego de Deza tried to convince the (Madonna of the Meadows), 1505. Oil on panel, 11 3 x 87 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art queen that this sort of was indeed Resource, N .Y. possible and assured her that the doctors of the , Thomas Aquinas included, had said so. Still lsabella refused to bend. "I will certainly not believe," she said, "that a can exert any power over those conjoined in matrimony . . . for those things are more Isabella's. Realism about human nature was the natural due to discord among humans than to interference by psychological matrix of a receptivity to fictionality. powerful demon^."^' Fictions only work because they are embedded within a Refined and private artworks became zones of community that share assumptions about the pragmatic, psychologically realist skepticism like Queen intelligibility of phenomena and the explicability of human behavior. Outside such a set of assumptions, the 29. Raphael's picture was painted for Taddeo Taddei, a merchant fictions would be mistaken for marvelous reports or and collector. The picture was surely meant for the private residence simply for lies. In order for there to be fiction, the realist and not a public or ritual setting and therefore belongs to a middle has to understand realism as a choice, an option; the category between cult image and artwork. realist has to have the sense of being surrounded by 30. Dosso's Washington maga may be dependent on one of them, Leonardo's Leda and the Swan (ca. 1506), as Peter Humfrey proposed; ordinary-thinking people incapable of lucid judgments Humfrey and Lucco (see note 13), p. 90. about things. The gap between the elected realism and 3 1. Josef Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte the simple belief-system of ordinary people becomes the des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn: space where fictions can be fashioned. The fiction is Georgi, 1901), p. 262. The text is discussed by Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: something like a lie, but it is a staged and protected lie. University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 31 3-314 [lsabella's comments Ariosto in the Orlando Furioso repeatedly comments translated by Stephens). in authorial asides on the improbablity of the very 160 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

events he is narrating, insisting on the reality and truthfulness precisely of the most fantastical elements of his story and so undermining the reliability of his own narrative.32 By protesting too much, he concedes that enchantments and metamorphoses do not really happen in life. As if any reader thought they did! Ariosto pretends to tend to the truth-content of his poem long after anyone still imagined that poems might be in the business of truth-telling. Ariosto's pretense of reassuring his readers that he believes in the events described in his own poem establishes an Isabella-like realism about human motivation as the ground against which the fiction can unfold. Common sense is the fixed grid against which fiction, a controlled confusion, can move. All of this had long since been understood by readers of poetry. Ariosto's devices are a mere pantomime: For painting, by contrast, it would be a new game. Authorial irony is the main thing painting had to learn from poetry in these years. Compare a sacred painting that dealt with witchcraft only a few years before Dosso's, the scenes from the life of St. Godelieve, painted in Bruges in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 7).33It is an altarpiece and therefore a painting prohibited from telling lies. St. Godelieve was a local martyr of the eleventh century. According to the legend, Godelieve's mother-in-law commissioned a maid to spy on her activities. In the middle ground of the scene illustrated here, the diminutive spy witnesses Godelieve's power to persuade crows to abandon the fields and instead enter a hut. In the foreground, the maid reports to the mother-in-law and husband. Godelieve is accused of possessing demonic powers and, in the next panel, will be strangled as a witch. The medieval witch was an anti-saint, a special woman embedded within society among normal people. The painting suggests that there is nothing on the surface that distinguishes between Christian saint and demonic Figure 7. Master of the Saint Godelieve Legend, The Life and witch. The painting warns that even a saint, perhaps of Saint Godieleve, late fifteenth century. Detail of the especially a saint, is misrecognized. Such an image right panel. Oil on wood, 125.1 x 43 cm. The Metropolitan instantly identifies the political core of the problem, Museum of Art, JohnStewart Kennedy Fund, 1912 (1 2.79). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 32. On the theory of literary autonomy encoded in the lunar episode of Orlando Furioso, see Quint (note 3), pp. 81-92. See also Daniel Javitch, "The Advertising of Fictionality in Orlando Furioso" and Elissa B. Weaver, "A Reading of the Interlaced Plot of the Orlando Furioso: The Three Cases of Love Madness," in Donald Beecher et al., which is that witchcraft itself is never seen. The eds, Ariosto Today: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of nocturnal sabbaths, naked dancing, devouring of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 106-125 and 126-1 53. children, and so forth were never witnessed by 33. See From Van Eyck to Bruegel (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), no. 15. Figure 7 reproduces the right third of outsiders. The Flemish painting reveals that the entire the central panel of the altarpiece. cultural project of singling out and exterminating Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 161

witches was built on spurious inference, guesswork, and realities but figments of the erotic imagination provoked extracted confessions. by the The modern prosecutors partially Godelieve is mistaken for a witch, but not because accepted this idea, making it both harder and easier for she was falsely accused of wielding power over birds. them to prosecute. Easier, because it removed the The spy was truthful. the saint really did control the burden of producing evidence of the sabbaths; harder, crows. The vita and the picture did not take the because whereas the cause of a bestial transformation or skeptical, rationalist option of deciding that Godelieve a night flight had to be a demon, the cause of a mere in the end never had anything to do with birds, and that illusion might be nothing more than the mind itself. The the charges against her were entirely trumped up. They prosecutorial handbook Malleus maleficarum, for did not require such an option, for they had at their instance, tried to find a middle ground. the Malleus disposal a different supernatural explanation at hand, accepts the literal reality of the nocturnal sabbaths. In not witchcraft but saintly, divinely endowed powers. The the section on transformations, however, the Dominican panel's and the vita's constitutional requirement to tell authors, following the opinions of Augustine and the truth compelled them to stick to supernatural Aquinas, deny that witches can transform people into explanations. The fictional poem and painting, by animals, explaining this instead as an illusion worked by contrast, had the freedom to raise the skeptical possibility demons.38Just behind the surface of the argumentation that no one ever had any supernatural powers.34 lurks the possibility that the sabbaths, too, are mere Unlike the Godelieve altarpiece, Dosso's canvases illusions; and the further possibility that such illusions, comment skeptically on the prosecution of witches by like or of any sort, might have non- repeating and extending the work of the witch. At the demonic or non-supernatural causes, threatening the same time, they comment skeptically on the witch by whole prosecutorial enterprise. Such were the doubts containing her within a work of artifice. The artwork at that had stayed the hand of the Church for centuries: this point was already independent of both antagonists, First, uncertainty about whether anyone really possessed prosecutor and witch. There is no more dramatic index the powers of the witch; second, uncertainty about of art's freedom than its refusal to take it seriously. In a whether belief in witches was an illusion caused by formula of Gregory Bateson: "The playful nip denotes demons or generated by the mind; and therefore third, the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted uncertainty about whether witchcraft amounted to by the bite."35 heresy. Those who tried to argue for the reality of the At the elite courts, the question asked was precisely sabbaths, no matter how thoughtful, were instantly not: Are witches real? For this is like the question: is caught in logical loops. Scholars found themselves there a God? If it has to be asked, it is already too late.36 adducing ancient texts, including poetic texts, to prove Elite skepticism immediately fed back into the the reality of modern witchcraft. Both the Malleus contemporary treatises on witchcraft, whose authors maleficarum and Molitor's De lamiis had referred to the were often humanistically educated and court-based mythic and literary personage of Circe, the island scholars. By asking the ontological question about enchantress who turned Odysseus's men into swine witches, scholars were inadmissibly attempting to ( lo), equally familiar from ( 7) and transfer a textual phenomenon into life. To ask the Ovid (Metamorphoses 14). In his treatise Strix, question was precisely to bring the chain of texts to a Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1 523; Italian ed., close, creating it now as the standard tradition of witch 1524) compared the modern witches, ten of whom had lore. Theologians had argued since Augustine that just been burned in Mirandola (Dosso's home town, nocturnal sabbaths and metamorphoses were not incidentally), to their ancient predecessor^.^^ It is an old

34. It should be noted, however, that the altarpiece, because it was 37. On the introduction of theories of the erotic imagination into narrating something that happened in the relatively distant past (four dernoniacal doctrine, see loan P. Couliano, and Magic in the centuries earlier), did not strictly need to decide about the truth Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. content of the Vita; it could just tell the story as it found it. 151-154. 35. Gregory Bateson, "A Theory of Play and " (1955), in 38. Malleus (see note 6), part two, question 1, chapter 8. Bateson, Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind(1972; Chicago: University 39. Burke (note 8, pp. 37-38) points out that fictional texts by of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 177-1 93, here p. 180. Ovid and Apuleius were adduced by scholars as evidence for the 36. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New reality of witches. Apuleius was avidly read at the court of Ferrara in York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 16: "[Alny question these years. See also the concise account of the interplay between the beginning with 'is there' is, so to speak, already an ungodly question." theological and humanistic accounts of modern witchcraft in Fiorenza 162 RES 49/50 SPRINGIAUTUMN 2006

theological reflex, not different logically from using diede commodit2, diede grande agio Christ's miracles to reinforce modern belief. In his di gir cercando ogni cosa a sua posta, biography of the lay holy woman Catherine of Raccongi, imagini abbruciar, suggelli torre, the same Pico legitimated the reports of her bodily e nodi e rombi e turbini disciorre. transportations by referring to the ancient philosophers lndi pei campi accelerando i passi, , Abaris, and Empedocles who had been gli antiqui amanti, ch'erano in gran torma borne aloft by demons. What happened to the conversi in font;, in fere, in legni, in sassi, philosophers, he argued, "nowadays happens to witches, fe'ritornar ne la lor prima forma. who are carried to the game of Diana or Herodias, as Without a guard she left her palace there, we have discussed at length in Stri~."~OIf demons can Which to Melissa, prompt her time to seize, do such things, then surely angels can, too, and we To loose her vassals that in misery were, should not doubt the living saint Catherine. The loops of Afforded all convenience and full ease; unreason grew tighter when modern poetic texts were -To range, at leisure, through the palace fair, introduced as proofs. In the first decades of the And so examine all her witcheries; seventeenth century, events in Torquato Tasso's To raze the seal, burn images, and loose Gerusalemme liberata were adduced by at least three Or cancel -knot, rhomb, or magic noose. demonologists either as reliable descriptions of Thence, through the fields, fast hurrying from that dome, witchcraft or as evidence of its reality.41There were both The former lovers changed, a mighty train, na'ive and knowing versions of "humanism": on the one Some into rock or tree, to fountain some, hand, literary authority introduced as an attempt to Or beast, she made assume their shapes again. reground and justify; on the other, literary references The picture may more specifically refer to Melissa's introduced as semantic overdetermination, a loading up conversion of the knight Astolfo, who had been of the poem or picture with classical lore-Apuleius, transformed into a myrtle tree, so restoring him to his Ovid, Theocritus-that was changing its meaning as fast armor (8.17).42 Neither passage is an exact fit. Again, as it was coming into philological focus. the painting provides no information that would even Dosso Dossi returned the prosecutor's question: is she help us decide which witch she is, Alcina or Melissa. a witch? by creating a kind of picture which declined to She wears an expression neither malicious, benevolent, answer the even more na'ive question: which of Ariosto's nor triumphant, but rather benign, neutral, sovereign, witches is she?The picture in Rome may possibly perhaps ~ybilline.~~A seventeenth-century painting in illustrate the following passage (8.7 4-1 5) in which the Baltimore attributed to Agostino Tassi quotes Dosso but soldiers of Ruggiero had been metamorphosized by does not help identify the subject.44 Certainly Dosso Alcina and the beneficient witch Melissa storms the could have identified his witch unambiguously if he had palace and undoes the bad magic, freeing the captives: Non lascia alcuno a guardia del palagio: il che a Melissa che stava alla posta per liberar di quel regno malvagio 42. See the review of opinions in Stefania Macioce, L'lncantesimo la gente ch'in miseria v'era posta, di Circe: Temi di magia nella pittura da Dosso Dossi a Salvator Rosa (Rome: Logart, n.d.1, pp. 29-34. 43. The engraved sibyls by Baccio Baldini and Michelangelo's Sistine sibyls are among her models. (note lo), pp. 264-270. See also Fr6d6ric Max, "Les premieres 44. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, inv. no. 37.1 145. A sorceress controverses sur la realit6 du Sabbat dans ltalie du XVI siecle," in in a landscape holds a torch to a brazier; there is armor, a dog, and Nicole Jacques-Chaquin and Maxime Preaud, Le sabbat des sorciers other curious details, but the textual reference is no clearer than in en Europe (XVe-XVllle) (Grenoble: Millon, 1993), pp. 55-62. Sullivan Dosso. A child-like figure attached to the tree appears to be winged (note 6, pp. 347-348) also stresses the evidentiary use of ancient texts. and wearing a pleated skirt, suggesting that Tassi had little idea what to 40. Quoted in Gabriella Zarri, "Living Saints: A Typology of make of Dosso's homunculi. See the entry by Federico Zeri, Italian Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century" (1980), in Daniel Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery, vol. 2, no. 319 (Baltimore: Walters Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, eds., Women and Religion in Art Gallery, 1976) Ipp. 44711481 Patrizia Cavazzini, "Towards a Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chronology of Agostino Tassi," Burlington Magazine 144 (2002):407, 19921, p. 245, n. 168. was the first to note the connection to Dosso. The brazier and torch 41. Stuart Clark, "Tasso and the Literature of Witchcraft," in J. resurface in the painting of the (1 526) by Jacob Salmons and W. Moretti, eds., Renaissance in Ferrara and its European Cornelisz. van Oostsanen in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; for a Horizon (Cardiff: University of Wales Press and Ravenna: Mario reproduction see Max J. Friedlander, Early Netherlandish Painting, vol. Lapucci, 1984), pp. 3-21, esp. pp. 8-12. 12, no. 250 (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1967-), p. 11 5, plate 139. Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 163

wanted to.45The lack of information suggests that Dosso fantasy and imagination against the possibility of the is deliberately converting the difficulty in recognizing reality of supernatural transformation^.^^ witches into poetics. He refuses to close the word-image Dosso's maga in the Villa Borghese was identified as gap. In an earlier version of the composition, the maga Circe in an inventory of 1790 and was generally known appears to be looking at a soldier standing at the left by this title until Schlosser suggested the link to Ariosto. with casually crossed legs, a figure now hidden by paint The Washington picture is still called Circe. Yet Circe layers but revealed by X-radiography at the time of the does not quite fit either picture, for the iconography recent e~hibition.~~The soldier, if Dosso had allowed requires swine and a boat, Odysseus's boat.49Still, the him to remain, would have assisted, possibly clinched, pictures belong to the Circe tradition generously the Ariostian reference. did the same with his defined. "Circe" was a textual and iconographic Three Philosophers, where the pentimenti-in this case, framework for addressing the complex psychological removal of explicit references to the Three Magi- problems of the delusion of the senses, imagination, rendered the picture more, not less, difficult to sexual enchantment, and beauty. The sorceress was de~ipher.~'The slight displacement from textual invoked in theological and literary texts as an all- anchorage accomplished by the revision was the point purpose example. When Dosso actually paints a maga, of Dosso's picture, perhaps of Giorgione's as well. By applying maga-like treatment to the maga herself, he is demurring in the face of subject matter, declining to allowing the means of the painter to "re-enterN the narrate or illustrate, Dosso sets his picture in motion in a painting on the level of subject matter.'O more general stratum of meaning. Literature, unable to In the early sixteenth century the Circe debate evade reference to subject matter so smoothly, has to resurfaced in a different place in the public sphere, signal such a move by other means. Painting is in effect provoking poet and painter to define each other against learning how to exploit its wordlessness, its difficulty in each other. Painting began to do what it was always making reference. It now voluntarily falls short of being reputed to do: reproduce beauty while bracketing "picture-writing." ontological questions. The equivalent is Ariosto's ludic A subject matter usually brings with it a set of foregrounding of those same questions. The end result is themes and questions that ignite as soon as they are the same, but one might say that Dosso's method is cool touched. To engage with the matter of the witch was to and the poet's hot. The key distinction is that poetry take over ready-made an entire problematic. The seems compelled to introduce the thematics of surface attractor around which ideas and debates about versus essence, for example at Orlando Furioso (7.73) witchcraft clustered was the name Circe. Both when Ruggiero sees through Alcina's charms. Painting Augustine's and Thomas Aquinas's discussions of the does not have to describe such discernments; indeed, it reality of metamorphoses had referred to Circe. The has trouble doing so. Painting just gives you the idea of Circe as the type of the deceitful temptress possibly in control of supernatural forces was perpetuated in vernacular literature, conspicuously in 48. JudithYarnal I, Transformations of Circe: The History of an Boccaccio's On Famous Women. The principal function Enchantress (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), of this long debate that wound through texts poetic and pp. 99-126; Gareth Roberts, "The Descendants of Circe: Witches and theological as well as images was not to determine Renaissance Fictions," in Jonathan Barry and Marianne Hester, eds., Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University whether witches existed, but rather to test the powers of Press, 1996), pp. 183-206; Charles Zika, "Images of Circe and Discourses of Witchcraft, 1480-1 580," Zeitenblicke 1 (2002) (online journal, http://www.zeitenblicke.historicum.neV~. 49. Admittedly, as some have pointed out, Circe is not in every 45. Fiorenza (see note lo), p. 259, makes this point. case accompanied by swine; see Zika, note 48, adducing a 1518 46. Anna Coliva, "Dosso's Works in the Galleria Borghese: New edition of Ovid and Macioce (note 42), p. 30. Documentary, Iconographical, and Technical Information," in Humfrey 50. On "re-entry" as a structural feature of artworks, see Niklas and Lucco (see note 13), pp. 75-76, fig. 58; Coliva considers the Luhmann, Art as a Social System (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, hidden figure to be Astolfo. 2000), pp. 143, 301, and passim. C. S. Lewis argued that the 47. On the original conception of the picture, see Salvatore Settis, sixteenth-century Italian epics demystified and mocked the popular Giorgione's Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject, trans. El len romances of the Middle Ages but at the same time practiced their own Bianchini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 20-29. aesthetic countermagic. "Even when you laugh at it, the old Still valuable on the topic of ambiguity is Creighton Gilbert, "On works. willy-nilly the fairies allure, the alarm, the Subject and Not-Subject in Pictures," Art Bulletin labyrinthine adventures draw you in." The Allegory of Love: A Study in 34 (1952): 202-21 6. Medieval Tradition (: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 299. ~urface.~'Painting is learning how to perform operations The stakes of the game that painting was playing were that only painting can perform, rather than simply higher, however. The borders of poetry were well fulfilling poetry's expectation of it, namely that it established by Ariosto's time; he could confuse the deceive with beauty. Painting in this period is starting to distinction between good and evil in all safety,53 make the case that its own true matrix is not poetry but whereas the secular painting, moving into a field other and prior pictures. By identifying the prehistory of traditionally occupied by altarpieces and devotional modern painting as its matrix and then working within images, was fighting for its existence. The kind of picture that matrix, painting begins to develop its own peculiar about which the strongest truth claims were made, the position on the problem of the gradient between past non-fictional or referential picture, was very much still and present, the problem that Ariosto designated with being made, indeed by the same artists who made the the phrase arti a1 nostro tempo ignote. secular pictures. The implications of the painting's Painting's intertextual recombination of its own metamagical inquiry were only intensified by the prehistory is its local form of countermagic. In this way institutional fact of the picture's recent painting at once recognizes and begins to undo the disengagement from the cultic context. force of history. The aim of this paper is to bring into This is a painting that is not a sacred image, but it coordination two traditions of reflection on resembles one. It defines itself in the first instance as enchantment, the theological-inquisitorial and the "not a cult image." By simultaneously invoking and artistic-intertextual. Both traditions involved constant distancing itself from that prior image, such a painting, comparison of the past with the present, of once- in effect, creates the cult image as a category; until then, powerful magic with its lesser modern forms, mere the cult image was so ubiquitous as to be virtually metaphors for magic. invisible. It was an image imbedded within a ritually structured context. Such images often had other functions and were indeed often private and disconnected from formal ritual of any kind, but their Vasari tells of the director of the hospital of Santa primary identity derived from ritual context. The cult Maria Nuova who objected because the saints in a image claimed stable referential relations to the painting by Rosso Fiorentino resembled devils. Vasari's personages and events of sacred history or to explanation for the patron's confusion is discouragingly eschatological doctrine. A non-cult image such as literal: They looked like devils because "Rosso's custom Dosso's is the sort of picture that does not have to in these oil sketches was to give certain faces an of specify what it refers to. It can just be "about" cruelty and despair, and then subsequently to soften something; it can reflect from a detached standpoint, their expressions and render them as they should be."52 even on something potentially self-undermining such as Painting in these decades was often skirting the frontier the nature of deceptive appearances. A picture capable between good and evil. The "charge" of the picture, of commenting generally emerged in relief against a positive or negative, was easily misread by the unaware. putative predecessor picture that could not do so. The Ariosto signalled the dangerous proximity of positive cult image-not in reality, but from the point of view of and negative by making both his witches, malevolent Dosso's picture-had been nai've about appearances. and benevolent, beautiful and finely dressed. It is this The cult image had offered the image of the Madonna, ambiguity that Dosso's Rome painting "illustrates." for example, as a reliable guide to her essence. The image of the maga also offered a beautiful surface, but signalled, through its self-differentiation from the cult 51. Cesare Cnudi, "L'Ariosto e le arti figurative," in Signore cortese image, that appearance itself was unreliable. The e umanissimo: Viaggio intorno a Ludovico Ariosto, ed. Jadranka fictional cabinet picture defined itself in terms of the Bentini (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), pp. 1347, here 35-37, said that whereas Ariosto transforms the true into a dream and back again, cult image on the basis of differing referential claims. Dosso only goes in one direction. The cabinet picture's commentary on its notional 52. Ciorgio Vasari, Le vite de' pib eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, vol. 5 (: Sansoni, 1906), p.157; Lives of the Artists, trans. G. Bull, Vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: 53. When imported by sailors to the New World, poetry like Penguin, 1987), p. 171. David Franklin, Rosso in Italy (New Haven: Ariosto's had to start all over and hold its own against referential texts; Yale University Press, 1994), p. 41, in turn reads Vasari's comment see Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, , and literally, as a critique of an ignorant patron who failed to realize that European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), the angels were still unfinished. pp. 13-34. Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 165

predecessor, the cult image, was part reverential and on the ground, in the rim of the enclosing , part skeptical. are material tokens that simply are their referents. They Dosso deployed the Circe tradition, within an are not formed by convention or governed by codes, as Ariostian framework, in order to re-stage an imagined our writing is. In fact, the maga does not write or paint predecessor state of art. He was testing the nature of his at all, but instead wields a kind of wand, a wax torch, in own mimetic powers by testing and monitoring versions her left hand, the non-writing hand. She performs the of a prehistory of art, even a prehistory of Christian art. writing much as a priest activates the Eucharist with a The enchantress's art figures within the painting as combination of words and gestures. Her own painting's own lost origin, a stronger form of mimetic performance is partially carried out as writing, in the figuration no longer available to painters. When the sense that after igniting the torch-or so one might read classical tradition describes witchcraft as a matter of her gesture-she will brandish it aloft, replicating the cosmetic trickery, it is basically saying that the witch formless pattern inscribed on the tablet, so in effect employs the same means as the artist. Dosso is testing writing with smoke, inscribing an inscription on air this equation from the opposite direction. He wonders that disappears as soon as it is written but has its about whether some more powerful use of images might effect nonetheless. That ephemeral smoke-writing is lie behind art. The painting tests art's role as the not alienated from speech as normal writing and potential successor to witchcraft as producer of painting are.55 apparitions. The whole scene of art is present in this painting, art The new fictional image hardly dared venture out of now as well as the lost prehistory of art that underwrites the elite household, unless it flew on a piece of paper, a it. Dosso's enchantress is the image of the cosmic print, or a drawing. Such a work was comparing itself to manipulator who has control of language at a deeper, the powerful, efficacious that ancient cultures pre-coded, pre-conventional level. She is a serene and disposed of. It was comparing itself to indexical images, successful version of Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I perhaps, of the sort that a witch or maga might (1 514), an engraving which was obviously one of its manipulate. The efficacious cult image, the notional models. Durer's Melancholy also sits among her archaic ground of the secular cabinet picture, is not instruments, including a brazier and an burner. literally visible in the painting. The painting offers There is also a dog. She is despondent, for unlike the instead a displaced and transformed cult image. The cult busy child next to her scribbling on a tablet, she has image reappears in the guise of the cryptogram on the somehow lost the key to creativity. enchantress's tablet. The tablet is the artifact that On the wall above and behind Durer's winged figure matches up somehow with the order of the cosmos and is a magic square, a tool for . Dosso's witch, she consults it for guidance. Conceptually it occupies meanwhile, sits in a magic circle, a protected precinct the same space that the crucifix does in pictures of the where her spells will have their effect and where words devout St. Jerome in the wilderness. The cryptogram on will leave the realm of the merely symbolic and instead the tablet in Dosso's Rome picture combines elements of become actions in the In her circle she is what appear to be geometric figures with formless invisible, just as are-notionally, it would seem-the doodles or flourishes. The diagram is glossed by various nude in the Louvre Fete Champetre by script-like but meaningless marks.54The diagram and Giorgione or Titian. The three soldiers in fancy dress script on the tablet remember a primordial or cosmic lounging in Dosso's landscape, already stock figures of writing, like the numbers and alphabet of kabbala, that northern Italian painting, are unaware of what is precedes speech itself. Such writing preceded the happening behind them.57The magic circle is an hierarchization of cult image and mere artistic painting. The maga manipulates a non-representational, mimetic- magical language. The illegible words on the tablet and 55. Cf. Orlando Furioso 6.38, "Alcina made the ready fish obey / By simple words and by mere magic lore" (con semplici parole, e puri incanti). 56. Cf. Orlando Furioso 3.21-22, where Melissa summons demons 54. Kristina Herrmann-Fiore, director of the Galleria Borghese, but protects Bradamante by enclosing her within a magic circle. Pico kindly made it possible for me to study the painting at close range. della Mirandola discussed the significance of the magic circle in his Attempts to make alchemical or geometrical sense of the tablet have treatise Strix; see Burke (note 8), p. 37. not met with lasting success. The book open at the feet of the 57. Felton Gibbons (see note 13, p. 200) argues that the maga Washington maga is potentially more intelligible. must be Melissa if the soldiers are so relaxed. 166 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

architecture, a temple; the twisting vines on the tree Landscape. Dosso's witch takes the pose of a seated suggest a sacred column; the circle permits her to be Virgin Mary in a landscape, perhaps in a hortus outdoors and indoors at once. conclusus. She resembles thevirgin but is not her, in the The magic circle around the witch is a figure for the same way that the magical writing on the ground picture frame. The frame was a virtual frontier resembles real writing but is not. Even the effigies in the differentiating a fictional from a real world, gathering all tree reinforce the Marian thematics of the painting, for the strange forces and phenomena and collecting them their hands are pressed together as if praying to the inside the frame and leaving the rest of the world on the interceding Virgin for release. outside. By retreating inside a frame, art created the idea If Dosso's witch is built on a Marian template, then of its own opposite, a real practical world beyond the by a principle of commutation the painting also allows frame where things make sense. Art found a social the sorceress to flow back into the Virgin Mary and function in the control and domestication of strangeness inhabit her. The painting excavates the witch-like layers and unreason by differentiating constantly between latent within the Marian myth. The pagan thematics of fiction and reality. Art drew a distinction between real the beautiful but deceptive surface were already and fictional worlds and then copied that distinction negatively inscribed into the personage of the Virgin back into itself as subject matter. That is exactly what Mary, for Mary was the one woman whose beauty did happens here: The magic circle reproduces the picture not deceive. The picture works backwards and discloses frame inside the picture. In doing this, Dosso's canvas is the pagan and magical dimensions of the Christian not exceptional, but rather is only making visible the figure.'jl The proposition is less outlandish if one basic structure of every artwork in this period. The new considers the Madonna and Child in a Landscape by picture frame, even when it does provide support, can Dosso Dossi in Parma, commonly called the Zingarella never be mistaken for a mere structural support. The or "Gypsy" on account of her orientalizing turban and frame around the enchantress is perfectly square and so the enchanted, fairy-tale atmosphere generated by the puts itself in analogy to the circle on the ground. crumbling phosphorescent paint and the eery isolation Dosso's witch in her green laboratory is twice-framed. of the figures in the landscape (fig. 8).62The Parma The most important of the work's own notional origin picture is the product of a transcoding; that is, an points is most carefully disguised, namely the Christian intersplicing of two unrelated codes: orthodox Marian image.58The sacred image is present only as a disfigured and "romantic" or Giorgionesque. intertext. The true subject of the picture is the nature of But the excavation of the picture's intertexts has only that disguising through disfiguration. Witchcraft had just begun, for the picture is governed not only by the become an occasion to reflect on latency, that is, on the myth of the Virgin Mary, but even more particularly by doubled or layered structure of the artwork.59It is the image of the Holy Family in the Landscape, the so- through disguising and disfiguration that the artwork, the called Rest on the Fight to Egypt. The Ariostian subject newly institutionalized cabinet picture, worked its comes to look increasingly like a decoy. Dosso's countermagic against the cult image: not a picture takes the Holy Family in the Landscape, disenchantment, but a co~nterenchantment.~~ disassembles it, breaks it down, and then reassembles Dosso's picture transforms a basic template or pattern it into a new picture. In doing this, Dosso extends the of Christian painting, the Madonna and Child in a challenge thrown down by vernacular devotional literature to the Church's discursive monopoly on the 58. The elite beholders of the painting and readers of Ariosto's poem were not necessarily much worried about the epistemology and theology of witchcraft. They were naturally concerned about the Christian cult image, however, whose legitimacy was the most pressing 61. Cf. Renate Lachmann on the aesthetic "fission" of the possible public issue in these decades, not least in Ferrara, which was individual, with implications far wider than her local subject, in one of the centers of reformist or crypto-Protestant thought in Italy. Memory and Literature: lntertextuality in Russian Modernism That is to say, the sorts of discriminations that Dosso makes within his (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), p. 298: "The history of picture between one sort of magic and another may be functioning, literature . . . can be read as a history of how dual beings have been just below the surface, as discriminations between one sort of religious split apart and tamed." image and another. 62. See Humfrey and Lucco (note 13), no. 7, pp. 110-1 13; Lucia 59. See Anselm Haverkamp, Figura cryptica: Theorie der Fornari Schianeti and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Parmigianino e il literarischen Latenz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). manierismo europeo, exhibition catalogue, Parma (Milan: Silvana, 60. Cf. the concept, familiar to inquisitors, of the diabolical 2003), no. 1.12, pp. 161-162. The veil held over the Child derives "countersacrament," Walter Stephens (see note 3 1), p. 198. from Raphael's Madonna of Loreto in Chantilly. Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 167

Figure 8. Dosso Dossi, Madonna and Child ("La Zingarella"), ca. 1513-1514. Oil on panel, 50 x 34 crn. Parrna, Galleria Nazionale. Photo: Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza PSAE di Parrna e Piacenza.

Christian myth.63Vernacular retelling of the scriptural flourished almost exclusively in northern Europe.64On story expanded the spare narrative into a spatial the way to Egypt, traditionally, the little family rests like dimension, giving the characters space to rest and gypsies in a green spot; the Virgin Mary holds her child- unfold. Cultic painting followed by insinuating more god with Joseph in close attendance, or tending to and more subjects into the repertoire. The Rest on the Flight to Egypt was not an old subject but one that -- emerged only in the end of the fourteenth century and 64. Louis Reau, lconographie de I'art chretien, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires Fran~aises,1957), part 2, pp. 278-280; Gertrud Schiller, lkonographie der christlichen Kunst, vol. 1 (Gutersloh: Mohn, 1966), 63. See the imaginative comments on this topic by Walter Seitter, pp. 132-1 33. Dosso's Holy Family in a Landscape, ca. 1516, in the Distant Siegfried-kraphrasen (Berlin: Merve, 1993), p. 26 and passim , was one of the earliest Italian versions; Hurnfrey and Lucco (see 168 RES 49/50 SPRINGIAUTUMN 2006

household tasks. In the background, sometimes, a pagan painting, Mary has abandoned her docile role and idol topples from a column. Joseph, father to a child he donned gaudy clothes. She reasserts the literal meaning has not fathered, is often a slightly ridiculous figure.65 of costume as an option, a way, a mere custom. She He is an older man who protects his young bride and literally travesties the Madonna, who like other holy her son but at the price of humiliation. The subject of personages was identifiable in paintings mainly on the the Holy Family discloses some of the paradoxes of basis of costume and other accoutrements. The Rome , the religion where the abject and infantile is enchantress is apparently the inverse of the nude figures brought into such close proximity to the ideal and in Dosso's Washington picture or the German prints and where ugliness and humiliation are so close to beauty. drawings. But in this respect these images are in fact Dosso has simply taken the proleptic or foreshadowing equivalent: nude or splendidly bedecked, either way it is structure of the traditional Christian image and pushed it not Mary anymore. This is made clear by Dosso's Venus further, literalized it, pulling apart the Holy Family and and Cupid, a recent attrib~tion.~~The picture is labelled dispersing its components in a new picture. He has by Cupid's wings and the obscure figure of Vulcan in the created an anagram of a Holy Family, just as if he had background, but in effect it is a nude Madonna and taken a word and recomposed its letters to form a new Child in a Landscape. The witch seduces through a word. In this painting, faithful Joseph has become the treatment and ornamenting of her own body that runs dog, a mute, helpful, shaggy, grey presence who looks directly against social convention, either through in wonder at the shining armor just as he had peered nudity-the inappropriate revelation of the body-or naively at the glittering gifts of the Magi who had through fantastic costume and luxurious, superfluous travelled from the East to honor the birth of the Christ materials. Her self-ornamentation turns the cosmos Child. Mary in this painting reasserts her original station upside down, just as the soft woman masters the hard, outside of matrimony, the posture of permanent armored soldier.70The "social" person always stays in estrangement from the body of man that she had in fact costume. The witch's power over her male victims is maintained throughout her strange marriage to Joseph. symbolized by her ability to disrobe and desocialize In this she was witch-like, for fundamental to the him. The embroidered cloth draped on her lap is in fact folklore of the witch, and later the judicial description of an article of clothing, with a sleeve and a collar, but it is the witch, was her alienation from marriage.66 not her own robe. It belongs to the unfortunate soldier; In the thirteenth-century Austrian retelling of the story perhaps it is the robe of silk and gold that the witch Das Kindheit Jesu, Joseph accuses Mary, when he is Alcina wove for Ruggiero with her own hands (7.53).71 confronted with the fact of her pregnancy, of deception, This maga is equally a mimic inversion of, and a rival trickery, and sexual mischief.'j7 Mary and her deceitful to, the three eastern kings who travelled to acknowledge handmaidens, for doubting Joseph, are untrustworthy the birth of the new king, magicians who voluntarily sorceresses, complicit with supernatural forces.68 In the subordinated their magic to religion.72

reading of a woodcut by Hans Baldung that Leo Steinberg later note 13), no. 14. David Rosand remarks that Ciorgione's Tempesta and contested (The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern other "pastoral" compositions "are almost secular variations on the Oblivion [New York: Pantheon, 19831, pp. 6-8, 11 7), many of his Rest on the Flight into Egypt"; "Ciorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral suggestive theses hold up. Cf. Dosso's own Holy Family in the Royal ," in Robert C. Cafritz, Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape Collection, with a weirdly horned and glowing Mary; Humfrey and (Washington, D.C.: Phillips Collection, 1988). Lucco (see note 13), no. 37, pp. 200-202. 65. The resemblance of the traveling Holy Family to a family of 69. Private collection. Humfrey and Lucco (see note 13), no. 29, gypsies was brought out by Martin Schongauer's engraving of a pp. 179-1 80. nameless wandering family projected onto the subject of the Flight to 70. The proximity of armor to naked flesh is explored in the Battle Egypt (1470s); see Le Beau Martin: Gravures et dessins de Martin of Orlando and Rodomonte at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Schongauer (Colrnar: Musee d'unterlinden, 1991), no. G4, pp. attributed by some to Dosso, by others to Battista Dossi; the only work 254-255. On Joseph's marginalization, see Albrecht Koschorke, Die by either brother unambiguously illustrating Ariosto. Humfrey and Heilige Familie und ihre Folgen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), pp. 30-37. Lucco (see note 13), no. 50. 66. Walter Stephens (see note 31), ch. 11. 71. See Kristina Herrmann-Fiore's entries on the picture in /I 67. Seitter (see note 63), pp. 26-56. Cf. Koschorke (see note 66, p. museo senza confini: Dipinti ferraresi del Rinascimento nelle raccolte 20), pointing out that the name Gabriel means "my husband is Cod." romane (Milan: Motta, 2002), no. 8, pp. 132-134; and Un 68. Koschorke (see note 65), p. 61. On the possible witch-like rinascimento singolare: La corte degli Este a Ferrara (MiIan: Silvana, attributes of St. Anne in early sixteenth-century German culture, see 2003), no. 180, p. 257. Jean Wirth, "Ste Anne est une sorciere," Bibliothi.que d'humanisme et 72. On the possibility of a "female Magus" and on the "femininity" Renaissance 40 (1 978):449-480. Although Wirth proceeded from a of the Magi, see Richard Trexler, The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in Wood: Countermagical combinations by Dosso Dossi 169

Dosso's Mary has recanted; the picture is her (ca. 1528) adapted Diirer's Four Witches engraving (figs. palinode. She desecrates the Christian chalice, vessel of 9, 10). Bronzino's uncanny Allegory with Venus and the blood of Christ, by burning herbs in it. In her arms Cupid in the National Gallery in London parodically she holds not her child but a tablet. She has sent her overturned Raphael's Holy Family of Francis I in the child up to the tree, to join the others, completing the Louvre.75Art kept trying combinations until magic met work of murder that the family had just escaped in its match. Bethlehem and predicting the Crucifixion. Here Mary The proximity of holy and unholy was equally a already sits below the Cross as she does in so many theme of the discourse on witchcraft. The witch was the pictures of the Crucifixion or Lamentation. On her lap is mocking mirror of the lay holy woman, the living saint not the body of her Son, but merely his seamless robe. who won adherents through spectacular self-denial, Christ is the soldier she has disrobed and de-socialized. ecstasies, demonstrations of , or In a few moments the three soldiers in the background thaumaturgic powers.7b In the era of the witch, the will gamble for it by throwing dice. female lay saint fell instantly under suspicion. Cesare Gnudi wrote of the circle-based structure of Biographies struggled to draw distinctions and refute this picture that brings it into alignment with the accusations. Remarkably, the inquisitors and witch- creations of Bramante and Raphael.73But it has come to scholars themselves were often closely involved with the look more like a parody of a harmonious man-cosmos holy women. Pico della Mirandola wrote a biography of relationship; or worse, it suggests that only the witch a lay saint, Catherine of Raccongi, and his Strix dealt can enjoy such a relationship with nature. explicitly with the homology between witch and saint. The painting is an anagrammatic dispersal of a Rest The Mantuan inquisitor Domenico of Gargnano was in on the Flight. But the painting also reveals that the contact with several living saints.77 conventional Rest on the Flight to Egypt was itself only Dosso's refined anagrammatic play, a diabolical ever an anagram of a Lamentation beneath the Cross. An combinatory magic, relativized the powers of the witch anagram is the rearrangement of the letters of a word to whose very reality had never been decisively form a new word. To make an anagram is to extract a demonstrated. His painting took possession of the whole word from a context of meaning and instead consider it myth of witchcraft, the collective construction and the as pure signifier. The rearranged letters make a new performance of the prosecutorial narrative, by signifier. This rearrangement creates a new context. In reproducing that performance in a removed artistic the framework of the anagrammatic play, both versions sphere. Like the narrative put into the mouths of the of the word, both combinations, are equal. The words' victims, his picture disclosed the forces of disorder reference to reality, their signifying function, is supposedly latent below a serene surface. In this way momentarily-though not irremediably-suspended.74 the picture brought out the fragility, conditionality, and The commutativity between Christian subject matter performed quality of the Marian ideal of womanhood as and its exact opposite was increasingly a theme in these it was retailed both by the traditional sacred image and years. Vasari, in his anecdote about Rosso's diabolical the prosecutorial narrative. The painting equally angels (see above), attributed the switching to a relativized the magical efficacy of the Christian image, a beholder's philistinism. But such reversals were in fact power whose theological necessity and orthodoxy had cultivated by painting as it tried to keep pace with life never quite been established. It smoothed out the and bring new domains of experience into the condition of representability. Pontormo's Carmignano Visitation

75. Leatrice Mendelsohn, "L'Allegoria di Londra del Bronzino e la retorica di Carnevale," in Monika Cammerer, ed., Kunst des History of a Christian Story (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Cinquecento in der Toskana (= ltalienische Forschungen, 19971, pp. 107-1 18. Kunsthistorisches lnstitut in Florenz, vol. 17) (Munich: Bruckmann, 73. Gnudi (see note 51), p. 20. 1992), pp.152-167, here p. 157. Others have noted the connection, 74. See the essay by Paul de Man on Saussure's "hypograms" and but Mendelsohn stresses it and reads it as a carnivalesque or burlesque their transformation in the poetics of Michael Riffaterre, exploring the moment. tension between rigorously formalistic and more semantically 76. On this topic, see fundamentally Zarri (note 40), esp. pp. replete--that is, approaching simple intertextuality-versions of 244-248, and Andre Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious anagrammatization; "Hypogram and Inscription," in de Man, The Beliefs and Devotional Practices (Notre Dame and London: University Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, of Notre Dame Press, 1993), esp. ch. 18. 19861, pp. 27-53. 77. Zarri (see note 401, pp. 244-245. 170 RES 49/50 SPRINGIAUTUMN 2006

Figure 9. Jacopo Pontormo, Visitation, ca. 1528. Oil on panel, Figure 10. Albrecht Diirer, Four Witches, 1497. Engraving, 202 x 156 cm. S. Michele, Carmignano. Photo: ScalaIArt 19 x 13 cm. Photo: Christopher S. Wood. Resource. N .Y.

apparent gradient between the cult image and the sending the powerful message that the cult image is only fictional image. A modern, fictional painting such as ever available from a vantage point inside the fictional Dosso's proposed a myth of a prior, more effective sort work of art. It shows how an image-magic might work if of picture whose powers derived from its ability to it had ever existed. That is not the usual account of the capture the true image of the . It then refuted the disenchantment process. very myth it had just offered by working a countermagic, a better magic, on the prior picture. The painting makes mimetic magic available again as a second-order phenomenon, by offering intertextual combinatorics as a mimicry of mimesis itself. By mimicking the mimetic image, the artwork took possession of it.78The painting does not really regret the loss of confidence in the efficacious cult image or the enchantress's . Rather, it embeds the cult image or talisman inside itself,

78. Cf. Taussig (see note 18), pp. 59-62.