Is the Devil still relevant?

‘Whether you call him Satan, Lucifer, or Mephistopholes, he’s a beast with even more faces than he has names’

The text for this project is taken from Co.Design’s interview with Bernard Barryte, curator of ‘Sympathy for the Devil: Satan, Sin and the Underworld’.

“Over the past five centuries, artists have variously depicted the devil as a fanged, horned demon; as an armored, Apollo-like army leader; and as a tailor of Nazi uniforms.

In the earlier depictions of Satan, hailing from the 1500s and 1600s, this intrigue with horror is projected onto an image of a bestial, inhuman demon. But as the centuries go on, artists start rendering the personification of evil as, well, one of us. How did Satan’s image evolve from that of a goat-like demon to more like your next door neighbor? How do artists decide what the devil looks like?

In the Middle Ages, artists who wanted to depict Satan—among them, Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, and Hendrick Goltzius, all from Germany—were given surprisingly few details from the Bible about how he should appear.

‘The Bible is very vague,’ Barryte says. To visualize this ruler of Hell, artists cobbled together imagery from older traditions that had already decided what demons looked like. ‘Bits and pieces from lots of now- defunct religions got synthesized: The cloven feet from Pan, the horns from the gods of various cults in the near east,’ Barryte says. "In the 15th and 16th century, these solidified into this personification of evil, seen as the great enemy of Christ, the Church, and mankind: a horned, bestial, furry figure."

Knight in the Grasp of the Devil, 1516, Urs Graf

'The Devil presenting St Augustine with the book of vices' - Michael Pacher, 1471-1475

‘Der Reuter’, or ‘The Knight, Death and the Devil’ – Albrecht Durer, 1513

Literature, too, has always had a major influence on how artists choose to represent Lucifer: in the Middle Ages, Dante’s Inferno, from the 14th century, provided the most graphic descriptions of the creature that lay in the innermost circle of Hell. In one image on view by Cornellus Gall, Satan appears exactly as Dante described him: standing upright, his lower half buried in a sea of ice, with three faces, munching on the three greatest traitors—Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. ‘He stares straight out at you with his foremost face,’ Barryte says. ‘Graphically, it’s a very powerful image.’

’Lucifer’, Cornelis Galle c. 1595

Giovanni da Modena, Inferno, San Petronio, Bologna (c. 1410)

In later centuries, depictions of Satan in art evolved from a wretched beast to a more human figure. "By the 18th century, he’s ennobled, almost looking like an Apollo," Bernard Barryte says—as seen in Thomas Stothard’s "Satan Summoning His Legions," from 1790. That was due to the aftermath of the French and American revolutions, which tried to excise the more superstitious elements of religion. "People interpreted the figure less as demonic creature and more as heroic rebel against the oppression of the paternal god," Barryte says. These renderings were also influenced by John Milton's Paradise Lost, which drew Satan as an almost pitiable tragic hero.

‘Satan Summoning His Legions’, Thomas Stothard, 1790

’Mephistopheles flying over the city’ – Eugene Delacroix, 1828

‘Dante and Virgil in Hell’ William Bouguereau, 1850

‘Hitler Idaho’ Charles Krafft 2003

The Sandman – Neil Gaiman