Witches in prints: a slow-looking practice

The picture of the witch that most of us carry in our heads, with the pot, the broom, the goat and the night sky, was shaped five hundred years ago in prints. In this lesson you meet two of the most influential, by Albrecht Dürer and Hans Baldung, and you learn the slow-looking method that museum educators use. It is the best single habit for anyone who loves art and the esoteric.

Why prints mattered

Historical Engravings and woodcuts could be printed in hundreds of copies and sold cheaply, so ideas spread fast. Around 1500 Albrecht Dürer made an engraving of a witch riding backwards on a goat through a stormy sky, a world turned upside down. In 1510 his former pupil Hans Baldung made a chiaroscuro woodcut, printed from more than one block to give light and shadow, of witches around a steaming pot at night. These images appeared in the same decades as the great witch-hunting books and helped fix what a witch “looked like”.

Historical The prints reflect fears of their time: about women, old age, the body and disorder. Many show nudity and some mix witchcraft with other prejudices of the period. They are documents of belief and fear, not records of real gatherings.

The first printed witches

Historical Some of the earliest printed pictures of witches appeared in a small book by the lawyer Ulrich Molitor, De laniis et phitonicis mulieribus (“On witches and female soothsayers”), printed in 1489. Its simple woodcuts show women raising a hailstorm with a cauldron, a man transformed into an animal and three witches riding a forked stick through the air.

Molitor himself was cautious and suggested that much of what witches confessed was illusion caused by the Devil, but the pictures were more memorable than his arguments. The famous Malleus maleficarum, first printed in 1486 or 1487, had no pictures at all.

Historical Look closely at Dürer’s goat rider and you may notice that his monogram, the AD he signed on his prints, is printed in reverse. Many scholars read it as part of the joke and the warning: the witch rides backwards and the whole world, even the artist’s signature, is turned upside down.

Baldung’s 1510 Witches’ Sabbath was made in the chiaroscuro technique, printed from two blocks, one for the black lines and one for a tone, so that the smoke and the night sky have a strange glow. It is one of the earliest prints of its kind in Germany.

Who bought these prints

Historical Prints by Dürer and Baldung were not cheap broadsheets for the poor. They were collected by educated buyers who enjoyed fine technique, classical references and the thrill of the forbidden. In this setting the naked witch was partly a pretext for showing the body, partly a warning about women’s supposed weakness and partly entertainment. Remembering that audience helps you see why the images look the way they do, and why they should not be read as reports of what accused people actually did.

From fear to romance

Historical Later artists changed the tone. In 1886 John William Waterhouse painted The Magic Circle, a calm, mysterious woman drawing a circle around herself. Comparing an image of fear with one of romance shows how the witch changed from threat to heroine in art.

Your slow-looking practice, step by step

What you need: a timer, a notebook, a pen and a free open-access image from a museum website, such as the Metropolitan Museum’s copy of Baldung’s woodcut. Allow about twenty minutes.

1. Open the image as large as you can and set a timer for ten minutes.
2. Look without reading any label or caption.
3. List twenty things you see: objects, gestures, ages, movement, light.
4. Go through your list and mark each line O for observation or I for interpretation.
5. Rewrite every I as an observation, for example “evil” becomes “faces turned away, mouths open”.
6. Read the museum’s text and note one thing you missed and one thing you saw that it did not mention.
7. Repeat the practice with Dürer’s goat rider and Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle, then write three sentences on how the image of the witch changed.

Journal prompts: Which detail did you only notice after five minutes? How many of your first words were interpretations? Whose fears do you think these prints were made for, and who was harmed by them?

A practice variation for a group

If you are learning with a friend or a study group, try the slow-looking practice as a pair. One person describes the print aloud for five minutes while the other keeps their eyes closed and listens. Then swap roles with a second print. Afterwards, compare what each describer chose to mention first, and how much of it was observation and how much interpretation. Groups usually find that the person listening notices interpretations at once, because they cannot see the picture to check them.

Modern Beginners often ask whether these prints show real witches’ gatherings. They do not; they show what artists and their buyers imagined, drawing on sermons, trial pamphlets and classical stories. People also ask why the witches are usually women. Most people accused in the German trials were women, and the prints both reflected and strengthened that pattern.

A third question is whether it is all right to enjoy the prints. Many people find them beautiful and fascinating; you can admire the art while remembering the real people who suffered in the trials. A myth to drop is that the pointed hat and broom were always part of the image; in these early prints the witches ride goats, sticks and forks, and the familiar hat comes much later.

Woodcut or engraving? How to tell

Historical Knowing how a print was made helps you look at it, and the two main techniques of 1500 leave different marks.

A woodcut is a relief print. The artist, or a specialist cutter, carves away everything on a wooden block except the lines that will print, then inks the raised surface and presses paper onto it, much like a rubber stamp. Woodcut lines tend to be bold and fairly even, with angular corners where the knife changed direction. Molitor’s little book and Baldung’s 1510 sabbath are woodcuts.

An engraving is an intaglio print, from the Italian for “cutting into”. The engraver pushes a sharp steel tool called a burin into a copper plate, cutting grooves. Ink is rubbed into the grooves, the surface is wiped clean and a heavy press forces damp paper into the lines. Engraved lines swell and taper gracefully, like a pen stroke, and fine cross-hatching can build up soft shadows. Dürer’s goat rider is an engraving.

On a museum website, zoom in as far as you can. If the lines look like crisp ribbons of even width, think woodcut. If they thicken in the middle and fade to a point, or form delicate nets of crossing lines, think engraving. Checking your guess against the label is a satisfying small test.

Two voices from the period

Historical To understand who looked at these prints, it helps to hear the voices around them. The King James Bible of 1611 renders Exodus 22:18 as “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”, a verse quoted again and again in the trials. Against that stood a few sceptics.

Reginald Scot, in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), described the people usually accused as “women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstitious”. His point was not to mock them but to argue that such poor, melancholy women were easily persuaded that misfortunes were their own doing, and that the courts believed their confessions too readily.

Hold both voices in mind when you look at Dürer and Baldung. Their old, wild-haired witches match Scot’s description closely, which tells you whom the artists, the preachers and the courts imagined when they thought of a witch.

A practice variation: lines only

For a different kind of looking, ignore the subject entirely for five minutes. Look only at the lines: their direction, their thickness, where they crowd together to make darkness and where they leave white paper as light. In Baldung’s woodcut, follow the plume of steam from the pot and notice how a few curving lines suggest a whole billowing cloud.

Then return to the subject and see whether the technique has changed how the scene feels to you. Many people find that the craft, the patience of carving each line in wood, softens the fear a little and replaces it with admiration. Note in your journal whether that happened for you.

A worked example

A learner looks at Baldung’s woodcut. At first she writes “scary, witches, evil”. After ten minutes her list includes “steam curling in a long plume”, “a jar held up to the sky”, “a figure riding a goat backwards across the sky”, “a skull and bones on the ground” and “light and shadow printed in two tones”. She rewrites “evil” as “faces lit from below, wild hair”. The museum text tells her about the printing technique, which she had noticed without a name for it.

Try this

Look at Hans Baldung’s 1510 woodcut of witches in a museum’s open-access image for ten minutes without reading anything. List twenty things you see, then sort them into observations and interpretations before you read the museum’s text.

Recap

Prints by Dürer and Baldung around 1500 to 1510 spread an image of the witch shaped by the fears of their time. Later art, like Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle, turned the witch into a romantic figure. Slow looking, with observations first and interpretations second, is a practice you can use on any image.

What next

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Goya and the witch as satire. My witches in art page follows the story further, and museums and open access lists free image collections.

Further reading: Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2007). Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Sources

• Albrecht Dürer, Witch Riding Backwards on a Goat, engraving, about 1500.
• Hans Baldung Grien, The Witches, chiaroscuro woodcut, 1510 (impressions in several museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
• John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle, oil on canvas, 1886 (Tate, London).

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

Mark as done