The Artist as Demon

 Stuart Clark’s “Glamours: Demons and Virtual Worlds,” begins with a question: what is the devil? “Nothing less than the inventor of virtual worlds,” Clark answers (123). The ultimate deceiver, the devil, demon, and witch is a master illusionist. But, according to Clark, he’s not a total illusionist. He is an inventor of virtual worlds but not of real worlds. Clark gives demons a very specific power, one not placed entirely in the realm of God or the realm of Earth, but carefully positioned at the edge of natural and the cusp of supernatural. It is perhaps best to explore Clark’s argument through the use of visual media, as the power of illusion is, as Clark insists, not just held in the hands of demons, but exemplified and possessed by the living artist. This understanding of the demon and the artist asks the viewer to straddle reality and unreality in an attempt to distinguish the truth. 

We can begin with Albrecht Dürer’s 1498 print, The Dream of the Doctor, which shows a doctor asleep at the stove while the devil uses a bellow to blow wicked ideas in his ear (Figure 1). The doctor’s dream is manifest in the shape of an Eve-like figure, who holds a hand out to the sleeping doctor. Eros plays on the floor, signifying the love and lust that the doctor is just beginning to feel. It is a collapsing of space: we see the doctor dreaming, and then in the same dimension, we see the dream itself; we knock on the doctor’s skull before pulling out what’s inside. Because Dürer depicts the imagined Eve standing in the same physical space as the doctor, the lines between illusion and reality have been made unclear. If we are actually residing outside the dream, in the Earthly space of the doctor and his stove, then Eve must be fake. But Eve herself stands in this Earthly space. If we are standing inside the dream, then Eve must be real in this dream-world. But the presence of the doctor disrupts this dream. If we are standing in-between, as the print positions us, then what is Eve? Real or fantasy? The only clear indication of what’s going on is the positioning of the devil. It is the devil that has created this strange real and not-real Eve, this half-movement from real world to dream world. What is the devil again? He is nothing less than the inventor of virtual worlds.

Figure 1. Durer, Dream of the Doctor, 1498

But again, he is not an inventor of real worlds. Clark describes Satan as a worthy adversary of God in that he wields almost identical powers; unlike God, he is limited “within the bounds of nature and its realities.” “Confined to the natural world,” Clark writes, “he could only pretend to go beyond it” (124). The devil cannot perform actual miracles. Forced within the confines of reality, the devil instead has to become a master of verisimilitude, facsimile and its paradoxes, possessing the power to deceive almost totally, but not totally. This devil plays expertly with dream worlds and illusions, bringing the imagined Eve to the forefront of the scene. The devil, unable to create Eve as God did, is only able to trick our human senses. We see what we think is unquestionable evidence of Eve occupying the doctor’s physical space—there are shadows created by her feet planted solidly on the ground, her muscles and curves are detailed and supple, her hand overlaps with the doctor’s—and conclude that she must be a physical, corporeal being. She is so close and so flesh-like that we are convinced we can touch her. It is only the peeking presence of her creators, the devil and the dreaming doctor, that reveals she is not real. At the same time, we cannot reduce the devil’s work to just a faking act. We have one foot inside and one foot outside. We are bound up in the physical space of the doctor, which is also, seemingly, the physical space of Eve. The print positions us at the very edge of the natural world and verging into the supernatural. The devil cannot make Eve real, but he can appear to: he can place her right in front of us, he can give her a shadow and a human body, enough so that we might believe she really is there, enough so that she might really be there. “The devil could so fascinate the eyes and sense of men that they believe themselves to be where they are not or to see what is not in itself so,” Clark writes (126). “In effect,” he concludes, “the practices of magic and witchcraft were never entirely real and never entirely unreal" (127).

This work of the demon, Clark argues, is exactly like the work of the artist. It is “like someone who paints,” Clark states. “They make something both real and unreal—a real portrait of a man, but not a real man” (128). Just as the devil can make a man think he sees something that he doesn’t, the artist is also able to manipulate objects, the painting also able to manipulate sight. It is a “perspective art” (132). The artist constantly plays with the nature and boundaries of reality and representation—this is not a pipe, except we think it is, for a second. Over the eye and the object, demons and artists seem to have total control, manipulating medium and light, creating shapes and reflections, turning paint into tears and stone and flesh. It is Eve being believably real; it is “the art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices…having an effect upon us like magic” (135). 

This idea of demon as artist is made explicit in Dosso Dossi’s 1518 painting, The Enchantress (Figure 2). The painting depicts a young Enchantress seated with her animal companion, holding a canvas under one arm and a sort of wooden instrument in the other. We know she must be a witch because of the abandoned suit of armor in the bottom left, perhaps the remains of some soldier she seduced, and the hanging children in the top left. The wooden instrument looks like a wand, which looks like a paintbrush; she places the blackened tip into the fire, as if to prepare to spear the children, or perhaps to finish her drawing. Her hair is pulled up, like a long-haired artist’s would be. There’s half a sketch already on the canvas—we have caught her mid-stroke, mid-thought. Dosso Dossi thus makes literal Clark’s idea of the demon as an artist, demonstrating to us exactly how a witch’s powers work. The demon deceives by working exactly as an artist does, with a canvas and a paintbrush. Clark describes the practice of “perspective art”: demons can “alter the composition around the object,” move the intervening air, hide the object, duplicate images, and more (132). Through perspective art, the demon and the artist, or the demon as an artist, tricks our senses and invades the eye. We can imagine the Enchantress exercising her powers as an artist, in the middle of drawing a dream or fantasy that she will later trick us into thinking is real. The canvas she holds is a representation of her position as a “consummate still life artist,” able to deceive a viewer into “confusing an image of something for the thing itself” (136). When we look back at The Dream of the Doctor, we realize the devil has drawn an image of Eve that we have confused for Eve herself. 

Figure 2. Dosso Dossi, The Enchantress, 1518

Peter van Laer’s 1635 self-portrait makes the same equation but flips it around, revealing new nuances (Figure 3). Here, we see the artist as demon. In this self-portrait, Pieter van Laer puts himself in a scene of witchcraft or alchemy. Dressed in the black cloak and cap of a magician, the artist stands behind his workshop table, which is covered in books, vessels, a morbid cooking pot, and a smoking skull. Again, we have caught the witch in the midst of creation. On a music sheet lying in the foreground, Van Laer has written: “the devil doesn’t jest.” The devil certainly does not jest—the magician is depicted with bulging eyes and a mouth open in terror as the devil’s clawed hands are seen reaching towards him. The magician has clearly created something that has caused the devil to be angered. We might imagine the devil angered for two possible reasons: his powers have been challenged, or he has been tricked by the magician, and has now come to deliver his wrath. 

Figure 3. Peter Van Laer, Self-Portrait, 1635

But we have to remember that this is not just a magician. This is a self-portrait of the artist himself. Van Laer has thus collapsed space as Dürer did. The real Peter Van Laer has reached inside the canvas to exist simultaneously as the painted Peter van Laer; he makes alchemist creations to anger the devil at the same time he makes artistic ones; he pushes the confines of the natural world into the supernatural. This collapsing of space means the viewer also becomes caught in the liminal space, entrapped between the other side of the table and our real world. Is this the real Peter van Laer?, we ask. Is this real? Perhaps it is this illusion that has challenged and angered the devil. In this way, it is the painting itself, or the making of the painting, which has become the spell to invoke the devil. This is Peter van Laer the artist giving himself the powers of demons and witches: it is the power to create, the power to push the limits of reality, the power to deceive even the devil himself, the power to make an image that has an effect like magic. 

We might look at all our images that way. That it is not just the Enchantress who is creating images and fantasies, but Dosso Dossi himself, who creates an image of the Enchantress. That it is not just the demon that has created an image of Eve as believable as Eve itself, but Dürer that has created this illusion, who has transported us to the edge of natural and the cusp of supernatural, who has made it so that we can’t really tell what’s real and what’s not. We are asked to think of the artist as a witch or a demon, as the inventor of virtual worlds (but not of real one’s), the creator of real portraits of men (but not the creator of men). When we view a work of art, we are always, always caught up in the liminal space between our own world and the virtual one, our senses tricked into believing the inside of the painting is real, until it might as well be real. The ability of demons to push the boundaries of the natural world to their limits meant that over and over again, the participants of the witchcraft craze were unable to distinguish between reality and unreality (150). The ability of artists to push the boundaries of the natural world means the lines are blurred yet again. When we are asked to understand art as a deceptive visual experience, the question becomes whether or not we can distinguish the truth.