Charles Zika

Images of Circe and Discourses of Witchcraft,
1480-1580 [*]

<1>
The discourses of sorcery and witchcraft which developed throughout much of western and central Europe from the middle of the fifteenth century involved the production and circulation not only of literary and archival documents, but also of pictorial artifacts. As woodcut illustrations for theological or philosophical treatises, for historical chronicles or contemporary news-sheets, as single-leaf woodcuts or stand alone drawings, engravings, or even paintings, visual images of witchcraft must have played a significant role in developing this new discourse about witchcraft and the direction of the debates which it spawned. But precisely how pictorial images contributed to this process, to what extent they were implicated in it, and what impact they made on its direction, are questions which historians have barely begun to address. Traditionally, historians have tended to confine the significance of visual images to that of illustration or decoration. Consideration of the visual images of witchcraft has suffered a similar fate, with the exception of images produced by notable artists. But with a mounting level of interest over the last twenty-five years in the work of artists such as Hans Baldung Grien, the subject of witchcraft is no longer ignored by art historians.[1] There is nevertheless a tendency by art historians to limit attention to the aesthetically significant and novel work of recognised artists, and to ignore the cruder and sometimes more traditional, even though more widely available, woodcuts which served as book illustrations. And there is an inclination on the part of both historians and art historians to read these images in a very literal fashion, as depictions of actual witches or historical events or as straightforward illustrations or responses to particular demonological treatises.[2]

<2>
This paper is meant as a small contribution to the complex history of this process - the role played by visual images of witchcraft in disseminating and making credible notions of witches and witchcraft in the first century of the new technologies of print and print-making. As will be clear from the evidence provided below, I believe that the new technologies of print and print-making, which began to operate as a new cultural platform in a number of different centres in Italian-, French- and German-speaking territories from the last quarter of the fifteenth century, were critical to the new social currency which ideas of witchcraft were able to achieve in this period. Print and print-making significantly increased the speed with which new images could be created, as well as the breadth of their geographical and social circulation; they also facilitated a greater standardization in the representation of different subjects, even when allowing for significant variations and difference. And so, although the number and range of images was able to increase at an exponential rate, particular notions concerning the significance of witchcraft could be fixed by means of particular visual codes.

<3>
In this paper I concentrate on a very limited subject, the visual representation of the classical sorcerer or witch, Circe. By limiting the scope of my subject in this way, I wish to emphasise that the contribution of visual artifacts to a cultural discourse is hardly ever a unitary or straight-line development. As with other subjects, older visual traditions of sorcery survive despite the development of a new iconography of witchcraft by leading artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Urs Graf and especially Hans Baldung Grien in the early decades of the sixteenth century. But we need to be attuned to the resonances and visual cues from these developments, even when the images might remain faithful to older established visual traditions. In this way visual images are able to suggest links with other sets of meanings, in addition to their more obvious association with the literary documents and traditions to which they relate or respond.

<4>
A second reason for focusing on a classical witch figure as Circe, is that historians have paid little attention to the interest in classical models for sorcery and witchcraft on the part of sixteenth-century writers and artists, despite their widespread use in that period in underpinning debate concerning the incidence and powers of witchcraft. Whereas Margaret Sullivan's recent argument for the importance of classical literature in explaining the interest of sixteenth-century artists in the subject of witchcraft is timely, we need a far more detailed examination of the images which these artists created and their relationship to literary and visual traditions, before we can conclude, as she has, that particular artists and works were primarily stimulated by interest in classical literature rather than by a contemporary concern for the subject of witchcraft. Indeed, the two alternatives hardly need be exclusive; they are more likely to be complementary. Only by following the elaboration of iconographical traditions over time, through the recycling of images in different works, in successive editions, and in the duplications of copyists and plagiarists, and by being sensitive to the synergies between images and contemporary political, theological or cultural engagements, can we begin to suggest how images were being read and how they may reflect particular, though by no means unified, beliefs about witchcraft.

<5>
The world of classical literature certainly provided artists with rich sources for exploring the meanings of witchcraft. The mythography of Saturn and Diana, for instance, was drawn on very considerably in the sixteenth-century iconography of witchcraft.[3] But probably the most important role of classical literature was to furnish artists with specific examples of practitioners of magic, sorcery and witchcraft in the ancient world. Palaestra, Meroe, Pamphile, Medea, and in particular Circe, were all classical sorcerers or witches who became the subjects of sixteenth-century visual images. Of them all, it was Circe who received the most widespread and long-lived attention. The powerful sorceress of classical mythology especially well known for her transformation of the companions of the wandering Odysseus (or Ulysses) into beasts, was an immensely popular subject in the art and illustration of the period.[4] The most direct source for her visual depiction in this period, however, was not Homer's "Odyssey", as one might expect, but the writings of Boccaccio, Boethius, Virgil and Augustine. Boccaccio's work "On Famous Women" began to include images of Circe in fifteenth-century editions and the iconography was maintained well into the sixteenth.

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The types of animals represented in the woodcut and their appearance before Circe together with Ulysses are further elements which do not conform to the Homeric narrative. But they fit well with Boccaccio's text, since it leaves the types of animals undefined and ignores many elements of the Ulysses story. In line with Boccaccio's text, the woodcut is primarily concerned to emphasise Circe's role as a sorceress who exploits her powers of metamorphosis. The iconography of the print continued for more than fifty years. The Augsburg printer, Anton Sorg, only had minor changes made to the edition he published in 1479, as did the so-called Brussels Woodcutter, who illustrated the Louvain edition of 1487.[7] And when the prolific Augsburg printer, Heinrich Steiner, published the book in 1541 and again in 1543, the print he used by Jörg Breu included the same iconography and composition adapted from Sorg's Augsburg edition of more than sixty years earlier.[8] The range of animals into which Ulysses' companions had been transformed was simply expanded (now a lion, a boar, a rabbit and a stag) and they were clothed in more contemporary garb. The details of the classical narrative were clearly less important than Boccaccio's fundamental moral: "If we consider human behavior, we can well understand from this example that there are many Circes everywhere and many other men are changed into beasts by their lustfulness and their vices. And Ulysses, instructed by Mercury's advice, obviously signifies the wise man who cannot be bound by the trickery of deceitful people and who by his example often loosens the bonds of those who are held."[9]

<7>
Another common way of representing Circe stressed the means and instruments used by the sorcerer to carry out her transformation of Ulysses' companions.

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<8>
Further narrative elements from the "Odyssey" are provided in the woodcut, largely in line with Schedel's text. Ulysses and his companions are shown in the boat in which they spent ten years at sea after the Trojan war and came to the island of Aeaea in southern Italy where Circe was said to live. Ulysses's companions have already drunk of Circe's potion and have been transformed. They are shown with the heads of a deer, lion and goat, though the the third animal is clearly listed as a boar in the text. Looming over them and duly labelled is the figure of Ulysses. He gestures with his right hand as though in response to the gesture of Circe's assistant; and in his left he holds the Moly, the flower given him by Mercury as protection against Circe's "trickery and sorcery" ("gespenst und zawberey"). Absent from Schedel's text, though very prominent in the iconography, is the figure of Circe's assistant. Decked out in a Burgundian-style headdress, she sits at a table and very conspicuously points at the wand she holds up above a series of instruments which are difficult to identify. There is a bowl, what may be a short stick, two cups as used in the so-called cup and ball game, and what are likely to be balls, dice or coins. Her gesture draws the viewer's notice to her strange activity and would also seem to mimic that of Ulysses himself. The introduction of such a figure might have been influenced by a reading of Ovid, in which Circe's maids assist her preparation of herbs. But I would suggest that the specificity of the iconographical details would rather suggest that the figure might have been included in order to emphasise the "trickery and sorcery" ("gespenst und zawberey") on which Circe's potion is based and against which Ulysses' Moly flower was meant to protect him. As the vernacular text has twice introduced the notion of "gespenst" - trickery, deceit, delusion - to qualify the nature of Circe's sorcery when translating references to her "incantationes", so the artist has also drawn on a visual code for trickery which must have been well understood to at least some of the readers of the "Nuremberg Chronicle" who were visually literate.

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But what is critical for understanding the figure of Circe's assistant in the "Nuremberg Chronicle", is that Bosch and Bruegel were both drawing on a well known visual code which had long been used to represent the trickery or illusion perpetrated by conjurors associated with carnival. A figure at a table with cups, balls and a stick or wand, appears in numerous so-called "Children of Luna" images through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. One of the fashionable and novel forms of social analysis and commentary in this period was to link social classes, occupations, professions, societal groups, and even psychological profiles and states, with astrology - with the planets and signs of the zodiac. In this way conjurors were linked to sailors, fishermen, fowlers, millers, bathers and vagrants; for all were considered to share in the cold and moist qualities of the moon. They were the children of Luna and manifested the fluidity and speedy movement of the moon, in their fickle, capricious, unstable and independent behaviour and nature. The conjuror with his cups and balls, who features so prominently in most of these images, clearly merits his identification with Luna because of two characteristics: firstly, he represents the archetypal vagrant, travelling from fair to fair for his living; and his living, and by virtue of that his identity, is premised on the manipulation of reality by the use of trickery, illusion and falsehood. We find illustrations of a conjuror with cups and balls on a table as a central figure in Children of Luna images from as early as 1404 - in a Tübingen manual on astrology and medicine - and their number increases through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In the fifteenth century they are found in several German manuscripts, in an engraving by Baccio Baldini of c. 1460, and then in several block books from the 1460s and 70s.[14]

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<11>
The inclusion in the Circe woodcut for the "Nuremberg Chronicle" of an assistant who holds a wand and has cups and balls on a table before her, would seem to have been a conscious attempt to link the classical sorceress to this visual tradition of conjurors and tricksters. And if the young Dürer was indeed the artist, he may have learnt of the motif from The Housebook Master, whose influence upon Dürer is widely attested.[16] However, given the widespread use of the motif in the later decades of the fifteenth century, it could also have been known to Dürer or any other artist from other sources, whether block books or manuscripts.

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<12>
By the second half of the sixteenth century, the rhetoric of "trickery" and "delusion" was clearly identified as the devil's work. The two works on witchcraft written by Johann Weyer in the 1560s and 1570s, for instance, included "Teuffelsgespenst" (the tricks of the devil) as a key term in their German titles.[18] One source for the understanding of magic and sorcery as demonic delusion was Augustine; and so it is unsurprising that Schedel's text concerning Circe begins with an acknowledgement of Augustine and Boethius as sources. In his "City of God", Bk. 18, chs. 17-18, Augustine specifically rejected Circe's transformation of Ulysses' companions as a real transformation. He argued that it was merely apparent and involved phantasms which had been created through demons to deceive and delude the human senses. And it was precisely in this way that the near contemporary "Malleus Maleficarum", which was well known in Nuremberg in the early 1490s before it came out in two Nuremberg editions published by Koberger shortly after the "Nuremberg Chronicle" in 1494 and again in 1496, made use of Augustine's interpretation of Circe's powers of metamorphosis.[19] Another work which was also likely to have been known to Koberger and the Wolgemut workshop was Ulrich Molitor's "On Female Witches and Seers" ("De Laniis et Phitonicis Mulieribus"), published for the first time in 1489 and then fifteen more times in Latin and three times in German ("Von den Unholden") before 1500. Here too, in the discussion of whether witches possess the power of metamorphosis, Augustine's "City of God" is cited to stress the trickery of the devil, and another work attributed to him, the "De spiritu et anima" to explain that the transformation which occurs by means of the devil is little more than a phantasm.[20] The figure of Circe's assistant in the "Nuremberg Chronicle" woodcut would seem to represent a visual version of this argument, that Circe exercised her sorcery by means of demonic delusion.

<13>
The second source cited by Hartmann Schedel for his account of Circe is Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy".[21] Boethius does not present a narrative account of the Circe story, but lays emphasis on the poison administered by Circe as a metaphor for human bestiality. Some, such as Ulysses' companions, will succumb to it; others, such as Ulysses, will resist it. Schedel's text and the accompanying image represent this magical struggle between the two protagonists, Circe with her poisonous cup and Ulysses with his protective Moly plant, even though the visual emphasis is weighted towards Circe's magic rather than Ulysses' counter-magic. This iconography contrasts markedly with the much simpler representation of metamorphosis used in the earlier Boccaccio editions. The use of potions or poisons was well established as part of the sorcerer's and witch's stock in trade by the later fifteenth century,[22] and here the magical nature of Circe's drink is established visually by the wand and magical paraphernalia, which find no mention in the Schedel and Boethius texts. Perhaps the Wolgemut workshop had access to earlier illustrated manuscripts of Boethius from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which we know to have depicted the confrontation between Circe with her enchanted cup and Ulysses with his Moly flower.[23]

<14>
The emphasis on Circe's sorcery as an act of demonic deception in the 1493 woodcut quickly disappears from the iconography.

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<15>
The compositional format of the "Nuremberg Chronicle" woodcuts and the strong association of Circe's powers with a magical potion survived in images through the sixteenth century. In the 1530s or 40s, for instance, the Nuremberg artist Georg Pencz, produced a pen and ink drawing which depicted Circe and an assistant presenting a goblet to Ulysses, shown on his ship with his transformed companions.[24] The Schedel image was clearly the model; however the exoticism of the scene was removed and both Circe and Ulysses were given contemporary clothing. This would seem to be in line with a strong tendency to allegorise the story in the sixteenth century, as we shall see. Pencz also endeavoured to pay closer attention to the literary text than did his predecessor: so the transformed companions are now represented as the wild boar, stag and lion referred to in Boethius and Schedel. While the scene is again one of confrontation between Circe and Ulysses, the magical Moly provided by Mercury no longer features: this is more of a human struggle in which will rather than magic is crucial, for Ulysses is shown with both hands raised in a gesture of rejection.[25]

<16>
The power of Circe to transform, to cross and negotiate the borders between the beastly and the human, a power which could be read as evil and even demonic, is the major import of many of these images. Within the historical development of the Circe figure, it was the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid, who played the most important role in endowing her with essentially negative qualities.[26] The earliest illustration of Virgil's Circe appears in the first illustrated edition of Virgil's works, which was edited by Sebastian Brant and printed by Johann Grüninger in Strasbourg in 1502.[27]

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<17>
This frequently reproduced figure of Circe, spinning and surrounded by her transformed and caged animals, could have been readily identified as a malefic witch in the early sixteenth century. Circe's spinning was no doubt meant by the artist to illustrate the account in Virgil's text, while the prominent fire on the hill behind the goddess represented the cedar burning in her palace and illuminating the night. But by the second decade of the sixteenth century, if not earlier, the distaff and spindle had been often used to make visual associations with witchcraft;[29] and so together with the belching fire (even without a cauldron) the scene would have been recognised as involving powerful sorcery or witchcraft. A woman whose natural domain was shown to be the animal world would also have fitted well with images of witchcraft in the early sixteenth century. Circe here epitomizes that liminal space witches were understood to inhabit between the realm of the human and the beastly, an idea strongly communicated from the turn of the sixteenth century through the common image of witches in the presence of animals.

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<18>
Ovid's portrayal of Circe in the "Metamorphoses", Book XIV, went well beyond Virgil's emphasis on her cruelty in subordinating men to her power. Ovid's account also described a goddess whose heart was "more susceptible to love" than any other. And her wicked spells and potions of herbs and powders, the black arts which she'd learnt from Hecate, were directed primarily at those who spurned her love. In Ovid, Circe's sorcery is clearly governed by her lust, and the beasts which populate her palace are the victims of that lust. They are described at one point as "the host of fawning beasts", and at another as "a horde of wild animals, a thousand strong".[31] The unfortunate Scylla, for instance, had her legs transformed by Circe into a pack of barking wild dogs, when her lover Glaucus rejected Circe's love; Picus, king of Ausonia, was turned into a woodpecker for spurning Circe's love;[32] and Ulysses' companions were turned back into human shape in order that Circe could win Ulysses' love. Some images of Circe in the early sixteenth century seem to have been decisively influenced by Ovid's emphases and show her surrounded by an assortment of animals, as mistress of and mistress to men's lusts.

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<19>
An image of Circe which seeks to be more faithful to Ovid's text is found in the edition of the "Metamorphoses" published by Jean de Tournes in Lyon in 1557 with woodcuts by Bernard Salomon.[35]

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<21>
The depiction of Circe as a kind of Sibyl-magician who operated with magical talismans is matched in a closely related painting of c. 1515-16 by Dossi, which is often given the title of "Circe". But as Peter Humphrey, Felton Gibbons and others have argued, the subject is more likely to be a depiction of Melissa, the good fairy or unwitcher from Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso", who breaks the spells of her Circean opposite, Alcina.[40] Ariosto's poem, first published in 1516, was circulating in the Ferrarese court of Alfonso d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia as early as 1512, and Dossi, court painter since 1514, must have been familiar with it. Melissa is depicted in Dossi's painting seated, richly clothed in scarlet and gold brocade, an exotic oriental turban ornamented with jewels and shimmering gold thread on her head, not unlike the representations of Circe and the Sibyls in editions of Boccaccio's "On Famous Women". But here she is also surrounded by a magic circle in which are seen pseudo-inscriptions, and holds drawings of magical talismans. She is shown lighting her torch from a brazier in the manner of the Witch of Endor in Cornelisz van Oostsanen's painting of 1526.[41] Gibbons has argued that the knights seen in the background have just been released from their bewitchment. Indeed a recent X-radiograph of the painting shows that Dossi had originally placed a standing figure of a knight in armour where the dog is situated in the final version, with the armour the only clue to his earlier presence.[42] While Melissa's eyes were fixed on the knight before he was painted out, in the finished version they are directed to the embroyonic shapes of four paladins who emerge from the tree trunks at upper left, a process of transformation back into human shape after their transformations into plants by the evil Alcina as described in Ariosto's poem. Other victims in the shape of a dog and two birds await their liberation by Melissa. Whether a direct illustration of Ariosto's text or not, Dossi's exotic enchantress does seem to have been inspired by Ariosto's fantasy world of magic and romance. And it is clear that she has little to do with the visual traditions of sorcery and witchcraft which develop at this time. Dosso draws on the visual traditions associated with the depiction of learned magicians and also the Sibyls; and not surprisingly then, achieves considerable importance in the following century, in the depiction of Circe by such artists as Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Antonio Maria Vassallo.[43]

<22>
An equally powerful and elegant, yet sexually more self-conscious, figure of Circe, surrounded by monstrous beasts of whose threat she seems totally oblivious, is found in a series of images from the first half of the sixteenth century which stem from Parmigianino.

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<23>

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<24>
It was this last view of Circe as a figure of sexual seduction, together with a long medieval allegorizing tradition which included Augustine, Boethius, Bocaccio, the "Moralized Ovid" and John of Frankfurt,[47] which laid the ground for Circe's adoption by the authors of emblem books in sixteenth-century Europe. The new genre of emblem books, beginning with the "Emblemata" of Andrea Alciato, first published in Augsburg by Heinrich Steiner in 1531, used visual images, poems and mottoes in a coordinated way to present moralizing messages to their readers.[48] A series of editions of Alciato's work were next published by the Wechel press in Paris during the 1530s and 1540s, and these included French and German translations. New emblems were being constantly added, as well as new or revised images for the mottoes and poems which already existed. The popularity of Alciato's emblems was extraordinary and the number of editions quickly multiplied into dozens, and by the end of the seventeenth century totalled more than two hundred. By the mid sixteenth century the somewhat haphazard sequence of epigrams which derived from the original edition was converted to a more systematic reference work which gathered the emblems under particular themes or topics as commonplace sayings which took on an authoritative status in the communication of moral and ethical teaching.

<25>
Circe was one classical figure who became the subject of an emblem, "Beware of Whores" ("Cavendum a meretricibus"). In the editions of the "Emblemata" which were arranged under commonplace headings, the emblem featuring Circe was grouped with a series on "luxuria" or licentiousness. The earliest image of Circe which I have been able to find appeared in the edition of the "Emblemata" published in Venice by the sons of Aldus Manutius in 1546.[49]

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<26>
In the 1580s some editions of Alciato included a new image which was a variation on the iconography above.[55] Circe is no longer depicted enthroned, but is now set within a rural landscape in which she takes on the appearance of a shepherdess. She is depicted again with a staff, with which she touches one of Ulysses' sailors who has been transformed into a boar. An ass, a goat and a dog are also to be seen. And there is one very prominent detail not found in any images of Circe other than in paintings by Dossi and Pellegrino Tibaldi: the sorceress is depicted bare-breasted, the upper part of her garment folded up in front of her, perhaps to hold the herbs for which, Ovid's text tells us, the goddess was so famous.[56] The transformation of Circe into a prostitute has been completed and she is now presented as the lascivious destroyer of those who fail to resist her seductions. Perhaps the admonition of Geoffrey Whitney, who incorporated the image into his 1586 English emblem collection, A "Choice of Emblemes", expresses most clearly Circe's transformation into a source of sexual danger. Whitney's motto reads "Homines voluptatibus transformantur" ("Men are transformed by pleasure"), and he concludes his verses by addressing the reader/ viewer: "Oh stoppe your eares, and shutte your eies, of Circe's cuppes beware".[57] The image of Circe before the viewer's eyes represents the sensual seduction which every reasoned man must reject. Indeed, in a quite unusual image of Circe and Ulysses found in the emblem book of Mathias Holtzwart, which was published in Strasbourg in 1581, the two protagonists are depicted in combat, exchanging physical blows while a group of Ulysses' transformed companions look on. The German epigram concludes by addressing the reader in similar fashion to Whitney, that he follows the example of Ulysses' behaviour by resisting Circe and throwing whores out of his house.[58]

<27>
The epigram accompanying Geoffrey Whitney's image of Circe tells the reader that although Ulysses' transformed companions had the choice to be changed back into humans, they refused. It was their "wicked love" which led them to prefer serving Circe to becoming humans again; but it was their loss of human sense or reason which ensured that their decisions would remain those of brute beasts. In Whitney's image at least, Circe's wand is not so much an instrument to be used for transformation - for re-transformation has already been rejected - but a rod used to control those effectively enslaved to Circe and their desires. The allegorizing tradition from Boethius to Alciato, which interpreted the metamorphosis as a loss of human reason, provided the basis for the broad re-identification of Circe in the sixteenth century with the range of vices and passions which enslave reason. It has been claimed that this Circe was largely inherited from Servius' "Commentary on Virgil's Aeneid", and then fed into Neoplatonic thinkers such as Christoforo Landino and Giovanni Pico, and possibly also influenced views of metamorphosis found in Simone Fornari's commentary on Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso".[59] As a kind of culmination of such a tradition, Circe now became representative of all the passions, the very embodiment of Vice itself. She was presented in this manner in Natale Conti's widely-used mythological manual, the "Mythologiae", which became the standard and most influential work on the interpretation of classical mythology and literature in the later sixteenth century. The first edition of Conti's work appeared in 1551, and the second edition, with a dedication to King Charles IX of France, in 1568.

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<28>
The "Ballet Comique de la Reyne" was a theatrical spectacle of the new genre of "ballet de cour", involving music, songs, poetry and dance, as well as sumptuous costuming, staging and visual effects in the fashion of the later English court masque.[60] It was presented by Queen Louise of Lorraine and directed by Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx, as part of the celebrations held in October 1581 in honour of the wedding between Louise's sister, Marguerite, and King Henri III's favourite, the Duke of Joyeuse. The "Balet Comique" represented the struggle between Virtue and Vice and the ultimate victory of Virtue through the power of Reason and Wisdom. While Minerva embodied Reason and Wisdom, virtues resplendent in the person of the French king, Circe personnified Vice in the form of all the passions. Circe is the agent of disordered change on a physical, moral and natural level. As she brings change to the seasons, to time and to corruption in nature, she also leads men into vice. She is a disruptive force working against the world's stability and harmony, personified in the king. This representation of Circe was circulated well beyond the audience who witnessed the performance in 1581, when the "Balet Comique" was published, first in February 1582 and again in 1612.[61] And it was made even more accessible to readers through the engraving by Jacques Patin which depicted the opening scene of the performance (fig. 16). The engraving shows the Salle de Bourbon in the Louvre, with the royal party seated at the end closest to the viewer, and the king, Henri III, in the middle, flanked by his mother Catherine de Medici on his right and the Duke de Joyeuse on his left.[62] They are watched over by four Swiss guards with pikes; to the right are foreign ambassadors and behind them the ladies of the court. On the right side of the hall beneath the galleries crammed with viewers, there is an oak wood, in which the figure of Pan can be seen. From the trees hang silver lamps made in the form of ships; while behind the trees musicians were apparently concealed. On the left at ground level, billowing clouds, gilded and covered with stars, form a long vault (the "voûte dorée"), and in it groups of musicians and singers were placed. Directly opposite the king and the royal party at the far end of the hall, within a garden framed by a triple arch of trellis, is the contrary principle, the figure of Circe. She sits on her throne, as she was frequently depicted in the emblem books, her magic wand in her hand, and in front of her the transformed companions of Ulysses - in the form of a stag, a dog, an elephant, a lion, a tiger and a pig.[63] And in the centre of the hall a gentleman is shown addressing the king. The text tells the reader that this is a Ulysses figure who has escaped from the garden of Circe. On account of his personal greed he had come under the power of Circe, and he and his companions had then been transformed into brute beasts. Circe had fortunately agreed in his case to transform him back into human form; so he now comes before the king, who has brought the Golden Age to France and alone has the power to resist such magic, to make an appeal that he might be protected from falling again under the power of this evil sorceress.[64]

<29>
This opening scene of the "Balet Comique" establishes the central theme and action of the whole performance. According to the exposition in the accompanying text, Circe controls all change and all human desire for change. She represents the passions and vices which have not been controlled by Reason. And the performance as a whole represents this struggle between Vice on the one hand, and Reason and Wisdom on the other. The action involves a series of entries, accompanied by music, song and dance, by different mythological figures, who try unsuccessfully to destroy the power of Circe: tritons, sirens, naiades (played by Queen Louise and her ladies), the sea-gods Glaucus and Tethys, Mercury, Pan and the dryads. It is finally Minerva, escorted by the four Virtues, and aided by the father of the gods, Jupiter, who succeeds in breaking Circe's spell and power. At the end of the performance the vanquished Circe is led before the king and gives over to him her magic wand the symbol of her power. Reason, Wisdom and Virtue have conquered Vice.

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The figure of Circe in the "Ballet Comique", as both Frances Yates and Margaret McGowan have argued, was meant to further intellectual debates within the French academies concerned with the rule of the passions and reason, and the role of king as custodian of political, social and moral harmony and virtue in a period following the terrible brutality and upheaval of civil war. The ballet had a political and religious function at a historical moment when Henri III's Counter Reformation was being made very visible through the public performances of penitential processions through Paris streets, with the king, queen and members of the court taking part.[65] The central role given to Circe's wand in the ballet, as the sorcery instrument with which she immobilised her enemies and which she finally surrendered to the king, also demonstrates how Circe's powers in this courtly setting are closely identified with the learned magic of the Renaissance magician. The cup of poison or the distaff and fire are not Circe's attributes in this case; it is with the wand that she performs her magic and attempts to break the rule of reason and order. So while it is inappropriate to identify this Circe in any simple fashion with traditions of popular witchcraft, it is also difficult to believe that the theatrical presentation of an ancient female sorcerer as the embodiment of all the vices in the France of 1581 had no relationship at all to contemporary discussions of witchcraft. The year before the performance of the ballet, in fact, Jean Bodin published in Paris his massive demonology and most important witchcraft treatise of the later sixteenth century, "De la démonomanie des sorciers", which he had been writing since 1578. Bodin had been in the service of the king's youngest brother, the Duke of Alençon, since about 1571 and immediately after the Joyeuse wedding in October 1581 he accompanied the Duke to England in his unsuccessful attempt to win Queen Elizabeth's hand. And although the rate of witch trials in the kingdom of France remained fairly consistent during this period, in the Lorraine territory of the Guise family, of which both queen and bride were members and with which the king was attempting to create some bond through the wedding, the rate of witch prosecutions increased exponentially in these years. Nicholas Remy, the demonologist and "procureur général" of the duchy, who had been active in pursuing witches in Lorraine since 1576, would be called "the scourge of witches" a few years later in 1583. Whereas the relationship between the Circe of the "Ballet Comique" and contemporary witchcraft discourse is far from clear and demands detailed examination, the failure to address this relationship in the otherwise very perceptive analyses of the work by Yates and McGowan are also quite inadequate.

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It is clear then, from this far from exhaustive study of images of Circe in the first century of printing and print-making, that there was considerable interest by visual artists of the period in this ancient sorcerer. It was an interest which was clearly demonstrated in the print production of this period and the popularity of Circe's image was no doubt assisted by the capacity of the print medium to circulate images to a broad audience with previously unknown speed. While there were a few paintings and frescoes of Circe executed in this period, and a few drawings as well, the overwhelming majority of images were woodcuts and engravings. The interest in Circe was also partly a by-product of a broader interest in classical literature and mythography, for a significant number of the images which have survived were produced as illustrations to accompany new editions of Virgil and Ovid. But as is clear from a study of the illustrations produced for the many new editions of Virgil's "Aeneid", it was by no means mandatory to reproduce images of Circe when illustrating Virgil's text, especially given that her story only received very brief treatment by the Roman poet. Indeed, the visual evidence would suggest that renewed interest in Christian writers of late antiquity such as Augustine and Boethius, as well as later medieval writers as Boccaccio, were (at least indirectly) as strong an influence on late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century visual images of Circe as the revival of classical literature itself. This is matched by the study in recent years of the significant role of late medieval texts in the transmission of classical stories and ideas.[66]

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These different narratives and accounts of Circe provided the basis for the considerable variation in the way she was depicted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But the one common and consistent element in all the visual depictions of Circe was her power to transform humans into animals; and in most instances this involved the transformation of the Ithacans who accompanied Ulysses during his ten years of wanderings through the Aegean after the battle of Troy, into different kinds of beasts. Whether Circe achieved this by a magic potion or wand, in reality or as some form of trickery or illusion, as seductress or demonic witch, her power to cross over the borders between the animal and the human, and thereby imprison and subvert humans to her will and her control, was the consistent message her image conveyed. It was found in the earliest printed images of Circe in fifteenth-century editions of Boccaccio's work on famous women and also in the most widely disseminated images of Circe from the sixteenth century, as found in the new Renaissance genre of emblem books. In both these cases, the fascination of Circe's powers of transformation rested on the allegorical ways in which those powers could be understood.

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The "great power" of Circe ("tam magna potentia"), referred to even in the most allegorical of interpretations such as in the emblem books, could only be explained by reference to magic or sorcery. Yet there is no clear and strong evidence of the influence of the new witchcraft iconography of witchcraft on these images. The clearest case of the influence of the literary discourse of witchcraft would seem to be the inclusion of the cup and ball game in the woodcut of Circe in Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle. It would appear that contemporary discussion of Augustine's text in witchcraft treatises as the "Malleus Maleficarum" and the "De laniis" led Schedel to emphasise the illusory character of Circe's black arts, and the artist in turn attempted to represent this claim in visual form. While Augustine's conclusion about the reality of such magic was ambivalent and was used to support quite different positions in the debates over the nature of witchcraft during the following century and more, this would seem to be a case of the iconography responding to such discourse, and responding by use of a specifically visual code for illusion and trickery. It certainly does seem to be the case that the demonic character of the beasts associated with Circe in the iconography of Parmigianino and copyists such as Fantuzzi would have been encouraged not simply by an Ovidian reading of the sorceress' power but also by her association with a contemporary iconography of witchcraft which was beginning to place increasing emphasis on the specifically demonic basis of a witches' power. And the overtly sexual nature of Circe's power, whether communicated through the alluring beauty of Dossi's naked figure, or through the development of Circe into the whore figure of the "Emblemata", must have been at the very least assisted by the visual image of the early sixteenth-century witch as a woman with a fierce sexual appetite whose purpose was to emasculate men and appropriate male power by inverting the proper sexual order.[67] The adoption of the magic potion and the fire may have been more readily adopted in representing Circe because of their prevalence in witchcraft imagery, but without any sign of a cauldron it is difficult to argue strongly for any more than a reliance on the accounts found in Ovid and Virgil.

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As there is no really clear evidence of a direct iconographical impact of the developing imagery of witchcraft on the visual representation of Circe in this period, so it is difficult to see any obvious impact of Circean imagery on general representations of witchcraft. One point of visual cross-fertilization would seem to be the greater prevalence given to the stick or wand as part of the witch's paraphernalia of evil. While the stick was used as an object on which witches rode in some of the earliest images of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, its use in the form of a wand became more common in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A key moment in this development was its adoption for that other ancient model of a female witch, the biblical Witch of Endor, in the first instance in Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen's remarkable painting of 1526.[68] Subsequently this witch was frequently endowed with some of the paraphernalia of the invocatory or ritual magic associated with the learned, male magician, including the wand. It does seem a reasonable claim, however, that depictions of the figure of Circe would have increased the cultural visibility and therefore the discursive currency of the practices of sorcery and magic in the ancient world. By virtue of that, visual representations of Circe must have helped consolidate belief in the use of such powers by some in the contemporary world, and not least the power of particular women who shared in some mysterious way in the world of animal nature and could constrain the wills of men who failed to control and reign in what were commonly understood to be their brutish, sensual natures. In this way the quite different images of Circe produced in the first century of print would have played a significant, though not wholly obvious and transparent, role in sixteenth-century discourses of witchcraft.

Notes

Empfohlene Zitierweise:

Charles Zika: Images of Circe and Discourses of Witchcraft, 1480 - 1580, in: zeitenblicke 1 (2002), Nr. 1 [08.07.2002], URL: <http://www.zeitenblicke.historicum.net/2002/01/zika/zika.html>

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