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Abstract:
What is tempting Anthony?: the Beauty of Evil depicted in Symbolism.
Who are these wild women? Herds of seductresses flock around a panicking monk, Saint Anthony. With it, 19th century painters developed the Symbolist tradition: giving evil a female face. Artists like Lovis Corinth obviously did not follow the script literally, since it tells about the devils’ transformation to a seductive woman. Writers evoke immoral situations with suggestive words and phrases, where painters actually have to give evil an appearance. Late medieval artists illustrated the content more ‘correctly’: Lucas van Leyden presented her as a well dressed noble female; her devilish character is revealed by the horned cap. Why developed Symbolists the concept of evil as a group of femmes fatales? It is the main question this paper answers.
Anthony turns out to be a perfect person to define ‘evil’ over the centuries. The original textual suggestions of the temptations he had to resist, gave artists the opportunity to create evil after their own interpretation. Medieval artists had a taste for it: from farting in the face to toads crawling over sensitive body parts. But why did artists ignored the wild animals the text told about, while devils and composed monsters were now widely copied? And why ignored their 19th century colleagues this marvelous source of imaginative creatures in Anthony-paintings, and yet painted sirens and chimera’s?
The answers give an insight in the role evil played in these specific periods. And the power of painting: when evil was depicted so vividly and colorful it appeared so tempting that it was forbidden. ‘Nothing has the impact of that which we have seen with our own eyes’, explains Luther Link. With my focus on Symbolism, the connection of women to both the devil as to evil is discussed and strengthens my statement that art has the nature to show an ugly face as a pretty thing.