ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights four broad ways evil is represented in art: the depiction of demons, witches, and other supernatural beings; images of temptation and the submission to evil by individual souls; works of art that suggest evil is embedded in nature itself; and images of evil as folly. It looks at Rembrandt's painting, Lucretia, and asking what we may learn of good and evil in this portrait of a young woman killing herself. Representations of evil have subjects, but there is also the viewer to consider when thinking about how these images were used and understood as cultural artifacts. Witches, devils and demons, werewolves, poltergeists, ghosts, and Satan himself were given ample artistic representation in early modern Europe. In visual representations of evil in the natural world, sometimes evil may be present in its absence, as in the Dutch menagerie paintings in the seventeenth century.
