ABSTRACT
During the last thirty years the new interest in and the re-discovery of the figure of the “witch” by historical, gender, religious, economic, legal and media studies, art history and studies in popular culture has also led to a re-discovery of a flood of pictorial images. Witches and witchcraft had become a prominent theme not only in theological, humanistic, juridical and medical treatises, historical chronicles as well as in moralizing literature of the time but also in pictorial representations – being produced and circulated often as part of the print publications or distributed independently. What can be called in retrospect the “imaginary of witchcraft” produced a dangerous reality for those being accused of it. One of the questions rising within the research on these representations is whether or not, (and how) they have been involved in and contributed to the discourses and the circulation of concepts of demonic magic and the witches as a sect, which finally supplied the arguments for legal and institutionalised prosecutions of “witches” and the execution of about 50,000 persons – not all but the majority of them being women. 1 Among these representations we find miniatures in manuscripts, drawings, woodcuts and etchings, news sheets and last but not least paintings. Some of the representations are anonymous some of them can be attributed to masters and artists or their workshops, some of them have been received as major contributions of those artists whose works are considered to be paradigmatic for the history of art between 1500 and 1600. 2
