This writer has a great sympathy for devil-lore, and many of his characters show the cloven hoof. An analyst of illusions, he has a profound interest in the greatest of illusions. An assailant of every form of superstition, he has a tender affection for the greatest of superstitions. An exponent of the radical and ironical spirit in French literature, he feels irresistibly drawn to the eternal Denier and Mocker.
The story of the Florentine painter Spinello Spinelli, to whom Lucifer appeared in a dream to ask him in what place he had beheld him under so brutish a form as he had painted him, is told in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite de’ più eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, ed Architteti (1550), which is the basis of the history of Italian art. It was treated by Barrili in his novel The Devil’s Portrait (1882; Engl. tr. 1885), from whom Anatole France may have got the idea for his story. But there is also a mediaeval French legend about a monk (Du moine qui contrefyt l’ymage du Diable, qui s’en corouça), who was forced by the indignant devil to paint him in a less ugly manner.
The devil is very sensitive in regard to his appearance. On a number of occasions he expressed his bitter resentment at the efforts of a certain class of artists to represent him in a hideous form (cf. M. D. Conway, Demonology and Devil-Lore). Daniel Defoe has well remarked that the devil does not think that the people would be terrified half so much if they were to converse face to face with him. “Really,” this biographer of Satan goes on to say, “it were enough to fright the devil himself to meet himself in the dark, dressed up in the several figures which imagination has formed for him in the minds of men.” It makes us, indeed, wonder why the devil was always represented in a hideous and horrid form. Rationally conceived, the devil should by right be the most fascinating object in creation. One of his essential functions, temptation, is destroyed by his hideousness. To do the work of temptation a demon might be expected to approach his intended victim in the most fascinating form he could command. This fact is an additional proof that the devil was for the early Christians but the discarded pagan god, whom they wished to represent as ugly and as repulsive as they could.
The earliest known representation of the devil in human form is found on an ivory diptych of the time of Charles the Bald (9th century). Many artists have since then painted his Majesty’s portrait. Schongauer, Dürer, Michelangelo, Titian, Raphael, Rubens, Poussin, Van Dyck, Breughel and other masters on canvas vied with each other to present us with a real likeness of Satan. None has, however, equalled the power of Gustave Doré in the portrayal of the Diabolical. This Frenchman was at his best as an artist of the infernal (Dante’s “Great Dis” and Milton’s “Satan at the gates of Hell”).
Modern artists frequently represent the devil as a woman. Félicien Rops, Max Klinger, and Franz Stuck may be cited as illustrations. Apparently the devil has in modern times changed sex as well as custom and costume. Victor Hugo has said:
“Dieu s’est fait homme; soit.
Le diable s’est fait femme.”
“Lucifer,” as well as the other stories which form the volume The Well of St. Claire, is told by the abbé Jérôme Coignard on the edge of Santa Clara’s well at Siena. The book was first published serially in the Echo de Paris (1895). It has just been rendered into Spanish (El Pozo de Santa Clara).
THE DEVIL
BY MAXIM GORKY[Story]
This story shows reminiscences of Le Sage’s Le Diable boiteux. It will be recalled that Asmodeus also lifts the roofs of the houses of Madrid and exhibits their interior to his benefactor.