Bewitched: Salvator Rosa's satanic art

The first rays of morning touch distant clouds with orange and unfurl a pennant of blue sky above black hills. But that's it for light. In about 1646, the artist and poet Salvator Rosa made darkness visible. He gave physical form to the shadows of the night.
His painting Witches at Their Incantations, which hangs today in the National Gallery in London, portrays terrible things happening in the Italian countryside in the wee small hours. A skeletal monster that resembles a dinosaur skeleton (did he see fossilised giants in a cabinet of curiosities or embedded in a hillside?) rears up, animated, over horrid figures: a naked witch mixing vile soup, a knight with a flaming brand, a ghastly shrouded figure, a skeleton being made to sign a document, a hanged man.
Who are these people and why have they gathered here? It is a witches' sabbath, a black mass. This mythic event transfixed demonologists, prosecutors and witchfinders in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. It also haunted artists. Witchcraft is one of the great themes of Renaissance and baroque art, and even survives into the Romantic era in the works of Francisco de Goya. It's conventional and cosy to think of paintings by the old masters as glowing depictions of Greek and Roman myths. But European painting in its golden age was also alive to the coarser, nastier, more toxic literature of demonologists at a time when the continent was in the grip of a witch craze.

It seems that all the vile scenes emerging from the stygian gloom in Rosa's painting are materialisations of darkness itself. The work makes its emotional effect with colour – or rather, the denial of colour. It is a distillation of gloom. Apart from a few flashes of blue and red cloth and yellow flesh, the nocturnal revellers seem to be made of greyness. The deep dark of the night has taken them.
The painting is a thorough exploration of what the devil's followers supposedly got up to. And yet, it fascinates because it is so ambiguous. Is it really an expression of the belief in witches that still flourished in Europe in the 1640s, or is it a study of our imaginative faculty? If it's the latter – an acknowledgment of the power of the mind to produce monsters – then perhaps what we are seeing is the first rays of a more enlightened Europe.

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