The Art of Darkness

There is an undeniable taste in Scotland for the spooky, the gruesome, the dark side of life. Our literature is studded with examples from Arthur Conan Doyle to Christopher Brookmyre, from Tam O’ Shanter to Harry Potter. But where, it recently struck me, are all the grizzly pictures and the spooky sculptures?

I feel compelled to find out. Convinced that a veritable coven of ghosts and ghouls is lurking somewhere in the shadows of our public collections, I embark on a hunt to unearth artistic horrors too terrible to describe.

Where better to start than the first ever printed image of witches on a broomstick? Held in the collections of both the National Library of Scotland, and Glasgow University Library, this lively woodcut was made in 1489, to illustrate the Latin book “Of Witches And Pythonic Women”. Writing in the form of a dialogue, German lawyer Ulrich Molitor debated the vexed question of whether or not witches really did exist, and concluded that they did.

Deep in the bowels of the National Library, Rare Books Curator Helen Vincent pores over the opening pages, dedicated to Archduke Sigismund of Austria. “Molitor says he’s presenting it to him because they’ve had a lot of plague recently,” says Vincent, “and everybody’s been saying ooh, it’s witches, it’s witches!”.

Molitor debates whether witches can take on the shape of animals, and asks if they ride on broomsticks or on wolves. In the groundbreaking illustration, we see three women with animal heads astride a cleft stick. “If you were asked to draw a witch on a broomstick,” Vincent points out, “you wouldn’t draw something like this. This is a very specific thing which is related to a divining rod – the dark arts, pagan magic, weird science – things that aren’t sanctioned by the church.”

In modern terms, the picture is far from threatening, with three toy-like figures struggling to fit on one broomstick. In other illustrations, the witches’ evil, satanic banquet is more akin to a picnic, and a witch’s sexual liaison with the devil is almost cuddly. But to those who were dying of the plague in 1489, these woodcuts, and Molitor’s conclusions, must have been terrifying.

In Scotland, witch-hunting didn’t get under way in earnest until the 16th century, when fanatical presbyterianism took hold. In Edinburgh, accused women underwent “trial by douking” in the stinking Nor’ Loch, the end result of which was either drowning or burning. In 1759 the loch was drained, and exactly a century later, the National Gallery of Scotland was built on the site.

That’s where my hunt brings me next. Hearing of my quest, the self-confessed “Witch of the Print Room”, Valerie Hunter, invites me to visit her in the Department of Prints and Drawings, sunk deep in the basement of the National Gallery. “I think this place is haunted,” the Senior Curator tells me with a wicked grin. “They used to drown witches in the Nor’ Loch and I think there’s one still trapped in here.”

Hunter has surrounded herself with an alarming array of scary prints and drawings. “This is the Department of Spooky!” she assures me. I have clearly struck on a subject close to her heart.

“This is the daddy of them all,” says Hunter, pointing to a print so clean and fresh that it might have been made yesterday. It is The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, made by Albrecht Dürer just ten years after Molitor’s book of witches. The rampant horsemen gallop over the lost souls of men and women, while a bishop is devoured by the fearsome mouth of hell.

“We are looking at the millennium panic,” explains Hunter. “Everyone’s worried about the end of the world. You can imagine in 1499 if you saw that, especially with the movement in it, you’d have been terrified.”

Until this woodcut, illustrations of the Apocalypse had been relatively tame and unthreatening, like those in Molitor’s book – but not an inch of Dürer’s print is static. His depiction of death, a zombie-like skeleton charging forward on an emaciated horse, is iconic. This print, Hunter believes, marks the birth of the modern taste for horror in art.

Horror for its own sake was yet to have its day. During the Renaissance, the Bible provided good material for gruesome pictures, all wrapped up with a moralising justification. Anatomical studies of dissected bodies, despite their scientific motives, had shock value equivalent to the plastinated cadavers of today’s Gunther von Hagens. But later changes in patronage were to allow artists to unleash their imaginations on more literary sources such as Shakespeare and Milton.

Exhibiting societies began to open up, explains Hunter, providing many new avenues for a range of unexplored subjects. She points to four 18th century depictions of the three witches from Macbeth; “and obviously these, if you see them on the wall – they’re going to be crowd pullers.”

But what about some real, terrifying, unadulterated ghoulishness? Surely the most celebrated horror-monger of art history is Francisco Goya, whose prints will go on show at the gallery in December.

“We’re having a black Christmas at the NGS this year” announces Hunter as she produces a box of the Spanish artist’s prints. I’m treated to a sneak preview of page after page of brutal images; some depict Goya’s dreams and nightmares, and others reflect the violent realities of war and the Spanish Inquisition.

But separating fantasy from reality is not that easy; in Goya’s prints they are inextricably intertwined. One, depicting bulls dangling in the sky, was drawn from a childhood memory of men tying a balloon to a bull to try and make it fly. Others are enigmatic allegories, carefully masked to protect the artist from the prying eyes of the Spanish Inquisition. It’s this ambiguous overlap of hallucination and fact which makes the prints so terrifying, and so influential to the present day.

“People think the idea of Surrealism is a new thing,” says Hunter, “but actually it’s got great historical roots going back to Dürer and the artistic imagination for not what you see, but what could be there.” She pulls out a series of “noirs” by late 19th century French artist Redon, much influenced by Goya, but better known for his shimmering pastel images of pretty girls and flowers.

“The Symbolists influenced a lot of the Surrealist art that came later on,” explains Hunter, “so Redon’s the daddy of the Surrealists in a way.” She points to one skeletal, prawn-like creature, twisted and shimmering against the black. “I think these influenced the guy that did Alien to a certain extent – this looks like a sketch for one of the scenes.”

I ask Hunter about the Victorian painter, Richard Dadd, who went mad, murdered his father, and spent the rest of his days in Bedlam and Broadmoor. She pulls out a box marked “D” and leafs through rustic landscapes, handsome portraits, and sultry nudes, finally arriving at Dadd, and his little demons.

At first sight, the image of a dancing jester surrounded by playful imps might seem jovial, but in light of the artist’s tragic history, the drawing takes on a more sinister cast. “Imagine you’re having problems with your mental health and you draw this imp,” says Hunter, “and it’s a cacophony going on about you. This little man on top of you playing the tympany drums, and one is hanging onto your flute – they look all quite devil-like, don’t they?”

The tiny, pointy-eared fiends seem to be driving Dadd’s jester demented, and are a vivid indication of how the artist must have felt. He believed that he was persecuted by demonic powers, and you can’t help but wonder if he left the drawing unfinished because he was so tormented by this little band of devils that he couldn’t bear to continue.

I leave the Print Room with a head full of horrors, to meet another member of staff, Janet Ibbotson. She tells me of her altercation with a spine-tingling piece of modern art at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

John Davies’s For The Last Time is a disturbing collection of male figures in masks and black suits, two of them on hands and knees. They can be arranged in any number of ways, to imply different power relations, but there is always an unmistakeable air of repression and brutality about them.

“It was the middle of the night,” Ibbotson tells me. “The whole place is so quiet and you don’t expect to see something so lifelike. We were cleaning the gallery, and when we came out of the door we just saw four men, one sitting, two bending down and one standing, and we screamed. Eileen nearly fell on my back because they’re so lifelike. We actually thought they were real. Creepy!”

Now hardened to such spooky encounters, Ibbotson and her colleague think nothing of spending dark nights in the company of the galleries’ large collection of 19th century death masks. I shiver at the thought and make my way to Aberdeen Art Gallery, where I’m told they have a painting which, though effectively a self-portrait, will chill me to the bone.

And so it does. Ken Currie’s Gallowgate Lard, made just ten years ago, is a far cry from the socio-realist dramas for which he rose to fame. Since then, his cast of figures has become emaciated and ghost-like, and specific class concerns have widened into an examination of the human condition.

This face is all proverbial skin and bone. Thick oil paint topped with a layer of beeswax creates a luminous, ghostly image half way between base meat and ethereal spirit. It’s quite uncanny how closely the painting recalls the words of the witch, Hecate, in Thomas Middleton’s play of 1613: “His picture made in wax and gently molten / By a blue fire kindled with dead men's eyes / Will waste him by degrees.”

Hecate is promising to kill a man slowly by melting his waxen image on a fire. Currie’s painting might be that very image, a sunken face behind which lurks nothing but a numb march towards certain death.

Thoroughly spooked, I bring my search to a close. I am satisfied that true to form, Scotland’s collections harbour an unhealthy dose of the gruesome, the ghoulish and the deeply disturbing. And I have only scraped the tip of the iceberg – so beware, next time you visit a gallery, of the pictures lurking in the basement, hiding from the light of day.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 29.10.06