Corps de sorcières, entre horreur et beauté. De la peinture au cinéma, avatars d’une tradition iconographique
Abstract
Bodies of Witches, between Horror and Beauty. From Painting to Cinema, Avatars of an Iconographic Tradition. This paper tries to investigate an important topic of European culture, since the Greek-Latin tradition to the nowadays cinematography: the body of the witch. Between the beauty of Circe and the ugliness attributed by Horace to the witch, a line is drawn which will reappear with a great force during the witch hunts at the beginning of the modern era (15th-18th centuries). Thus, the physical descriptions made at this period put and emphasis on the extraordinary beauty of the witch or on her monstrous ugliness. First of all, the iconographic scheme will be interrogated in painting, from the Renaissance (Hans Baldung Grien, Dürer, Lucas Cranach) and the baroque (Salvator Rosa, Frans Francken II) to the 19th century (Luis Ricardo Falero). Afterwards, on the basis of the obtained data, an analysis is proposed, in respect to some fantasy or horror movies, showing the importance of the system of aesthetical opposition between beauty and ugliness, with the help of the analytical methods of comparative iconography and of some insights from classical psychoanalysis.
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