A Witches’ Sabbath

A pale, wild-haired witch straddles a goat on the left side of this dark scene, painted by the Dutch artist Cornelis Saftleven in 1650. Goats were long linked to the devil and forbidden magic, so her mount was no accident. Facing her across the gloom is a churning mass of demons, warped creatures, and part-human figures, all crowded into what looks like a cave or pit. A ghostly light glows on the left while everything else dissolves into blackness, drawing your gaze toward the horrors creeping out of the dark.

Scenes like this, showing a so-called witches' sabbath, had a real audience in the 1600s, when talk of witchcraft and demons stirred genuine fear across Europe. Saftleven made his living in Rotterdam painting cheerful peasants and farm animals, yet he clearly relished the grotesque and the monstrous too. The strange beasts crowding this canvas nod back to the wild imagination of Hieronymus Bosch, who had delighted in similar oddities a century earlier. Rather than telling a clear tale, the picture piles up one weird detail after another.

Think of it less as a story and more as a mood, a window into how people once pictured the frightening rituals they believed took place in the middle of the night. Fresh oddities keep surfacing the longer you study the murk, which seems to be exactly the effect Saftleven was after.