Salvator Rosa's 'Witches at their Incantations'

This is a description of 'Witches at their Incantations' by the Italian artist Salvator Rosa. It is oil on canvas, painted in about 1646. It measures about 130cm wide by 70 cm high, and is in a decorative gilded frame.

This dark painting depicts a gathering of around 20 figures beneath a cloud covered night sky. They are taking part in a variety of bizarre, gruesome and terrifying acts of witchcraft. Some are humans, there to be sacrificed or provide ingredients for spells being cast. Many of their witchy tormentors are naked, and some take the form of monstrous, skeletal beasts. They are arranged along the foreground of the painting, as though across a stage set, illuminated only by scattered pools of light from candles and torches, leaving any other sinister activities in the shadows to our imagination.

The figures are congregated on the earthen floor in three main groups. On the left they huddle in the shadow of a large rock behind them. A ghoulish standing figure, covered entirely in a white sheet, with cut out eye holes, is crowned and garlanded with greenery, holding a hoop of candles. These illuminate two hunched figures who are exhuming a skeleton from its wooden coffin, forcing it to sit up and sign a document with its bony hand.

The group in the centre attend to their incantations in front of a dead tree with withered, gnarly branches. From it hangs a corpse, his neck cruelly extended, head hanging at a 90 degree angle. A witch holds up a flaming pot, smoking the corpse, and a man at his feet works with scissors, harvesting the toenails.

In front of the corpse, a naked witch sits at a stone table, amidst a few gawping observers, their bare flesh gleaming in the firelight. In one hand she holds a small doll-like effigy which is reflected in a small mirror held in her other hand.

To the right, down on the ground, a naked white-haired crone with sagging breasts is hunched over a metal pot between her legs. From something clenched in her hand she squeezes blood into the cauldron, while in the other hand she holds a bone. She consults a recipe from a sheet of paper nailed to the ground beside her, together with magical aids; playing cards, skull, coins, herbs, a knife and various jars.

Moving to the right of the painting, a huge skeletal bird with a long sharp beak is almost as tall as the dead tree with the hanged man. The dark shadows of a forest behind, it looms over the figures below. In front of it, a man in armour is setting light to a white hare with a torch. The hare is on a sheet of paper on which magic symbols are scrawled, the paper pinned within a magic circle drawn on the ground, surrounded by candles. The armoured figure is doing the bidding of two men behind him, one holding a broom across his back. His companion holds a sword, upon which a human heart is impaled.

Last in line on the far right, a giant turtle-like beast with wide grinning jaws and bones for arms is ridden by an elderly witch. She holds a swaddled infant who she appears to be posting into a gaping hole in the creatures shelled back.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was still common for people to be accused of, and executed for supposed acts of witchcraft and sorcery. Salvator Rosa settled in Florence in 1640, and became part of a group of intellectuals, scientists and artists who shared a fascination with the supernatural and the occult.

Rosa probably painted this picture for a Florentine banker and collector Carlo Rossi. According to a letter written by Rosa, the unsettling painting was hung behind a curtain at the end of a long gallery so that it could be dramatically revealed to unsuspecting visitors!