Twelve famous paintings of the Devil, from Giotto's Last Judgment of about 1305 to Franz von Stuck's Lucifer of about 1890, show a figure the Bible hardly describes. Each painter had to invent his body.
Some made him a beast, others a brooding young man. And when a Vatican official called one fresco fit for a tavern, the painter put the official's face in hell, where it has stayed for almost five centuries.
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Satan, Lucifer, the dragon of Revelation and the serpent of Eden are four names for one figure in Christian art: the angel who rebelled against God and fell. Yet no verse of the Bible gives his height, his color, or whether he has horns.
Saints came with models to copy, but the Devil had almost none, so painters shaped him to fit each picture. The great wall paintings of the Last Judgment, the end of the world when Christ judges the living and the dead, needed him near the bottom, punishing the damned in front of the congregation.
This list includes Satan himself and the devils who do his work in hell. Each picture earned its place because its painter gave him something of his own: a face, a job, a way of moving.
12. Franz von Stuck, Lucifer (about 1890)
In this dark canvas, almost nothing catches the light except two eyes staring straight out of the frame. They belong to Lucifer, another name for Satan, and Franz Stuck painted them around 1890, in his late twenties, in Munich.
He was still plain Franz Stuck then, years before a title of nobility made him the von Stuck of the museum label, and not yet a leading name in the city. Two years later he would help found the Munich Secession, a group of artists who broke away from Munich's official art association.
His Lucifer already breaks the rules of the subject, with neither horns nor tail, and not a flame anywhere. What Stuck gave him instead was darkness, and the choice carries a joke on the name. In Latin, Lucifer means light bearer, yet the painter left the leader of the rebellion in shadow, crouching without moving, and watching.
At a Glance
Artist: Franz von Stuck (1863 to 1928)
Painted: About 1890
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 161 × 152.5 cm (63 × 60 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria
About This Painting
Who is Franz von Stuck?
A German painter and sculptor who also designed his own house in Munich, the Villa Stuck, now a museum. He was later ennobled, which added the "von" to his name, and as a professor at the Munich Academy from 1895 he taught Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.
11. Mikhail Vrubel, The Demon Seated (1890)
A young man sits alone on a rock, staring at nothing, while the sky behind him turns red. Mikhail Vrubel painted him in Moscow in 1890. He looks more lost than evil, yet Russian readers of the time knew exactly who he was, and what he had done to a young princess.