RHYS AITKEN
Horrorfull Histories: An Exploration/Analysis of Horror/Gothic Literature, and Its Relation to and Subsequent Influence on Art Throughout History
May 2025
Fine Art BA Hons Dissertation
DOI 10.20933/100001379
Except where otherwise noted, the text in this dissertation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
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Horrorfull Histories:
An exploration/analysis of horror/gothic literature, and its relation to and subsequent influence on art throughout history.
Fine Art (Hons)
Word count: 7349
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree in Fine Art.
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design
The University of Dundee
Dundee
Scotland 2025
List of Illustrations – 4
Abstract - 5
Opening Scene - 6
Act One: The Horror is Introduced and Setup - 7
Act Two: We Learn About the Horror and Tension is Built - 8
Act Three: We See the Effects of the Horror and Build to Climax - 17
Climax – 26
Reference List – 27
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Page 8 “Ancient Mesopotamian clay tablet depicting ghosts”.
2. Page 8 “Aeschylus: Eumenides”, Robin Mitchell-Boyask (2009)
3. Page 8 “The divine comedy, The Project Gutenberg eBook”, Alighieri, D. (N.D.)
4. Page 9 “The hammer of witches: a complete translation of the Malleus Maleficarum”, Mackay, C.S. and Institoris, H. (2009)
5. Page 10 “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus from the Quarto of 1604”, Marlowe, C. (N.D.)
6. Page 10 “Faust Parts 1 & 2”, Goethe, J.W. and Clifford, J. (2019)
7. Page 11 “The castle of Otranto. Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg”, Walpole, H. (1764)
8. Page 12 “Frankenstein; Or the Modern Prometheus in Three Volumes”, Shelley, M.W. (1818)
9. Page 14 “Dracula”, Stoker, B., 1897.
10. Page 17 “La Mappa dell’Inferno (The Map of Hell)”, Sandro Botticelli (1480-1490)
11. Page 19 “The Hell panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych”, Hieronymous Bosch (1480-1510)
12. Page 20 “The Tree Man”, Hieronymous Bosch’s (1500)
13. Page 22 “The Nightmare”, Henry Fuseli (1781)
14. Page 24 “Three Studies at the Base of a Crucifixion”, Francis Bacon (1944)
15. Page 25 “Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, Francis Bacon (1981)
ABSTRACT
There is no big overarching argument in this dissertation. This dissertation will look at horror and gothic literature spanning from the fourth century BC with ancient tablets depicting exorcisms all the way up to the seventeenth century with Bram Stokers Dracula. These written works will be analysed alongside the painted works of Sandro Botticelli, Hieronymous Bosch, Henry Fuseli and Francis Bacon. With these artists in mind, we look at different genres of horror, religious horror is a common occurrence unsurprisingly, we see instances of haunting and possession. Elements of body horror, physical violence and very typical of the times in which some of these works were created, bountiful sexist horror examples.
The dissertation is broken down and structured in the same way as a classic horror movie: The Opening Scene building up part of the story and setting the tone, explaining the origin of the term horror and explain how horror can be underrated.
Act One: The Horror is Introduced and Setup, this is where the origins of vampires, werewolves, spirit/ghosts, zombies, demons, and witches are explained.
Act Two: We Learn About the Horror and Tension is Built, here we summarise and analyse early horror literature which influences physical art.
Act Three: We See the Effects of the Horror and Build to Climax, we analyse the physical art through the lens of the literature.
Climax, we discuss what we have learned so far, flash back to the middle of the story and then celebrate the artists in the closing moments.
OPENING SCENE
The term “Horror” was introduced to the English vocabulary somewhere in the Early 14th century. Horror meaning a feeling of disgust or dread, derived from the Latin horror described as a feeling of dread or religious awe, this comes from the Latin verb horrēre. Horrēre meaning to shudder/shiver (with cold), tremble (with fear), or in some cases can refer to one’s appearance
It isn’t a secret that in media whether it be art, cinema, books etc. that the horror genre is often overlooked and shunned in a sense especially nowadays For example, the last time a horror film won an award was Get Out by Jordan Peele and though it did get four academy awards in 2018 there is then roughly a ten-year gap between the wins recorded before then. This dissertation will look at the literary works of gothic and horror giants and look at the links they hold with some of the most famous dark artworks throughout history, we will discuss the horror elements and look at how the literature has in ways influenced the artists to create their works in an attempt to celebrate the works of all the artists.
ACT ONE: THE HORROR IS INTRODUCED AND SETUP
The true origin of horror is widely agreed to be found within verbal telling’s of folklore, native fables, myths, and customs that pass down centuries of cultures, and in cases through religion and worship. The classic antagonists we are so used to seeing in stories, movies, art etc. all stem from these roots. Such as the vampire, werewolf, zombie, demon, spirit and witches, these terms would have been used in their own respective ways to try to explain certain anomalies.
Vampires are supposedly walking dead creatures, typically eastern European, who consume the blood of living to further the semblance of life. According to ‘The history of the word “vampire”’ Wilson, K.M. (1985). Werewolves or Lycanthropes can be found in 16th century reports of men in a state of madness believing they were wolves and acting as such, however the origin seems to be skewed as reported in Stewart, C.T. (2013) The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition. The Zombie is of African origin and is reportedly a result of Vodou practice where one’s body is reanimated and will be under the control of a sorcerer or the need to consume flesh. Ghost is the English translation for the German word gaistaz and have had varying forms and origins throughout the years, early stories exist in the first century A.D. and span back to the Roman times noted by Pliny the Younger “the great Roman author and statesman Pliny the Younger recorded one of the first notable ghost stories in his letters...” and early modern England. History.com, Editors (2009). Witches have many different origins, some coming from Greek mythos, the pagan religion is another obvious source and others come from European folklore. The word derives from the old English wiċċe meaning a practitioner of magic, this famously was used to prosecute intelligent women. Quensel, S. (2023)
ACT TWO: WE LEARN ABOUT THE HORROR AND TENSION IS BUILT
The origin of the horror genre however can be found within early literature, some early examples would be the ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets with references to spirits or ghosts inscribed on them dated back around five thousand years ago “tablet dated to the early third millennium BCE, which is inscribed with the cuneiform character for the Sumerian word for ‘ghost’, gidim”…
Clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia (fourth century BCE) showing earliest known depiction of a ghost” Al-Rashid, M. (2022) which were uncovered in the mountains of Iraq. The early Egyptians had a fascination with the afterlife in their form of the Duat, we can find these rituals and the instructions to achieving the afterlife in the Book of the Dead. If we look to the Greeks for Ghost stories, we’ll find Aeschylus’ Eumenides (458 BCE) This is the third part of the Oresteia trilogy which follows the story of Ortestes and his journey to Athens to stand trial for committing matricide (a crime which he commits as vengeance for her killing his father). On his way he is hunted by the Furies which his mother’s ghost has set upon him, and we also see the ghost of his mother throughout. The Furies fight with the god Apollo, and he declares them a relic of the past and that now is not a time for vengeance but for justice. Athena holds court and the Furies are the accusing faction. The jury comes to an impasse in the voting and the goddess Athena cast the final vote to acquit Orestes of his crime, The furies are then persuaded to be guardians of Athens in exchange for their peace and in turn will be dubbed the Eumenides meaning the kindly ones. The Divine Comedy (1300) is a fantastic example of early literature that applies obvious religious and horror elements that at the time would’ve been a pioneering piece of literature and the depiction of hell would’ve struck fear in the Christians at that time. Dante is led by the spirit of the poet Virgil on a journey throughout the depths of Hell so that he may yet reach paradise. Virgil guides him
from the forest to Hell (Inferno), then Purgatory (Purgatorio) and finally to Paradise (Paradiso) or Heaven; Dante is forced to see the struggles of those in penance and the demons from the underworld.
Malleus Maleficarum or the Hammer of Witches (c. 1486) is a, bafflingly nonfiction, self-described handbook used to assist in the hunting and brutal prosecuting of “witches” in Europe throughout the 16th and well into the 18th century; Originally penned by Heinrich Kraemer (Institoris), an Austrian theology professor and inquisitor for the Tyrol region. Kraemer alongside the German Johann Sprenger, with the blessing of the ironically name Pope Innocent VIII, set out to thwart the supposed witch threat. The Hammer is split into three categories, part 1 underlines the severity of the witch’s heretical nature, the existence of sorcery and specifically sorceresses; also stating that any witness regardless of stature or credentials can testify against the proposed witch. Part 2 is a catalogue of the sorceress’s activities and practices; filled with fantastical tales of metamorphosis, sexual relations with demons and devils “copulation with the devil and sexual orgies during the Sabbath were central characteristics” and that some possess the ability to fly Quensel, S. (2023). Part 3 seeks to lay out the legal procedures surrounding the prosecuting of the witches, stating the hammer is distributed to the clerical “judges” to be used at their discretion. In a more direct telling, the hammer is a tool to be utilised in the extermination of sorceresses through “judicial” process and execution and states that torture is authorised as a means of retrieving a confession from the accused, “In the 15th century, the use of torture in secular criminal proceedings, which now aimed at the achievement of formal confessions at any price… and was therefore referred to as the ’confession process‘”. Behringer, W. (2000, p.75). Early modern Europe at the time was already ripe with systemic misogyny and Kramer only saw fit to add to the pollution, producing more oppression and horror in the hearts of women. Kramer saw fit to slander women and created a fictitious correlation between sexual activity and witchcraft as mentioned above, he also repeated the notion of women being a lesser sex which Morgan Stringer notes in her paper A War on Women? “The Malleus Maleficarum contains a plethora of sexist views. Kramer was obsessed with the sexual purity of women, their “inherent evil nature,” and their inferiority to males”. (Stringer, M. 2015). It is true that he even mentioned male witches in the handbook however
it cant be ignored that Kramer chose to change the Latin term “Maleficorum”, which is the masculine/gender neutral pronoun of “Maleficus” to mean evil/wrongdoer (even though it literally starts with the word male and is derived from male – badly wrongly), to “Maleficarum” the feminine equivalent because he believed they had “better claim to it” (Stringer, M. 2015). This, if we look at all the things listed above, would have had women fearing for their lives as at the drop of a hat they could have been tortured and prosecuted for crimes they never committed and would have no way of proving their innocence.
Back into the world of fiction, tales with depictions of Satan and the theme of selling your soul to the fallen angel can be traced back to the story of Faust/Dr Faustus, these stories have spawned several similar tales and would later be the inspiration for many movies.
Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (1590), Marlowe paints us an image of doctor displeased with the conventional studies of science and falls down the rabbit hole of the world of magic (specifically necromancy). Faustus summons forth the demon Mephistopheles (this would be the first appearance of this original character which appeared in many other forms of media since, sometimes being known as Mephisto) seemingly by accident, Faustus then sends the demon back to the underworld with an accord for Lucifer himself, trading his soul for 24 years of power and knowledge; perpetuating the theme of the male lust for power. That theme has direct links to the story of Icarus and that of Lucifer himself, aspiring for too much power leading to their inevitable downfall. Though it may not be the very first instance of selling your soul to the devil Marlowe has given us perhaps the most notable version of it, with it then being dubbed the Faustian bargain because of the tale. The two-part poem Faust (1808 and 1833) by Goethe tells a different story of the aspirant necromancer with a similar plot. Instead of a pursuit of power the Doctor almost follows a hero’s path to the understanding of the meaning of life after contact with the demon Mephistopheles, In the poem Goethe uses Faust as a vehicle to represent humankind and all its flaws and although he is received into heaven in its conclusion, his journey is somewhat similar to that of Faustus in that he wishes to seek knowledge that is
beyond the limitations of mere mortals.
In the Castle of Otranto (1764), we find an expansive story, full of prophecy and mankind’s desire for power, where the author Horace Walpole has curated his own fantasy world and lore; in which we see ghostly visions akin to that of Macbeth, a winding castle with haunted galleries, trap doors (which can viewed as an allegory for the oppression of women) and an enormous, armoured phantom and nonfiction realisations such as murder and the abuse of women. Walpole frames the novel as a manuscript written somewhere around first crusade and was uncovered in the library of a historical English family, it was then taken to Naples and printed for publish. It follows the prince of the castle; an abhorrent man named Manfred. Manfred would be plagued by a prophecy that could damn his rule and his family. When the tale begins, he awaits his son Conrad’s marriage however on the day his son is found in the castle grounds crushed by an unworldly sized helmet. In his grief and desire to avoid the coming of the prophecy Manfred conspires to marry his sons betrothed Isabella and upon her refusal he attempts to assault her, here we encounter instances of the supernatural in which Manfred is halted by a vision of his grandfather causing poor Isabella to escape. Later when Manfred hunts Isabella through the grounds he finds an enormous greave (following the prophecy and the helmet from before) and we see Isabella has linked up with Theodore (who we later find is the true heir of the castle), Theodore then has a duel with a knight who would be Isabella’s father Frederic. When the trio return to the castle Frederic explains to Manfred’s wife that he was shown a prophecy of his own whilst out at war (on a giant sword) telling him of his daughters impending peril which would spur his return to save her. We encounter more ghastly visions later, when Manfred proposes a double marriage between the fathers and daughters in the story, basically selling his own daughter Matilda to the knight in order to stem the prophecy (furthering the mistreatment of women in the novel); Frederic refuses when the vision of the hermit who showed him the sword would appear, sparking a rage within Manfred where in turn he would murder Isabella or so he thought. He would murder his own daughter by accident, clouded by a vision set upon him by the castle Something that is baffling to me but seems typical for that time was that the horrific treatment of women in
the tale went more or less unnoticed in the initial reception, the readers were more concerned by the supernatural elements and some even noted that a member of the gentry shouldn’t be creating tales of that genre, as noted in a paper by Valdine Clemens, “Judging by such reviews, one would conclude that what captured readers' immediate conscious attention was not the sexual violence with which Otranto abounds. but the evocation of the supernatural.” Clemens, V (1994). Manfred vacates the throne leaving Theodore to marry Isabella. Otranto the story of a man haunted by his own grief and fear would secure its place as the widely considered grandfather of the Gothic novel and would set the stage for stories such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and even contemporary writers like Stephen King. Yet this pioneering literature piece was openly met with mixed emotions, even his own friends had some negative things to say about it, however also noted by Clemens is that one Thomas Gray said this to Walpole: ”it engages our attention here, makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o'nights,” highlighting to us that at the time Walpole’s literary elements were definitely achieving the right reactions. Clemens, V (1994).
Speaking of Mary Shelley’s gothic goliath, Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a legendary story from the daughter of the renowned feminist author who is her mother’s namesake, and the progenitor of modern science fiction riddled with romantic and horror themes. We begin with Robert Walton addressing his sister in several letters detailing his expedition to the north pole; During a hiccup in their journey, they are at an impasse with the terrain and upon waiting for favourable conditions they spot an imposing figure sledding across the arctic plain. The morning after a similar sledge appears by the boat side and its rider appears to be a strange and emaciated, Victor Frankenstein. Who states that when he was found, was out hunting for the imposing figure on the sled who he calls a “dæmon”, he then regales Walton with his life story. Victor lived with his two younger brothers and his cousin Elizabeth (who was his adopted sister in the 1831 edition, from his father’s side which his mother decided he was to marry), he was to travel to Ingolstadt for his studies but was halted initially as his mother passed of the scarlet fever after contracting it from Elizabeth, where she would then state her dying wish was that the two would marry. When finally at his university he excelled
in his studies and began to research the mystery of human mortality, as he was consumed with the idea of creating a new species of reanimated creatures. This new goal led him to commit heinous acts where he would find himself graverobbing, torturing animals and pocketing bones from morgues and mausoleums, in the end his workshop was more akin to an abattoir, and it would be here he would create his “dæmon.” Victor often draws comparisons between his work and that of other ambitious men such as Satan and Caesar; In the case of Caesar, he relates the enslavement of Greece with that of his own monstrous work. With Satan he relates his envy with that of the fallen angel, similarly his ambitions had him cast out from his peers With word of his brother’s murder meeting him he would head home to his family and would see his creation lurking near the family home, victor had convinced himself it was his own fault and would later attack his monster in a fit of rage when encountering it again. Instead of hurting it he would listen to its recollection of the past few months where it would reveal it did in fact murder his younger brother. It then asks Victor to build him a wife and it would be agreed if the creature and his counterpart flee Europe forever. However, Frankenstein would betray the beast, refusing to create another monster and it would again murder a loved one of Victor’s and it would frame him for the murder causing him to endure three months in prison On returning to Geneva and the family home once again, he would marry Elizabeth finally fulfilling his mother’s dying wish, only for his creature to take her life also, adding to his tally further Victor’s father would die of heartbreak due to the ordeal sending Victor into his second mental breakdown. The poor scientist would recover his health and then set upon hunting the creature down, following it all the way to the north pole. Unfortunately, Frankenstein would succumb to his illness and in his final moments would be visited by his monster; Walton would walk in on this unlikely reunion and would be rooted to the spot in fear of its appearance and stature, and in the end the monster would express its wish to end its life and perpetual pain. Frankenstein is a true telling of the repercussions of abundant ambition; Frankenstein spent his years neglecting his family in pursuit of greatness in his studies all for the fruit of his labour to end the lives of his family. The now horror legend initially opened to mixed reviews, in the March 1818 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine the novelist Walter Scott had a positive review of Frankenstein “Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author's original genius and happy power of expression” Scott, W. (1818). John Wilson Croker’s review in The Quarterly Review was less than complimentary about Shelley’s work. “Our readers will guess from this
summary, what a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents” Croker, J.W. (1818). There is noticeable nature of the sublime in the story of Frankenstein; linking back to the Romantics, nature is used to heal the emotional trauma that both Frankenstein and his monster feel throughout the story and even in the end the barren arctic waste can be seen as a metaphor for the natural struggle he has with the monster. Overall passion will beget suffering.
Time for another titan of the horror genre, found in the infamous Bram Stokers Dracula (1897). A legendary gothic tale told through the medium of telegraphs, diaries, journal entries, and letters all penned by the stories main characters, showing Stoker’s attempt at modernising the story We begin with the good lawyer Jonathan Harker on his journey from London to Transylvania to meet his “client”, He embarks on this job to secure a property transaction with no knowledge of the count or his true nature. He arrives in the town of Bistritz, where the count instructs him to go to a hotel where Harker receives a letter from him and a frosty reception from the staff when they find out why he is there. Upon trying to leave the hotel he is accosted by the hostess where she pleads with him to stay, telling him that it is “the eve of St. George's Day” where evil enjoys its fullest power, Stoker, B (1897). She implores him to take her cross for safety “Vampires are often depicted as being repelled by garlic or Christian implements such as crucifixes and holy water” Britannica (1998). Upon arriving at the castle Harker perceives our tall ghastly resident vampire Count Dacula. The Count would see to his settling in and later by the fire Harker would mentally note the strangeness of his client and his appearance, this would be interrupted by the howling of wolves; and Dracula would utter the infamous phrase “Listen to them the children of the night. What music they make!” Stoker, B (1897). Three days later, Harker notes that his shaving was interrupted by Dracula and curiously could not see him coming for he had no reflection in the mirror, and upon cutting himself the Count flew at him in a frenzy grasping at his throat only to be thwarted by the burning of the rosary beads Harker had been given earlier. From here we see a spiral of events that would lead Harker to truly fear the Count: whilst exploring the castle bedrooms he falls asleep writing in his journal,
and he is woken to the sight of three shadowless women. The women effortlessly seduce him, but Dracula would swoop in and accost the women resulting in a fight between the four; Resulting in the count revealing he had plans to be made; Plans which he would find to be the shipping of Dracula to England along with fifty boxes of dirt. The three vampires are a good example of the battle of women’s sexuality in the novel, essentially the balance of good and evil hedges on the sexuality of the female characters purely due to the restrictions of the Victorian times where women were stuck in a sort of binary of a virgin (pure and good) or a mother, if you didn’t fit this binary you were cast out as a “whore” (Evil and a detriment to society). Towards the end of his letters he would note another visit from the three vampires in which Dracula would intervene again stating that on the morrow they would have their wishes come true; That day Harker would attempt to attack the sleeping count in his coffin but to no great result, he is then interrupted by the castle workers and forced to flee. Whilst hiding he hears the doors being bolted. He had been left behind, with the three women who sought to feast on him. Back home Harker’s fiancée Mina takes control of the narrative, writing a letter to her close friend Lucy. Mina is missing Harker and wishes to visit the exotic places he gets to visit through his work. Mina would then go to stay at Lucy’s home, where Mina journals her displeasure with the lack of communication from Harker and fears for his safety whilst also having to effectively babysit Lucy due to a recurrence of her sleepwalking habits. Habits that lead Lucy to danger one night, Mina awoke to see Lucy was gone and somehow follows her all the way through the vacant town and into the abbey’s graveyard where we should spot Lucy upon their “favourite seat” Stoker, B (1897). Upon approaching Lucy, she spies a dark and ghastly figure looming over her pale unconscious body. Mina wraps Lucy up and believes that in her haste, she has pierced her neck with the pin of a shawl she wraps her in, the next morning upon examining her she notices two small identical pin pricks on her throat. Over the course of a few days Mina’s journal entries note Lucy’s decline in health and a long-awaited contact from Harker, she then rushes to visit him as he is dreadfully ill (They would later marry upon returning home). Lucy is then put into the care of Dr. Seward (in whose communications we also get to read about his patient Renfield) and one Dr. Van Helsing. Renfield has been crippled by the effects vampiric contamination, he feasts upon animals and his sanity fluctuates wildly as he is tormented by his former master and later falls victim to the count in his own cell. Lucy would soon follow a similar fate, she undergoes several “failed” blood transfusions and Seward fears the wounds on her neck found by Lucy
are the cause of the failures. Van Helsing decides to drape her in garlic flowers and scatters her room with them claiming that it will save Lucy. This was of course a popular myth in folklore and was utilised in this story “Much of the source material used to inform these practices was gleaned from meticulous recording of local folklore, with origins in the Middle Ages” Mantzioris, E. and Weinstein, P (2021). Unfortunately for Lucy she would still succumb to Dracula upon his visit to her, heralded by the howling of the wolves. The wolves are a constant motif in Dracula, and they are used to symbolise his more savage nature and his hunger. After her passing, Mina realises through Harker’s diaries that Dracula might indeed be in England and informs Dr. Van Helsing of this. We then see a series of attacks being conducted in London, where children are found with similar marks to Lucy’s, Van Helsing concludes that she must be responsible. They go to her grave to exhume her and find the coffin empty and then find a corpse nearby; and upon returning to the tomb, they find her back in her place and conclude that she is Un-dead and must be dealt with. After taking serious convincing and actual proof of the act, her fiancé agrees to stake her through the heart, decapitate her, and to have her mouth stuffed with garlic. The story unravels quickly from here. The band decide to hunt down Dracula and his fifty boxes of dirt. (In vampiric lore the boxes are the source of his power, and the dirt is consecrated which is what allows him to regenerate). Mina is left out of the hunt and as of that becomes Dracula’s next victim. They find 29 boxes in Carfax, and 21 in London. Upon rushing back to the asylum, they find the count infecting Mina. The ritual is a perverted communion, where the victim must be fed upon and then must feed on the blood of the vampire; ironically, the wafer of the eucharist is the cure to destroying the boxes. They track the count back to his home, finally shifting the power of the story back against him. When they find the castle Van Helsing cleanses it and blocks the entry with wafers preventing Dracula’s return. The count is then found in his final box, and with a smile on his face, He would perish with his throat slit and a knife through the heart, turning the creature to dust. Stoker’s story is one of good conquering evil and horrors of the supernatural.
CHAPTER THREE: WE SEE THE EFFECTS OF THE HORROR AND BUILD TO CLIMAX
Sandro Botticelli created this masterpiece to illustrate The Divine Comedy (1300). It focuses on Inferno, perhaps the most famous of the three parts in which Dante is guided through the realms of hell and down the nine circles. This is one of four surviving parchments of Botticelli’s work and its now stored in the Vatican library. He employs the technique of silver tip on a tiny piece of parchment (32.5 x 47.5cm) and it details those nine circles of hell in incredible detail, faithfully following the word of Dante The circles famously represent the deadly sins and those play a part in their reserved circle: The first being Limbo, where the unbaptised virtuous pagans reside wracked with grief from a lack of holy presence. The second would be Lust, home to its adulterous and lusty patrons notably queen Cleopatra, doomed to suffer constant storms for their crimes. Third is Gluttony, its residents battered daily with rain, sleet, and black snow. The fourth is Greed where in the people are forced to push momentous weights at each other and are forced to engage in battle if they lock eyes. Circle five holds both the
La Mappa dell’Inferno (The Map of Hell), Sandro Botticelli, 1480-1490
perpetrators of Wrath and Sloth, where the angry are forced to engage in perpetual battle upon the river Styx (which in the divine comedy was changed to a marsh) and the sullen sink to the bottom only revealing their presence by the bubble on the surface. Circle six is Heresy where the heretics suffer in their flaming stone coffins. Circle seven has three separate rings for varying degrees of Violence, the outer for violence against property and humans, where they swim in a river of blood, the middle for victims of suicide where they become trees and are torn to shred by harpies and the profligatory who are hunted by hounds. The inner most ring holds those who commit violence, God, and nature, who are doomed to life in a desert where it constantly rains fire. Circle eight is Fraud or Malebolge, where in lies eight ditches of the condemned, the first for panderers and seducers, the second flatterers, the third for simony, the fourth for false prophets, sorcerers, and astrologers, the fifth for corrupt politicians, sixth hypocrites, seventh thieves, eight the fraudulent counsellors, the ninth for sowers of discord finally the tenth for falsifiers. The final circle is for the treacherous, divided into four “rounds” First for traitors of kin, second for traitors of country, third are traitors to their guests, fourth and finally being traitors to their lords and benefactors these traitors would be frozen in ice up to their necks. At the base of the painting, we see the centre of the earth and a frozen lake in which Lucifer himself is pictured as the king of his domain.
The Hell panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, Hieronymous Bosch 1480-1510
The third panel of Bosch’s “The Garden of Early Delights” triptych depicts a surrealist vision of a hell. Painted in oil, on three oak wood panels composed of a middle panel (205.5 x 231.9cm) enveloped by two rectangular wings (205.5 x 76.5cm) that double up as functional doors to cover the middle plain, (the piece in total sits at 205.5 x 384.9cm) the piece has been housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid since 1939. Specifically focusing on this one panel, it is packed with nightmarish scenes and characters like monstrous bird and fishlike creatures, humans being tortured and eaten, a pair of colossal knife wielding ears, Bosch also employs the use of giant musical instruments, enormous skulls all layered on top of a blazing battlefield where a city is being invaded by soldiers on horseback. There are strong elements of the seven deadly sins in this piece; Lust is dominant, but we also see elements of Greed and Envy. In the case of greed, the rapacious pay for their sins by being eaten by a large blue bird creature (Who is seemingly a
figure of royalty in the image due to his blue tones, the cauldron crown and his golden “throne”) in the forefront and are immediately defecated into the pit beneath the lavatory stool; You can see the pit is full of floating heads if you have a keen eye, beside it a man is forced to vomit on the heads by a goblin like creature. We can determine that the gluttons are addressed in the scene within the egg/tree like man in the centre of the painting (Considered by the art historian Hans Belting to be a selfportrait of Bosch, and is a reference to a drawing he created called “The Tree Man” ); Where if we look closely, we can see the naked gluttons being waited on by demons and anthropomorphic toad creatures. There are a plethora of musical instruments in the piece, and we can surmise they’re being used to torture those guilty of creating secular music and not worshipping god through song, we see them strung up on the harp in a crucifixion like pose, one is bound to the neck of the lute, we see one with the written music branded to his behind as a demon recites it off of him and one poor soul has had a flute of sorts inserted in his rear Finally, those guilty of Envy are submerged in freezing water, echoing that of the judgment for the sullen in the lake of Styx mentioned above. Circling back to the giant ears, combined with the music instruments used for torture, it can be postulated that these elements combined are symbols of unholy distraction, the siren call of the sinners and heretics. The ears also resemble some sort of canon or, to tie in with the motif of Lust, male genitalia. On the topic of Lust we can see another example going back to the egg/tree man, atop his head on the platter we see a set of bagpipes; these are considered a symbol of the instrument of “sloth and idleness” by some but can also be interpreted as another symbol of male genitalia, which if we are to believe the man is a self-portrait of Bosch we may also believe that he was a sinner of Lust and this is a subtle case of admittance, NTR (2016) There are more smaller motifs displayed in the piece, on the right side we see a lantern and a small red disc under it, atop the disk is an armour-plated soldier and several dog-like creatures feasting upon him.
The soldier holds a golden chalice and next to it is a white wafer, this is a clear reference to the eucharist; and if we look to the surroundings of this area we see what can be construed as a perverted holy communion being mirrored right under the body and blood; in a similar parody to that which we seen in Dracula with how a person is transformed into a vampire. “The mutilated knight is lying on a large pale-red wafer that is being cut by a big knife. Below it, a demon is riding a naked woman, driving her into a large pitcher, which could be filled with wine” NTR (2016). Another smaller religious detail can be found in the bottom right, where we see a pig clad in a Dominican nuns habit supposedly (with the help of the small armoured demon) seducing a man into signing his assets over to them under the guise of it going to the church; portraying a Faustian bargain, an interesting commentary noted by Hans Belting is that the armour clad demon has a severed foot hanging from his helmet which he states is “the emblem of the professional beggar” Belting (2002). If we glance to the bottom left, we see a mix of the deadly sins being punished in Bosch’s hell, a man is nailed to a table on which we can assume he was gambling, almost in a form of stigmata, whilst being strangled by one of Bosch’s fantastical creatures Finally, if we go back to the blazing city, several sources speculate that this is indeed a reflection of Bosch’s own memories of his childhood; it is recorded a raging fire devastated the city of 's-Hertogenbosch in 1463 and that time Bosch would’ve been around 13 years old
Henry Fuseli’s romantic paintings hold great dark and horror elements but perhaps his most famous is The Nightmare. Fuseli created this on a 101.6 x 127cm canvas working with oils, it currently holds residence in the Detroit Institute of Arts in Michigan. The Swissman conjures up a scene where a woman is sprawled out on her bed presumably in a deep sleep and atop her chest sits an apelike incubus creature and, in the backdrop, draped in a red curtain, a pale stallion stares out at the scene almost like a parallel to the viewer. Some could say the stallion in the back is a visual pun on the words mare and nightmare however in researching the symbolism behind horses it could be construed that Fuseli wanted us to picture it as Death’s horse from the depiction of the four horsemen of apocalypse “I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider's name was Death, and Hades followed him…” (King James Bible, 1989, Revelation 6:1-8) We know the small creature is an incubus because if we look into
The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781
mythology, we can see that the word incubus is derived from incubare (Latin) which translates to “to lie upon” and in reading a book on sleep paralysis by Shelley Adler (In which this paining is the cover) she tells us that in the case of Incubi encounters “Some terms for these events have been used in a restricted sense, referring to sexual encounters or to terrifying attacks involving pressure and restraint. Other terms are broader and can refer to either or both experiences” Shelley, Adler (2011). This piece has many interpretations and links to literature; It can be interpreted literally given the title, and that the piece is just the woman’s nightmare or some form of sleep paralysis haunting. As the nightmare is a common vehicle used in the gothic genre to drive the story in particular direction; and in an interesting meta turn of events some gothic novels have been inspired by nightmares, “Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), for example, had its origins in a dream the author experienced at Strawberry Hill, his Gothic residence” Moffitt, J.F. (2002) Equally, In the 1831 revised edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Mary recites a nightmare she had which inspired the story of the monster “He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside… I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me…I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted”, Shelley, M. (1831). It has also been theorised by some scholars that Fuseli’s painting was an inspiration for the death of Victors wife Elizabeth. “Several critics (e.g. Joseph 1975, 109; Ward 2000, 20–31) have suggested that Henry Fuseli's Nightmare… was an inspiration for Elizabeth's death in Volume III, chapter 6 in the first edition of Frankenstein (1818)” Which when compared, the two situations do have striking similarities (another strange link between Shelley and Fuseli would be that her mother tried to pursue Fuseli romantically after he painted her portrait), Desset, F. (2021). The piece opened to a mixed and mainly confused reception from viewers back in 1782, with certain reviewers comparing the work to a Shakespeare scene (giving us more links to literature) and others critiquing the subject matter; leading them leave poor reviews and one is recorded questioning who stands to gain anything from the painting. “The Nightmare, by Mr. Fuseli like all his productions has strong marks of genius about it; but hag-riding is too unpleasant a thought to be agreeable to anyone, and is unfit for furniture or reflection – Qui bono?..” Davison, M. (2016). Fuseli’s work has also been linked to the Malleus Maleficarum, as it would have been an apt subject matter for the timing of the painting,
projecting perhaps the fears of some Europeans in the 18th century due to Kramer’s crazed conquest at the time. The nightmare does portray some motifs shared in the Hammer such as the topic of “daemonialita” concerning the incubus and succubus demons and their possession of their victims, in this case the young women in the painting. “It now appears that it is a single published source, The Malleus Maleficarum that best contextually explains the intrinsic significance of many specific motifs encountered in Fuseli's familiar painting… And the essentially textually inspired features in Fuseli's The Nightmare include the female protagonist, her tormented dreamstate, the horse in the background (a mare), its gleaming eyes, and so forth all corresponding to motifs in The Malleus Maleficarum ”
One of Bacon’s most famous works and a body horror heavy piece, Three Studies at the Base of a Crucifixion is an oil on board triptych, sitting at 94 × 73.7 cm for each panel (being 282 x 221.1 cm all in), currently being held in the Tate Britain. Bacon himself stated that he loved creating triptychs and as we can see, it spurred him on to create several different triptychs later in his career. “Triptychs are the thing I like doing the most... I like the juxtaposition of the images separated on three different canvases. So far as my work has any quality, I often feel perhaps it is the triptychs have the most quality” Francis Bacon, 1979 The panels show three different scenes with vaguely anatomical creatures in different poses, these are iconic elements in the Irishman’s work as are the religious themes and horror elements he utilises. We see these figures enveloped in a hellish burnt orange, holding a warm and unsettling
Three Studies at the Base of a Crucifixion, Francis Bacon, 1944
feeling, forging a tie between the three stories. The creatures themselves were based on the Furies (or the Erinyes/Eumenides as they are known in Greek) from T.S. Elliot’s The Family Reunion based on the Greek myth of Orestes “The Family Reunion… inspired Francis Bacon to produce one of his most emblematic works, Three Studies at the Base of a Crucifixion” Llorens-Cubedo, D. (2023), and Bacon was specifically interested in the Story of Oresteia by the poet Aeschylus which we can later see in the triptych titled Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 These meat creatures replace traditional saints and figures in religious artworks and goes beyond the conventional iconography of Christianity and Greek mythos by morphing them together. The creatures in a way are more representative of human mortality and suffering, showing how in Bacons eyes there’s no difference between humans and animals. “We are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop, I always think it is surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal” Bacon, F. (1966). Predictably the reception of the work was less than favourable at the time, critics and public alike were shocked, disgusted, and terrified. One John Russell described it as such “images so unrelievedly awful that the mind shut with a snap at the sight of them. Their anatomy was half-human, half-animal . They could bite, probe and suck, and they had very long eel-like necks, but their functioning in other respects was mysterious” Anonymous (2021) Journalist Herbert Furst expressed a similar feeling “I… was so shocked and disturbed by the surrealism of Francis Bacon that I was glad to escape this exhibition… made me think of entrails, of an anatomy or vivisection and feel squeamish.” Lloyd, T. (2019)
CLIMAX
Typically, in a horror film this would be where the antagonist would be felled or would finish the final girl, however this is no such story and in fact here we will discuss what we have learned so far. This story began with the types of creatures we often face in horror stories and where they come from, this was so that we might later appreciate how the artworks listed are in ways influenced by the dark literary works discussed in this dissertation; We then looked at the incredible literary works that have over centuries inspired artists to create legendary paintings. Finally, we looked at those legendary paintings and assessed the links and influences from the written works.
The aim of this dissertation was to discuss the links that can could be found between gothic/horror literature and famous artworks throughout history which hopefully we can see are bountiful whether it be between Aeschylus’ plays from 458 BC and Francis Bacon’s paintings from the mid-18th century or between Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare and the actual nightmare of the witch hunts and the inquisition of Kramer and his Hammer of Witches. The links are there laid bare to see and though we cannot celebrate the works of Kramer we can celebrate the works of the other writers, poets and playwrights who have influenced the incredible artists above to create the works that have been assessed in this dissertation
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