What does the Devil actually look like?

The answer, Luther Link argues, is nothing like the familiar package of horns, tail, hooves and pitchfork suggests. Moving through a thousand years of Western art, The Devil traces how Satan’s image was assembled from theology, folklore, political struggle and the visual habits of successive periods — and how often artists disagreed about what evil should resemble. 

Link moves between illuminated manuscripts, church sculpture, mosaics and frescoes, examining figures from horned beasts and hybrid demons to disturbingly human, even beautiful, representations of Lucifer. Along the way he dismantles some comfortable assumptions: the Devil is not simply a Christianised Pan, nor does his iconography develop in a tidy evolutionary line. His body becomes a kind of contested visual archive, taking on whatever a particular culture fears, condemns or needs to make visible.

Hell mouths, Last Judgments, devils, heretics, monsters and the visual machinery of damnation — with extensive black-and-white and colour illustrations throughout, excellent book.

Edition/Condition: Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1995. Hardcover with dust jacket. First American edition. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white. Light shelf wear and faint handling to jacket, with minor edge wear; boards and interior clean and sound. Very good condition.