Hans Baldung

In the early 16th century, German artists narrowed the dance of death down to two figures only, a young woman and death.

In a panel painted in 1517 by Hans Baldung Grien, now in Basel, a skeletal death grabs a naked young woman by the hair and leans in as if to kiss her beside an open grave.

The Swiss painter Niklaus Manuel painted similar scenes.

The moral was vanity, her beauty won't last.

but instead becomes part of a charged female world filled with smoke, bodies, bones, animals, weather, sexuality, impossible motion, and the suggestion that women gathered together outside the control of ordinary social structures might possess powers capable of disturbing the natural and religious order itself.

Baldung had trained in the artistic world surrounding Dürer, but his fascination with witchcraft becomes far more obsessive and, for our purposes, far more revealing because his witches refuse to settle into one single visual type.

Some of them are aged, wrinkled, and grotesque, while others are young, physically beautiful, overtly sexualized, and visually powerful.

And that diversity matters enormously, because the modern Halloween witch has trained us to assume that the old crone was always the obvious or universal model.

while the younger witch could embody a different cluster of fears surrounding sexuality, fertility, seduction, desire, and the possibility that beauty concealed destructive or demonic power.

In both cases, what makes the figure dangerous is not merely that she supposedly performs magic, but that she possesses agency in a form that religious and social authorities can portray as disorderly, uncontrolled, and therefore threatening.

Baldung's Weather Witches from 1523 is one of the most useful examples because the women were not presented as pathetic old hags crouching over some filthy cooking vessel, but as nude, physically attractive, sexually charged figures associated with the manipulation of weather itself.

Which means the witch has now become powerful enough to reach beyond the household and apparently interfere with the sky.