The Disenchantment of the Vernacular: Architectural Representation from the Witch-Hunt to the Picturesque
Sometime between 1510 and 1515, Hieronymous Bosch (or someone in his workshop) painted a version of The Temptations of Saint Anthony Abbot which is currently in the collection of the Prado Museum (Figure 1). Unlike earlier depictions of the story – by Bosch himself, by Michelangelo and others – temptation in this work was not depicted as a pack of monstrous demons assaulting the hermit saint, but as a thatched-roof cottage which bore the face of an elderly woman. A younger, naked woman stands at the threshold, inviting the saint to its dark interior. The text that accompanies the painting on the website of the Prado explains that this detail, along with the dovecote that crowns the head of the old woman and the swan on the signboard, all suggest one thing: the cottage that we see here – and in other, similar paintings by Bosch – is a brothel.
Figure 1. The Temptations of Saint Anthony Abbot, Workshop of Hieronymous Bosch, ca. 1510-15. Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado.
Bosch painted this image at the dawn of the Witch-Hunt, which peaked in central and northern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The vast majority of the people that were accused of being witches were women, in most cases elderly, working-class women. In her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), Silvia Federici has shown how proletarian women in early modern Europe were banned from any wage work outside the house – essentially reduced to domestic servants – and thus often sought income as sex workers. The proliferation of sex work eventually led to its penalization and its banning from urban public space. Sex work now had to be offered and sought in hidden corners of the city or in the countryside. Around the same time, according to Federici, the figure of the sex worker was increasingly conflated with that of the witch, both seen as demonic, temptress figures who “sold themselves” (whether to the Devil or to men) in exchange for money and power.[1] As evidenced in genre painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most urban elites viewed peasants as a promiscuous, indulgent, and immoral mob. For a pious man like Saint Anthony, the countryside was a dangerous place. A lonely cottage in the distance was not a comforting sight; it was cause for vigilance and self-control.
Saint Anthony lived in Egypt during the third century CE. His famous ascetic retreat into the wilderness, during which the Devil tried to tempt him by assuming various forms, took place in the desert. Bosch’s painting of the Temptations of Saint Anthony is set in a European rural landscape that would have been more familiar to his audience. The Dutch painter is most famous for his other-wordly images of heaven and hell. This seemingly down-to-earth image is in fact not that far from them: as Joseph Leo Koerner explains in Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016), such detailed depictions of ordinary people and places – nascent instances of genre painting – were often intended as representations of devilish illusion and deceit. An essential component of this was the medieval iconography of the grotesque: of surreal, hybrid creatures, whose forms combined human and animal parts. As Koerner explains, “Bosch [often] fills the scene with entities whose inconsistent shapes, colors, and scale indicate that they cannot be of the world. This devilry becomes most concrete where it is least physically plausible.”[2] This grotesque is more abundant and obvious in typical Bosch-ian scenes like The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), but it is also present in the rural landscape of the Temptations of Saint Anthony through the uncanny shape of a cottage with a human face. The architectural form of the rural house and the physiognomy of the elderly woman are presented as both familiar and apalling.
By the eighteenth century, the persecution and execution of witches in central and northern Europe had significantly waned. This was largely because their primary persecutors – members of the urban upper class and of the clergy – had stopped believing in witchcraft. People who reportedly cast spells or performed magic were no longer seen as threatening accomplices of the Devil, but as as charlatans who took advantage of the “superstitions” of the rural commonfolk.[3] The rural countryside was no longer a sphere of temptation and corruption; it was a place in which royals and aristocrats could retreat to get fresh air and food, to be away from the troubles of the city and closer to nature. A new appreciation of pastoral and picturesque scenes led painters and architects to seek inspiration in rural vernacular architecture. In his book Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797), English painter John Thomas Smith wrote:
the best advice I can offer [to a painter] is that you retire into the inmost recesses of forests, and most obscure and unfrequented villages. The former will supply [you with] the most various models for trees, underwoods, plants and foliage … and the latter, with the simplest and most artless forms of houses, bridges, gates, barns, fences, and other rural structures … On the remote wild common … or in the silent sequestered dell, you shall find, unguarded, the richest treasures of picturesque Nature—the ancient, feeble, roof-oppressed hovel, fenced with various patches of brick and stone and mudmix'd wall with quick hedge … Situations like these, afford not only the richest objects and contrasts crouded in luxuriant varieties, but also (which is at least of equal importance) the advantage of that silent serenity in which you may most successfully study and comprehend your objects, indulge your feelings, and effect your purposes.[4]
Smith’s text was accompanied by a series of sketches of such cottages made by the painter himself during various excursions in the English countryside. The last of these was wittily titled “Lady Plomer’s Palace, on the summit of Hawke’s Bill Wood, Epping Forest” (Figure 2). The figure of the wooden cottage, with its tree-trunk columns and beams, and its roof overgrown by trees, is symptomatic of the sensitivities of the pictursque, but also of the concurrent preoccupation with the origins of architecture and the “primitive hut.” If the cottage in Bosch’s painting of the Temptations was the work of deceitful artifice, the one that Smith saw three centuries later was pleasingly “artless” (whether one had in mind the fine arts or the magical arts). The old woman that sat by the door – presumbly Lady Plomer herself – was no longer a symbol of temptation or danger; she was an innocuous, perhaps even welcoming host to an idyllic rural scene.
“In genre painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . A lonely cottage in the distance was not a comforting sight; it was cause for vigilance and self-control.”
Figure 2. John Thomas Smith, “Lady Plomer’s Palace, on the summit of Hawke’s Bill Wood, Epping Forest,” Remarks on Rural Scenery (1797).
The caption that Smith gave to this particular image – “Lady Plomer’s Palace, on the summit of Hawke’s Bill Wood, Epping Forest” – is rather elaborate and specific. The location of all other cottages in the album is more vaguely specified as “near Deptford, Kent” or “on Merrow Common, Surrey,” and no mention is made of the names of their owners. Lady Plomer and her house in the forest must have been common knowldge for the locals and perhaps that is what led Smith to it. Lady Plommer could have been one of what people at the time called “cunning folk:” men and women who could cast spells or untie them, help with fertility or abortions, cure illnesses and find lost objects. Two or three centuries earlier, Lady Plomer could have been easily accused of being a “witch” and her house would be searched for proof of her pact with the Devil.
In 1486, inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger published the Malleus Maleficarum (also known as The Hammer of Witches), a book that went on to become the most popular witch-hunting manual of early-modern Europe. The manual advised that once a woman was suspected to be a witch and arrested,
her house should be searched as thoroughly as possible, in all holes and corners and chests, top and bottom; and if she is a noted witch, then without a doubt … there will be found various instruments of witchcraft.[5]
The authors of the manual referred to a particular incident in Innsbruck, where someone had fallen ill and discovered that this was the result of witchcraft, after digging under the threshold of their house and discovering certain “instruments of witchcraft” that had been buried there: “a waxen image … perforated all over, and pierced through the sides with two needles … and then little bags containing all sorts of things, such as grains and seeds and bones.”[6] The readers of the Malleus Maleficarum were advised to pay close attention to details:
Sometimes, [witches] have only had to make a hole [in the wall of a house or a stable] in which the devil has placed the instrument of witchcraft; and this [can be a hidden or] a visible object, such as a stone or a piece of wood or a mouse or some serpent.[7]
“By the eighteenth century, the fear of witches lurking in the wild had been replaced by a secular appreciation of the rural countryside.”
To John Thomas Smith, three centuries later, all of this would have probably sounded like nonsense. By the eighteenth century, the fear of witches lurking in the wild had been replaced by a secular appreciation of the rural countryside. When preparing for an excursion to Epping Forest, an English painter such as Smith read poets such as William Cowper and William Shenstone,[8] not witch-hunting manuals. In his eyes, an old woman’s cottage in the forest was not suspect of anything and did not require close scrutiny – it was a most pleasing and innocent sight. All in all, he admitted, “rural and cottage-scenery shall be considered as no more than a sort of low-comedy landscape.”[9]
The world, however, was not entirely disenchanted after the eighteenth century: People who lived in such cottages did not stop believing in “magic” and “witches.” As historian Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra put it, “long after the end of the witch-trials, thinking and acting in terms of witchcraft still formed part of the cultural repertoire which was available to people in cases of misfortune. . . Witchcraft remained a useful, culturally accepted and therefore rational strategy for dealing with certain problems. It could explain misfortune and the responsibility for it could be attributed to someone else.”[10] For many, magic was also a valid means for preventing misfortune: The inner and outer surfaces of farmhouses and stables continued to be carved with apotropaic signs, and their construction was accompanied by all sorts of rituals. As Hervé Fillipetti and Janine Trotereau have emphasized, for the peasants themselves the house was more than just the sum of its material parts or a juxtaposition of heterogeneous volumes and spaces: “Much more than a ‘shelter’, the traditional peasant house is a social body and even more a cosmogonic object on which is expressed the transcription of the spiritual limits between man and all the forces which regulate the order of things . . . It is not in any case the elements of the construction themselves which protect the individual and their property, because the house itself is ‘transparent’ [i.e. permeable by, and vulnerable to various magic forces and spirits]; it is a ‘magic shield’ of signs, of marks, of symbolic objects which ensures this protection [and] marks the true limits of the habitat.”[11]
The preoccupation of academically trained artists and architects with vernacular architecture became increasingly systematic during the nineteenth century and culminated in the twentieth with the works of authors such as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Bernard Rudofsky, Amos Rapoport, and Paul Oliver. Fillipetti and Trotereau’s aforecited analysis of the peasant’s house as a cosmogonic object was published in 1978, around the same time as the seminal works of these architectural authors. But it was an exception within an otherwise predominantly secular understanding of such buildings, which had its roots in the eighteenth century and a process that is often described as the “disenchantment of the world.” In his final work, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity (2022), Marshall Sahlins revisited a well-known distinction between cultures of immanence and cultures of transcendence: for the former, divinity resides in the everyday, among humans and within objects and things; for the latter, divinity resides in an other, distant world, far from that of humans. The makers of vernacular architecture have historically belonged to the former category. Architects and intellectuals who appreciate vernacular architecture belong mostly to the latter, and are hence led to make a distinction between the material and the spiritual (a distinction that, as Sahlins reminds us, makes no sense for cultures of immanence). The cottages and huts of common people – whether in rural provinces of Europe, or in distant peripheries and colonies – became interesting as architectural artifacts for Western intellectuals only when their form was disentangled from the popular culture that created it and all the obscure folklore that surrounded it. To become “architecture,” the vernacular had to be disenchanted.
Author’s note
This text is part of my ongoing research, which forms part of the research project “Building Identity: Character in Architectural Debate and Design, 1750-1850,” led by Sigrid de Jong and Maarten Delbeke at ETH Zurich, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). In this context, my research focuses on the vernacular architecture of Switzerland, and it juxtaposes two opposing views: the idealization of the Swiss chalet as a symbol of rusticity and national identity by urban intellectuals, and the actual lives, customs and beliefs of the peasants who built and inhabited such constructions.
Notes
[1] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (London: Penguin, 2004), 213-220.
[2] Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch & Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016), 161.
[3] For more on this, see: Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack and Roy Porter, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, volume 5: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: The Athlone Press, 1999).
[4] John Thomas Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery; With twenty etchings of Cottages from Nature, and Some Observations and Precepts Relative to the Picturesque (London, 1797), 12-13.
[5] Montague Summers ed., The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger (New York: Dover Publications, 2023), 215.
[6] Summers, The Malleus Maleficarum, 138.
[7] Summers, The Malleus Maleficarum, 190.
[8] Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery, 6-7.
[9] Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery, 6.
[10] Gijswijt-Hofstra, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, “Part 2: Witchcraft after the Witch-trials,” 175.
[11] Hervé Fillipetti and Janine Trotereau, Symboles et Pratiques Rituelles dans la Maison Paysanne Traditionelle (Paris: Éditions Berger Levrault, 1978), 7-8. Translated from French by the author.
Citation
Nikos Magouliotis, “The Disenchantment of the Vernacular: Architectural Representation from the Witch-Hunt to the Picturesque,” PLATFORM, Sep 9, 2024.
