Hind Massad

Imagine a painter moving into a house called the "deaf man's house," because the former resident of the house was deaf after living in it, and soon after that painter is also deaf in the same house for unknown reasons, but nevertheless does not leave the house.

Moreover, the artist continues to draw a set of black paintings (14 paintings) on all its walls, reflecting the tormented spirits, hints, goblins and a dog barking in a vacuum, and a man eats his son, and ends up in 1820, because the devil is painted in the form of a goat mediating a number of witches in A terrifying scene, that painting was known as the "Witch Sat."

This is the story of the most terrifying paintings in the history of plastic arts, known as the series of black paintings by the Spanish painter Francesco Joya (30 March 1746 - 16 April 1828), the man who adorned the walls of his dubious house with scary paintings, and ended up being a deaf one. He suffered a stroke and died two weeks later.

The sacrifice of the devil
The legend of the "Witch Sabbath," which spread in medieval Europe, tells that witches meet on their Sabbath in distant forests or between mountains to practice certain rituals under which they possess supernatural powers.

These rituals involved total disbelief and desecration of the Christian religion, where the witches offered sacrifices to Satan, who was evoked to be embodied at night in a black goat with two large horns. The more sacrifices the devil blessed the witches with more magical powers.

These forces are the ability to fly; the devil harnesses the animals of the abominable carrying them from the urban areas of these isolated areas, and sometimes witches riding jinn and goblins or even brooms straw.

According to legend, the witches crush the cross and baptize themselves in the name of Satan and with the blood of sacrifices that were slaughtered in front of him and offer him, and practiced many forms of black magic at night, after the absence of light until the dawn.

The sacrifices themselves were young children from the age of one day to two years, and the maximum three, slaughtered as a sacrifice of the devil, when the devil accepts the sacrifice, and the ritual continues to recite spells and drinking wine, then be baptized by the blood of children.

Dark Humanity
Like all his paintings in the series "Black Paintings", "The Sabbath of the Witches" evokes nightmarish and pessimistic feelings about the entire human existence, and although the entire series is mired in darkness, the scenes are all distorted and tortured human features.

In the "Sabbath of the Witches" we find the devil in the middle of that group of witches with distorted faces similar to cutting the dough, and we see that there are a number of young children in the painting, and they are about to be sacrificed to the devil.

We see on the far right a witch giving the devil a little child, and next to it sitting another witch holding another child in her arms, and will be sacrificed as well, as we find on the far right a long stick and attached to three small embryos, above the ring of magic we find bats flying between my horns Satan and the moon.

Art critic Arthur Lapu believes that the painting, like the rest of the series, reflects Joya's hysterical fear of the ominous fate that awaits humanity from greed and a desire for power. There was significant social and political change in Spain at that time, and Spain was afraid and threatened by the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte.

And the painting in the end is only a metaphor for the battle of the only real existence between good and evil. However, what Joya did in the series of black paintings reflects that who will win most often is madness, drama and meaninglessness. This is if evil does not win as we see in the "Witch Sabbath," where children and embryos are sacrificed with the utmost ecstasy of witches to the devil.

Art critic Margherita Gonzalez believes that the spectator can never escape the painful impact of the painting, and that Joya may not have actually been meant to be taken literally as a ring of magic in the presence of Satan, but perhaps wanted to be a criticism of the ugly and dark side of humanity in Period of the Napoleonic Wars.

So Joya drew another series called "Disasters of War", in which he introduced human bodies cut and torn. Some of the paintings in this series show scenes of brutal torture of the inhabitants of the country conquered by Napoleon.