Woodcut from Johann Wolf’s ‘Lectiones Memorabiles et Reconditae,’ a commonplace bo
Woodcut from Johann Wolf’s ‘Lectiones Memorabiles et Reconditae,’ a commonplace book published in 1600 of “everything strange, wonderful, terrible, incredible and impossible which the author could find in all literature of the previous sixteen centuries.” It depicts a creature reported to have washed up in the Tiber River in 1496, during the papacy of Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). To Wolf, it “represented the form of the Roman papacy so perfectly and splendidly that it could not be the work of any human being but must be accepted as God’s own representation of the papal abomination.” Wolf believed Borgia “addressed himself to black magic…promising obedience to the devil,” expressing a popular idea contemporary to Borgia’s time and one that persisted in Wolf’s and beyond.J.N. Hilgarth, “The Image of Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996): 120-121. -- source link
#the borgias#rodrigo borgia#devil worship#manuscript#black magic#renaissance history#seventeenth century#sixteenth century