25 Grotesque Faces from Leonardo

Harry Clarke and Goethe's 'Faust'

Above is an unfinished, and unpublished, illustration depicting Faust and Margaret from the 'Garden' scene in Faust. The watercolour is by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), an illustrator who was, first and foremost, a stained-glass artist. The Ireland-born Clarke owes much to Byzantium in style, and something to Beardsley in tone. Clarke began work on the project in late 1924. Initially Harraps, the publisher, did not like the drawings (Clarke recalled that they thought the work was 'full of steaming horrors'), and many of the illustrations were finished under pressure.

A sexually ambiguous Mephistopholes lures the old wizard Faust into an infrnal, chaotic world where forms change freely and the creatures are grotesquely mutilated, their bloated, misshapen bodies and breasts set against their bony limbs and cadaverous faces. Clarke was the first illustrator of the poem to make its sexual elements overt, and he succeeds in creating a truly creepy world bubbling with erotic decadence, while retaining an element of humour.

There were eventually 8 full-colour, full-page illustrations; eight full-page ink wash illustrations; six full-page illustrations in pure black line; and sixty-four black and white vignettes referringto 'incidents in the poem not covered by the full-page drawings.' Clarke's Faust was published in 1926, limited to 2,000 copies. Despite Harraps' earlier dislike of the drawings, the reviews on the book's release were generally positive.

'There is from first to last in these pictures no sunlight, but rather light filtered, coming as through a glass darkly. And it is this quality of filtered light, helping to make him so interesting a commentator on Goeth's tale, that is one of the distinctive charms of Mr. Clarke's work. It is not for nothing that he is by choice a designer of storied windows richly dight, and in the case of these Faust pictures, the dimmed light is truly religious, binding together as in a single medium this wealth of fantastic invention and remaining in the mind until the detail is lost in the whole' - Dorothy Richardson for The Studio, October 1926

'Nothing in these drawings represents anything in the visible world: all come from that dread mid-world of purgatory or the soul where forms change on the instant by evil or beautiful imagination... Clarke's fertility of of invention is endless. It is shown in a multitude of designs less elaborate than the page plates, but no less intense. How awful... is the Despair with head like a bird of prey, which holds the fainting girl in the Cathedral, while the choir chants the Dies Irae... Clarke is not the artist of men and women, but seer of forms which their passions and imaginations assume' - Irish Statesman

A negative review of the drawings actually sums up what I love about Clarke's take on the poem:

'... a dream world of half-created fantasies; the powerless fancies of senile visions; misshapen bodies with wormlike heads; staring eyes of octopuses and reptiles gaze like ponderous saurians of the lost world, while half-finished homuncili change like 'plasma' in forms unbound by reason' - Artwork

For more of Clarke's Faust illustrations see nocloo.com and Grandma's Graphics. Much of the information in this post was taken from Nicola Gordon Bowe's excellent book The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (1989).

Disney Demonology

A while ago Michael Sporn posted the awe-inspiring drawings by Vladimir 'Bill' Tytla for the giant Devil atop Bald Mountain in Disney's 'Fantasia', varyingly referred to as 'Satan himself', 'Tchernobog' and 'Chernobog', but, most frequently known as Chernabog. This may be my favourite sequence in any Disney film.


The monster was based on a number of sources, but perhaps most famously, the look of the whole Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria sequence was defined by the great illustrator Kay Nielsen.


Nielsen's work in illustration suited him well to scenes of supernatural elegance; an illustration from 'Felicia' shares some characteristics with the swirling spirits Chernabog calls forth from their graves...

while another illustration for 'John and the Ghosts' demonstrates an interest in distorted shadow.

Credited with coming up with the idea for the sequence in the first place is the great Albert Hurter, whose nervous scribblings and fantastical doodles have been paid tribute to in John Canemaker's 'Before the Animation Begins', and the 1942 book 'He Drew as He Pleased'.




Hurter himself was inspired by Heinrich Kley, who depicted devils and giants in grotesque, surreal and sometimes comical sequences. Kley's devils, delighting in causing chaos, are part Gargantua, part Gulliver. For a time Disney attempted to introduce thios comical aspect to the Bald Mountain sequence, but decided against it.

Robin Allan ('Walt Disney and Europe') has remarked on the influence of Gustave Dore on much of the early work at Disney. Dore not only inspired Disney artists like Hurter, Joe Grant and Ferdinand Hovarth. His influence can also be found in Kley's work, with a bit of Honore Daumier thrown in. Most famous of Dore's devils is probably his Satan in 'Dante's Inferno'. Like Disney's Chernabog, Dore's Satan is titanic in size, but rooted from the waist up in a single place, and completely impotent. It almost seems that Dore really wants to design his own Devil, but grudgingly sketches in the characteristics Dante describes. Though his Satan has three heads, two are more or less hidden in shadow, and the two extra pairs of wings, described by Dante to move like the blades of a windmill, are vague enough to be taken almost as a motion blur. The devil Dore seems eager to depict is not Dante's but the more traditional version, with the satyr-like features traditionally attributed to him up to that point. Dore's Satan is nevertheless quite chilling, combining the awesome size of the likes of Giotto's Satan in his Last Judgement fresco with the quiet, brooding menace of the demon of Fuseli's The Nightmare.

Also in Dore's Dante illustrations can be found swirling seas of spirits similar to those seen in Night on Bald Mountain, and a similarly jagged, rocky landscape.

There may also be something of the Lucifer of Dore's Paradise Lost, who spends a lot of time angsting about on moody mountaintops. The above engraving is a highlight in a set of illustrations that tends to be rather samey.

The comical aspect of Kley's devils may also be in reference to Dore, who seems to have enjoyed the comedic situations between giants and humans in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. The situations are at times grotesque, at times frightening, most of the time comical.

I don't know if Kley or the Disney artist would have seen the spectacular 1875 engravings - in my opinion Dore's best illustrations - as they were only published once, in a very expensive edition that now sells for thousands - though they have thankfully become more readily available recently through a cheap Dover paperback featuring all of the full-page illustrations and many of the vignettes - but the earlier illustrations of Dore's were in wide circulation and published many times.

The most well-known inspiration for the Night on Bald Mountain sequence is the scene in Murnau's Faust in which Mephisto, portrayed by Emil Jannings, appears as a giant, bat-like shadow over Faust's village, releasing poisonous smoke that spreads the plague. So iconic is this sequence that it even found its way into an episode of The Powerpuff Girls.

Not only is the idea and staging similar, but the architecture of village beneath Bald Mountain bears more than a passing resemblance to the crooked houses of Faust's hometown. The influence here is most prominently Der Golem, which the Disney artists may also have seen.

Dan Malan has also cited, as an influence on Murnau's Nosferatu and Faust (you guessed it) Gustave Dore. In the case of Faust he's probably thinking of a few full-page illustrations in Contes Drolatiques, which share a similar passion for Gothic Medievalism, in part inspired in turn by Dore's schoolboy years in Strasbourg.

Ugly Duchess Update

A friend rather better than I am at following the news just alerted me to this article, which presents a new theory on Massys' Grotesque Old Woman. The article suggests that Massys' modelled his Duchess on a real person: an old woman with a severe form of Paget's disease.

The drawing attributed to Francesco Melzi (above) could be a copy of a Leonardo drawing, which is now thought not to be an original. The theory is now that Leonardo, or possibly Melzi, copied Massys, not the other way round. This does seem possible, since the drawing is not as detailed.

Though this may initially seem to solve the mystery, it actually adds to the mystery by raising a couple of questions. First of all, who is Leonardo's drawing (above) of? It appears to have been done quickly, so could have been an observational sketch. Unfortunately the top of it is chopped off, so we can't tell if Leonardo's old woman had the distinct headdress or if she was the same as Massys'.

The painting is displayed next to the old man painting (shown in an etching above) for the first time in a while, in the exhibition 'Renaissance Faces' at the National Gallery.

The Ugly Duchess; from Leonardo to Tenniel

I find Leonardo's grotesque drawings very interesting, as, even though they are weird and distorted, they somehow look as though they could exist. Most of them were not drawn from observation but from imagination, and Leonardo used the same sort of precise principles in their design - such as dividing the head into lines of latitude for the brow, the nose and the lip - that he was applying to his (far more numerous) drawings of beautiful and youthful faces.

This drawing, attributed to Francesco Melzi, is a faithful copy of a lost original by Leonardo (c. 1490). It shows a rather ugly old woman in a somewhat unflattering costume. Her weird, distinct headdress emphasises her oddly-shaped head and sticky out ears, and her revealing costume displays bits of her we would probably rather not see.

A surviving, but unfortunately trimmed, drawing by Leonardo himself, from the same year, seems to have been a preparatory sketch for his ugly old woman. Many of his facial studies, both beautiful and grotesque, were done in profile, Leonardo believing such an angle to be the best way to show the features of the face.

Leonardo's old woman is not grotesque simply because she is old; it is the woman's vanity and ostentatiousness, reflected in her costume and bearing, that make her ugly. An extract from Erasmus' Praise of Folly (1511) is included in Leonardo da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesque to suggest a similar message to that illustrated in the drawing:

It is even more amusing to see these old women, so ancient they might as well be dead... They pay a good price for the services of some handsome young Adonis. They never cease smearing their faces with make-up. They can't tear themselves away from the mirror... They show off their withered and flabby breasts... Everyone laughs at these things as utterly foolish (and indeed they are), but the old bags themselves are perfectly self-satisfied.

Quinten Massys of Antwerp may have seen several of Leonardo's grotesque faces, as he used similar designs in a few of his paintings. One of the gypsy faces in the sketch at the top of this post appears in his Grotesque Betrothal and, famously, he painted his own Grotesque Old Woman (c. 1520), which can be seen in the National Gallery in London:

This is certainly one of my favourite paintings in the National Gallery, because it's one of the few paintings that actually puts a smile on people's faces - the laughter is a welcome change from the respectful, decorous hush generally found in museums and galleries. There's also something inherently charming about the old woman's naive ignorance of her own ugliness. The dreamy eyes and coy mouth rally add to the humour.

While Erasmus accuses vain old ladies of having their eyes on 'some handsome young Adonis', Massys depicted his grotesque old woman as seeking the affections of a man of a similar age, who rejects her offer of a rosebud. The idea may also have been inspired by Leonardo, who drew a Satire on Aged Lovers (c. 1490, above); however, Leonardo's old man is much more keen on his admirer than Massys' is.

Massys' narrative was later depicted in an etching (above) by Wenceslaus Hollar around 1645, under the title The King and Queen of Tunis, with the old man (not exactly in a position to be fussy, it must be said) rejecting his admirer's advances. The painting of the old woman still works on its own, however; the rosebud she is holding, along with her wistful gaze into (apparently) nothing could be seen to allude to a youth long since lost.

Sir John Tenniel is more likely to have used Massys' old woman as a source for his Ugly Duchess in Alice in Wonderland, because the Leonardo version's headdress does not feature the embroidered pattern seen in the Tenniel illustrations, and the Hollar version does not give the headdress such a distinct shape. The Punch cartoonist could have seen it in the collection of Alfred Seymour; alternatively he may have used an engraving (above) of the painting by Gilles-Antoine Demarteau.

But there may have been other sources as well. Tenniel had depicted medieval women with similarly shaped headdresses in several of his Punch cartoons (above), and these women have completely different faces. Furthermore, Tenniel's Duchess' face doesn't really resemble that of Massys'.

After Gordon Brown, who wasn't around in Lewis Carrol's day, the closest facial resemblance to the Tenniel Duchess can be found in an engraving (above) by F. W. Fairholt for Thomas Wright's History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art(1865). The illustration is of a misericord, which often featured grotesque faces. The thuggish face shown quite closely resembles Tenniel's Duchess. It is likely Tenniel had come across the book in his earlier days.

This perhaps accounts for the Duchess having a big bulky chin, in contrast to the 'sharp little chin' described by Lewis Carrol. Nevertheless the Tenniel Duchess' chin does at least end in a point, the better to dig into Alice during a conversation. The Tenniel Duchess and her distinctive headdress have been an influence on many of the Alice illustrators, including Gwyneddm Hudson: