Assembly of Witches

Francken signed and dated this oak panel in 1607, and within a few years it was already in the imperial collection in Vienna. Witch trials were being held across the German lands and the Netherlands in those decades, and learned books argued in detail over what witches did at their night meetings. Francken turned that literature into a crowded scene of women at their rites, with small demons and hybrid creatures in among them, borrowed from the painted worlds of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The museum points out that he drew loosely on writings by Hildegard of Bingen and Paracelsus, and that the picture carries the fears about women common in the writing of his time. He painted the theme again and again, because collectors kept buying it.