Autoritratto con scena di magia

Pieter van Laer spent his best years in Rome, where the Italians nicknamed him il Bamboccio, roughly clumsy puppet, because of his oddly stunted body. Around 1636 he painted himself not as a proud master but as a magician in black cap and cloak, recoiling in horror as a clawed devil reaches for him out of the dark. On the table sit the props of forbidden knowledge, books with alchemical signs, glass vessels, a snuffed candle, a skull set on glowing coals. He signed the work on a sheet of music lying in front, whose words warn that the devil does not jest. People in his day sometimes claimed a deformed body came from dealings with witchcraft, and van Laer, mocked for his own shape, turned that ugly idea into a picture of himself caught in the act.