Explore the Description of this artwork, The Four Witches.
The women are positioned in a small interior space which contains a window and can be entered or exited from two sides. The small devil in the left hand recess, who is intended to represent evil,  as mammalian anatomy including hind legs, and holds a vaguely described object in his claw that appears to consist of sticks and a piece of string, perhaps comprising a contemporary device for hunting birds and fowl. The devil's form and gestures closely resembles a similar small bat-like monster in Durer's The Dream of the Doctor of 1498–99, an engraving close in date and style to the Four Witches.The differing hairstyles and headdress suggests that the women are from different social classes; differing types of headdresses were often used in medieval and early Renaissance pictures to indicate social and moral aspects of the individual person. This was especially so in Nuremberg, where guidelines on the matter were issued by the Nuremberg council. The woman on the left wears a Haube (a type of bonnet, in German a Festhaube), usually the preserve of married women. The woman to the far right, facing the viewer, wears a long folded veil (Schleier), indicating that she comes from the middle-class.At this early stage in his life, Dürer was struggling with both the restrictions of drawing for engraving, and the portrayal of nudes. Compared to his nudes in the near contemporary Small Fortune which shows a female satyr nursing her infant, or The Penance of St John Chrysostom, the current work seems more reliant on Renaissance proto-types, although they are, according to art historian Charles Ilsley Minott "taller, sturdier, and more graceful."
early Renaissance Nuremberg veil left bonnet engraving