The Witch

Circle of Alessandro Magnasco · 1700–1725

Medium

Oil on panel

Original size

31.4 × 22.2 cm (12 3/8 × 8 3/4 in.); Framed: 50.8 × 41.3 × 7.7 cm (20 × 16 1/4 × 3 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

"The Witch" captures the brooding theatricality that defined Italian Baroque painting at its most unnerving — a shadowy figure rendered with crackling energy against a darkened ground. Alessandro Magnasco and his circle were masters of this unsettled mood, building compositions through rapid, flickering brushwork that seems almost agitated on the surface. Working in Genoa and Milan in the early eighteenth century, Magnasco's studio produced devotional works alongside darker subjects — witches, hermits, and figures at the margins of society — reflecting the era's fascination with the transgressive and the occult. The panel format used here was traditional for intimate, highly worked compositions, allowing for fine detail that rewards close looking. Magnasco's witch imagery sits within a broader Italian tradition of depicting nocturnal sorcery, subjects that were as much about social anxiety as artistic spectacle — painted at a time when witch trials were still within living memory across much of Europe. Our hand-painted oil reproduction, executed on panel using traditional materials and methods, preserves the textural depth and tonal drama that make the original, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, so quietly unsettling in person.