The Independent discusses how the Devil has informed our art.
From the article...
Indeed, the word "Satan" means "adversary" and it is only during the Middle Ages that this image warped into the monstrous, fork-wielding enemy of God that we all know so well.
"If you look at Satan in the Bible, he is not necessarily on the wrong side. In the Book of Job he is clearly one of the sons of God and sort of working for God as a kind of agent provocateur who says: 'let's go and see how Job responds to affliction'," explains Parker. "So Satan and God are in collusion to some extent. And there is no devil in the Garden of Eden – that is all part of later theology."
According to Parker, this was resurrected in the 17th century, when John Milton created a uniquely imaginative connection with the Devil in his poem Paradise Lost.
Before Paradise Lost – with a few exceptions – the Devil had horns and a fork, yet Milton shows him as to be an individual who's so sensitive to the beauty and goodness of God's creation that he simply can't bear it and has to destroy it. "That's very different from acting out of pure evil," adds Parker.
This concept of a more thoughtful and romantic Satan was built upon by the Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust - which, in turn influenced Lord Byron's representations of the Devil in Cain and The Vision of Judgment. William Blake was another to draw upon this dark inspiration both within his writing and his uniquely unnerving paintings.
In more recent times it has also influenced the daimonic creativity handed to Adrian Leverkühn, the fictional composer who's the protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus.
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