Spanish Romantic School (xix) - Pact With The Devil

Oil on pine panel.

Under the crimson light of a strange noon, when the parhel dominates the celestial vault, the knight holds his mount at the edge of the cliff, where the air exhales scents of sulfur and burnt street, emanations of the fiery earth. In front of him, the firmament is torn apart, giving rise to a diaphanous, formless figure, a breath of ectoplasm descending through wisps of mist, like a fallen angel summoned in a circle of salt. This scene, an oil of dark, feverish romanticism, inevitably evokes the gothic horror of the Wolf Gorge in Freischütz; here, as there, the dialogue is not a prayer, but a pact with the devil sealed in the silence of the mountain. While the horse, terrorized by the presence of the sacred, tramples the ground, the encounter evokes the invocation of Samiel, the Black Hunter, where the metal of the magic bullets melts under the influence of forces that 18th-century reason would call "evil eye" and 19th-century reason "diabolic magnetism". This is the suspended moment when man, small and mortal, offers his will to a celestial shadow in exchange for a power that, like all the legacies of the witches of yesteryear, will eventually demand its blood tribute.

- Image size unframed: 77 x 40 cm / 86.5 x 50 cm with exclusive custom frame.