Hair on End. Demons and Sinners in Old Russian Iconography

Abstract

The way to depict the enemy in Christian art is a wide sphere of research, comprising a multitude of visual motifs. In the Middle Ages, dealing with the world of demons allowed the painters a certain poetic licence for playing with forms and details; however, there existed some “generic indicators” for demonic figures, such as dark colouring, a mixture of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic features and other less evident visual markers. For Byzantine and Old Russian iconography the most important one was hair standing on end. Upright locks in demons appeared fairly early in Christian art and served for centuries to form the image of the enemy. They marked various characters, from infernal monsters and personifications of sins to heretics and transgressors, solidifying them into the army of Satan. Sometimes this motif was used to add dynamics to a picture and show the transformation of a character who became evil or, on the contrary, turned into a righteous Christian. The article is focused on the origin and semantics of this essential marker, and the way it was used in Old Russian iconography to help form the image of the many-faced enemy.