Witches have always cast a wicked spell over art

They ride on broomsticks or backwards on goats, according to the German artist Albrecht Dürer. They hold midnight sabbaths. And they are always “modern”.

They are "modern" because they provoke anxiety. The image of the witch was a focus for Freudian terrors long before Freud came along to analyse them. This European myth is a figure of darkness on to which some of the greatest artists have projected some of their most bizarre  and hence "modern" imaginings.

The art world has certainly played a role over the last few centuries, amping up our fear and infatuation with wicked women. For over 500 years, artists from Albrecht Dürer to Cindy Sherman have had an indissoluble fascination with the phenomenon of witches. Art history anthologies are filled with images of female characters endowed with magical, sometimes malevolent abilities, echoing the general long-lasting cultural obsession.

In his painting Witchcraft, also known as Allegory of Hercules, the 16th-century painter Dosso Dossi depicts a sinister group of people at a nocturnal banquet. Is witchcraft going on here, or is that a romantic title? Dossi was fascinated by the idea of the witch. His painting Circe portrays an ancient Greek enchantress from Homer's Odyssey.

Circe, who is ancient history’s first recorded practitioner of  pharamakonor sorcery, was originally labelled polypharmakos. Homer’s work The Odyssey, which is the piece of literature in which Circe first makes an appearance, was written around 700B.C. Through the use of her extended knowledge of herbs and potions, Circe transforms men into animals. Portrayed as an extremely attractive and erotic woman, one is lead to believe that the practice of male transformation is to enable Circe, a woman who apparently craves sexual stimulation, to have a stable of men permanently attached to her side with no means of escape.

In his 1940 painting the Robing of the Bride, the surrealist Max Ernst imagines a fantastical transformation of woman into bird, under the tutelage of his personal demon Loplop. It is a sensual demonstration of how the occult and the unconscious still flourish in modern art. But while for Ernst magic is fascinating, for artists in the age of Dürer and Dossi it was both alluring and terrifying: flesh and blood people were executed for this fictional crime.

From the first emergence of the character of Circe in Homer’s work The Odyssey , to the many representations of Medea intragedy, mythology, and poetry, the stereotype of dangerous women who engaged in the art of  magic has been a disconcertingly central theme of western art for centuries. Out of primitive beliefs, the imagination grows strange fruit.