Der Teufelsbeschwörer

This Exorcist (Der Teufelsbeschwörer) depicts the practice of demonic exorcism — the formal ritual by which priests expelled evil spirits from the possessed — combining Magnasco's interest in extreme religious experience with the element of the supernatural. Exorcism was an officially recognized church practice in Baroque Catholicism, with specific rituals prescribed in the Rituale Romanum, and its visual representation combined the dramatic possibilities of possession and convulsion with the authority of priestly intervention. Magnasco's treatment of this subject brought his characteristic expressive intensity to a subject already inherently dramatic, creating an image of spiritual combat that combined religious documentation with aesthetic extremism.

The exorcism scene is rendered with Magnasco's most agitated brushwork, the flickering, almost hallucinatory treatment of the figures creating an atmosphere of supernatural terror and religious frenzy.