Dog-faced demons and a pitchforked penis: the world’s most terrifying artworks

Sinners being eaten alive by serpents, the antichrist seizing power on Earth, a bound penis menaced by a goat-footed devil … in a Halloween special, we look at four devilish masterpieces. Warning: graphic content

The devil comes out to play at Halloween – but people haven’t always viewed hell and its creatures as good clean fun. When artists 600 years ago painted their satanic scarefests, they weren’t just trying to entertain. Medieval Europeans believed in the existence of hell as a physical place. Paintings in parish churches across Britain depicted the damned being led into hell by clawed, scaly cloven-footed demons. In Flanders and Germany, painters competed to make the legions of the devil and the horrors of hell seem utterly real.

That’s how the world’s scariest satanic works of art were created. Gothic paintings have a belief in the demonic world that gets deep under your flesh. Here are four devilish masterpieces that survive to thrill us from a lost age of fear – and one wicked modern update.

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