Artwork

It Is the Devil, Bearing Beneath His Two Wings the Seven Deadly Sins

It Is the Devil, Bearing Beneath His Two Wings the Seven Deadly Sins is a print by the Impressionist artist Odilon Redon. It dates from 1888 and is held in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Accession no.: 1927.477.3
Credit line: Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland

About this work

Overview

Odilon Redon’s lithograph, It Is the Devil, Bearing Beneath His Two Wings the Seven Deadly Sins, belongs to a small portfolio of three prints inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s 1874 novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony. The work does not illustrate a specific episode from the text; instead it visualises the novel’s nightmarish atmosphere through an imagined demonic figure that carries the seven sins as parasitic forms beneath its wings.

Subject & Meaning

The central figure is a shadowy, bat‑winged entity whose body seems composed of swirling darkness. Beneath its wings cling diminutive, grotesque figures, each symbolising one of the traditional seven deadly sins. By presenting the sins as attached parasites, Redon suggests a moral weight that the devil bears, reflecting the novel’s theme of spiritual trial and temptation.

Technique & Style

Redon translated the dense blackness of his earlier charcoal studies into lithographic ink, exploiting the medium’s capacity for stark tonal contrasts. Thick, expressive lines generate a heavy, almost tactile darkness, while lighter passages create abrupt shifts of light and shadow, a chiaroscuro effect that heightens the work’s dreamlike, otherworldly quality.

History & Provenance

Created after Redon read Flaubert’s novel, the print was part of a series intended to capture the book’s imaginative tone rather than its narrative details. Although Redon believed the lithographs succeeded in conveying the novel’s surreal universe, contemporary audiences largely misunderstood them, and they remained relatively obscure during his lifetime.