A curse on all your paintings: the secret magic of Renaissance art

The ancient Egyptians were not the only ones who created art for magical purposes
botticelli madonna and child
Enchanting ... Botticelli is known for paintings such as his Madonna and Child, but he also painted portraits of traitors to invoke malevolent magic. Photograph: Murdo Macleod Murdo Macleod/Murdo Macleod

Magic is halfway between science and religion. Hear me out, secularists, hear me out. Religion is concerned with a spiritual realm beyond the visible world. Science only accepts – for practical purposes and, if you are Richard Dawkins and others, for philosophical purposes, too – the existence of that visible world, and attempts to discover its nature and how it works. But magic is the desire to use invisible forces to change the visible world.

Works of art that we look at today in museums, as if they were solely intended for mute aesthetic contemplation, were often made for magical purposes. This is clearly true of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, but it also applies to art made thousands of years later in Europe. In Renaissance Florence, portraits of traitors were often painted on walls in public places – after one conspiracy, no less an artist than Sandro Botticelli portrayed the conspirators on the Piazza della Signoria. These were not merely "wanted" posters. They were visual curses: paintings that set out to injure their victims, to invoke malevolent magic. In a similar way, when a Venetian Doge betrayed the Republic of Venice his portrait in the Doge's Palace was blanked out. A modern regime might simply remove his picture: by preserving it over the centuries, as a blank space, Venice did something more potent and spooky.

The most famous magical images of the Renaissance were, however, more benign in their influence. The church of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence treasured – and still does – a miraculously painted Annunciation whose protecting powers made it, in the 15th century, more famous than anything by Botticelli. When the city was in danger it was believed to guard the populace while another magical Madonna was ritually brought into the city from the suburbs at moments of peril.

Astral signs were important in Renaissance magic, and the great astronomical clocks that still survive from this period in Venice and at Hampton Court Palace are magical technologies. As it happens, Renaissance intellectuals who dabbled in magic believed they were the direct heirs of the kind of Egyptian wisdom seen in the Book of the Dead. They credited their magical books to Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly an ancient Egyptian sage. He never existed. In reality the Hermetic tradition of magical lore goes back to late antiquity. And yet, all magic seems to make use of images and incantations in a way that echoes the Book of the Dead. Magic was fantasy, but it enchanted artists whose works enchant us. Science works, but it leaves less scope for the imagination to believe it can remake the world.