María Cayetana de Silva, 13th Duchess of Alba the House of Osuna. The Duchess' relationship with famed Spanish painter Francisco Goya and her somewhat eccentric personality have contributed greatly to a continuing interest in her life during the two centuries since her death. Goya executed several well-known portraits of the duchess, most of them during his stay at Sanlúcar de Barrameda (one of the Andalusian country seats of the House of Medina-Sidonia), shortly after the death of her husband, the Duke of Alba, who was also Duke of Medina Sidonia, in 1796. Goya's accompaniment of the recently widowed Duchess combined with certain innuendo expressed in his portraits of
Witches' Sabbath Rob Zombie's "The Lords of Salem" incorporates such imagery as flashbacks into the titular town's backstory. Depictions in painting include the following: In spite of the number of times that religious authorities retold stories of gatherings of witches, modern researchers have been unable to find any corroboration that any such event ever physically occurred. The historian Scott E. Hendrix presents a two-fold explanation for why these stories were so commonly told in spite of the fact that sabbats likely never actually occurred in his study "The Pursuit of Witches and the Sexual Discourse of the Sabbat." First, belief in the