"Lucifer In the Flesh" From the Middle Ages to Cruz

For well over a thousand years, we humans have tried to imagine what the Devil might look like incarnate.

Early renderings generally showed us a human-like figure with wings and horns, like this engraving from the year 1288. Those traits were most famously explored by John Milton in “Paradise Lost,” his 1667 epic poem about the Devil. Milton gave us the Lucifer we have pictured ever since. But ever since, we’ve also freely applied other traits to the Devil.