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At his fourth appearance the Devil showed him a large yellow money-bag and a great ducat and promised him to give him as many of these as he wanted at any time. But the painter is able to boast that he ‘had taken nothing whatever of the kind’.

Another time the Devil asked him to turn to enjoyment and entertainment, and the painter remarks that ‘this indeed came to pass at his desire; but I did not continue for more than three days and it was then brought to an end’.

Since he rejected magical arts, money and pleasures when they were offered him by the Devil, and still less made them conditions of the pact, it becomes really imperative to know what the painter in fact wanted from the Devil when he signed a bond with him. Some motive he must have had for his dealings with the Devil.

On this point, too, the Trophaeum provides us with reliable information. He had become low-spirited, was unable or unwilling to work properly and was worried about making a livelihood; that is to say, he was suffering from melancholic depression, with an inhibition in his work and (justified) fears about his future. We can see that what we are dealing with really is a case history. We learn, too, the exciting cause of the illness, which the painter himself, in the caption to one of his pictures of the Devil, actually calls a melancholia (‘that I should seek diversion and banish melancholy’). The first of our three sources of information, the village priest s letter of introduction, speaks, it is true, only of the state of depression (‘dum artis suae progressum emolumentumque secuturum pusillanimis perpenderet’), but the second source, the Abbot Franciscus’s report, tells us the cause of this despondency or depression as well. He says: ‘acceptâ aliquâ pusillanimitate ex morte parentis’; and in the compiler’s preface the same words are used, though in a reversed order: (‘ex morte parentis acceptâ aliquâ pusillanimitate’). His father, then, had died and he had in consequence fallen into a state of melancholia; whereupon the Devil had approached him and asked him why he was so downcast and sad, and had promised ‘to help him in every way and to give him support’. ¹

¹ The first picture on the title-page and its caption represent the Devil in the form of an ‘honest citizen’.