A youthful witch, depicted half-length, makes irresistible play for the viewer's attention, a dramatic expression of astonishment, fear, and disgust overspreading her features (fig. 82). Startled, abruptly, in the midst of enacting a magical ritual upon a human skull atop a bowl of live coals, and with an occult manual at her elbow, she turns towards the viewer her heavily contorted, flushed visage: the deeply furrowed brow, heavily knitted eyebrows, and wide-eyed grimace indicate a heightened psychological state. Her abrupt movement causes her breasts to spill out of her dress, which falls down to expose her shoulder as well. It takes a moment to identify the cause of her horror: a pair of long and articulated black claws irrupt into the pictorial space from the left.

This small canvas, hanging in the Pinacoteca Civica in Ancona, and a larger panel version, formerly owned by the Maurizio Canesso Gallery in Paris and now held in a private collection (fig. 83), have been attributed to the Roman painter Angelo Caroselli (1585–1652) or to an anonymous artist dubbed in recent decades “Pseudo-Caroselli.” Adaptations of this dramatic scene, in which a male magician replaces the female witch, were painted by Pietro Paolini from Lucca (1603–81; fig. 84) and by the Haarlem native Pieter van Laer (1599–ca.1642; fig. 85). The four paintings (in addition to two copies of Paolini's painting), collectively denoted here Witch Alarmed by a Devil given their cohesion as a group, introduce a unique iconography developed during the artists’ sojourns in Rome in the 1620s and 1630s.