Haloed in darkness, naked but for a sheer gauze across his loins, Satan stands fierce on the edge of a flaming sea and raises his arms, muscles rippling under the weight of his staff, to call his legions. ‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!’

With only his glowering eyes and the snake circling his helm marking him as the Devil, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s handsome antihero is a far cry from the be-tailed monsters that boiled fallen souls in the 12th-century mural at Chaldon Church, Surrey.

Vigorous or deformed, fearsome, humbled or desperate, the Devil has been shapeshifting since he made his artistic debut in late Antiquity, taking on as many forms as his names — Satan is the adversary, Lucifer the fallen angel — or, indeed, the religions for which he was the bogeyman (Islam alone has a bevy

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