Agostino Veneziano's enigmatic 16th-century engraving Lo Stregozzo (“The Male Witch”) has been mystifying viewers for nearly 500 years.

Four naked, muscular young men rush at a run into a wetland. (Note on the upper left the ducks that their coming has disturbed.) In their midst, an elderly woman, also naked—a witch? Hecate-Diana, the witches' goddess?—holding the witch's signature emblem, the bubbling cook-pot, rides the articulated skeleton of an large animal of indeterminate species (horse?). Beneath her mount, a thickset older man on all fours, also naked, awkwardly attempts to straddle two animated skeletons, also of indeterminate species.

There's much to unpack here, and I hope to do so in a future post. For today, though, I'd like to examine more closely the engraving's mysterious title.

Numerous copies of the etching have survived the centuries. Museums generally title it either "The Carcass" or “The Witches' Procession,” but that's not what Lo Stregozzo means.

Google-translate Lo Stregozzo and you'll get: “the sorcerer.” Well, kind of.

The word is clearly masculine singular. (Lo is the form that il, “the,” takes before Zs and certain Ss.) Stregone is the masculine form of strega, a (female) witch. Some would translate “wizard.” Me, I'd say “warlock.”

What about that ending, though? (Pronounce that double Z as ts, as in pizza.) -Ozzo in Italian is a (masculine singular) “augmentative suffix”: the opposite of a diminutive. It tells you that something is “big.” Whether or not we want to take this literally is another matter.

The same suffix occurs in maritozzo, literally “big husband,” a kind of central Italian sweet bun, and panuozzo, a stuffed Neapolitan sandwich. Draw your own conclusions.

So, the big question: who is the eponymous “big warlock” of the title?

It can't be the four hunky runners. (They're plural.) It can't be the skeleton-riding witch/goddess. (She's female.) It can only be the butt-in-the-air guy beneath her, desperately trying, not wholly successfully, to ride two mounts at once—or, possibly, to crawl from one skeletal mount to another.

It's a counterintuitive title. Said stregozzo is far from the most noticeable figure in the composition. (The viewer's eye is drawn, first to the four runners, then to the crone, then to her mount.) One senses a certain wryness in that augmentative ending.

Well, that's the nature of warlockry. Me, I've been trying, not always successfully, to ride multiple mounts for years.

Perhaps Agostino is commenting here on the role of the artist, a position not always beautiful or dignified, and certainly not in the forefront of attention.

Art as magic. Artist as warlock.

Sure makes sense to me.