Check out this excellent picture of devils from a medieval book I found here (well, there are saints and angels and Jesus in the picture, too, but the good guys look like a bunch of snooty killjoys; my eye is drawn to the much more expressive and happy-looking creatures on the bottom half of the page):
The devil in the middle, with the chicken feet hands and a face on his belly, has little faces on his (her?) knees, elbows and shoulders and the rest of the limb comes out of that faces open mouth. I’ve seen this curious trick of anatomy before in other medieval art before, and always liked it. It suggests to me two things:
- If I were into tattoos, wouldn’t it be cool to get demon faces tattooed on my joints?
- If his knee face or elbow face bites down, isn’t the rest of the limb going to fall off?