Historical Artwork

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The creature known as Slender Man has popped up in countless works of art and carvings, dating all the way back to ancient Egypt. It has been found in a number of hieroglyphics. Referred in texts as “Thief of the Gods” or “Thief of Kuk” (Kuk is the Egyptian Deity of Darkness, depicted as a woman, perhaps related to the fact that many of its victims are women), the carvings date back to roughly 3100 BCE in lower Egypt. Slender Man is most commonly mentioned around Pharaoh Wazner, and it is theorized that he had some sort of encounter with the creature, though it has never been confirmed.

The German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung (better known as Hans Baldung Grien) was thought to be a contemporary of the woodcut artist Hans Freckenberg (it is presumed that Baldung acquired his "Grien" nickname at Albrect Dürer's workshop in Nuremberg due to the preponderance of Hanses at one point). Baldurg died in 1545 (the cause of death is unknown), a mere two years after Freckenberg. One of Baldurg's better known paintings is the Three Ages of Woman and Death, painted in 1510 and currently in the possession of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Famous for it's strange portrayal of a skeletal figure holding an hour-glass (similar to the recurring theme in Frackenberg's series of woodcuts), the painting was subjected to an X-Ray analysis following the theft of the Cellini Salt Cellar from the museum in 2003 as an insurance requirement. Unexpectedly, the painting seemed to have been altered at an early stage, and the X-Ray appears to show the skeletal "death" figure possessing a number of extraneous upper limbs. Again, this is reminiscent of the figure portrayed as "Der Ritter" in Frackenberg's woodcuts of the period. (See our records on "16th Century German Woodcuts" for more information)

Even today, the entity continues to pop up in contemporary artwork, notably in urban graffiti work.