The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Bosch's Temptation of Saint Anthony (c. 1525) is a later, smaller treatment of the subject that allowed him to concentrate on specific demonic episodes in Anthony's temptations rather than the panoramic overview of the Lisbon triptych. The Anthony temptation subject was so productive for Bosch — providing unlimited license to invent demonic creatures and morally degraded human types — that he returned to it multiple times. Each version found new ways to populate the desert landscape with fantastical beings: hybrid creatures combining animal, human, and mechanical elements, landscapes that dissolve between natural and supernatural, and demons whose inventive malevolence is simultaneously terrifying and darkly comic.

Bosch's distinctive hybrid creatures and fantastical landscapes are rendered with meticulous precision, the dreamlike imagery painted with the careful oil technique of a Netherlandish master.