The torments in the life of the saint echo the example of Christ’s passion and his earlier temptations by Satan in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11 Mark 1:12–13, Luke 4:1–13). Born in the fourth century in Upper Egypt, Saint Anthony mortified his flesh and suffered tribulations from demons in the desert as well as lustful temptations from devilish visions of female nudes for twenty years after becoming a hermit. Additionally, Anthony’s vita was featured in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) of about 1260, which had been translated by 1500 into both Southern and Northern Middle Dutch, surviving in many manuscripts and thirteen printed editions (see Paul Wackers, "'Latinitas' in Middle Dutch Literature," in Boethius in the Middle Ages, Leiden, 1997, p. This widely disseminated Latin text was translated and published in Middle Dutch as Vader Boeck (Book of the Fathers) in 1490 by Peter van Os in Zwolle. Based on these sources, an account of Anthony’s life had been included in the sixth-century collection of hagiographies known as Vitae Patrum. 296/98–373), or from the Collationes patrum in scetica eremo by the monk and theologian John Cassian (ca. Artists could study several sources of the saint’s life, all of which derived either from the Vita Sancti Antonii, written in 357 by Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. The Temptation of Saint Anthony was one of the most popular subjects in mid-sixteenth-century Netherlandish landscape painting. The saint beseeches Christ for solace and protection while a grotesque creature attempts to drag him backward toward the gaping mouth of hell. A kneeling Saint Anthony, who can be identified by his T-shaped staff, prays before the altar and its triptych. The right half is dominated by fanciful architecture consisting of two prominent towers flanking a stairway, which leads to an altar. A doomsday conflagration with menacing demons hovering above engulfs a village at the left. The Painting: This richly colored, small-format painting presents a spacious and mesmerizing view of an inhospitable landscape.
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