Hieronymus Bosch (Jeroen van Aken, ca 1450-1516), Temptation of St. Anthony, central panel. Original, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. Copy, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
Among various copies of the Temptation of St. Antony, the Brussels copy is almost similar and undoubtedly the closest to the Lisbon original.
The triptych depicts the story of St. Anthony, who lived at the turn of the fourth century, retired in the Egyptian desert and was subject to hallucinations due to his cloistered life spent in solitude.
In the central panel, monstrosities converge upon a ruined tomb in the middle of the painting, where the main scene takes place on a platform before the tomb. A sumptuously dressed couple offer drinks to a group of manlike monsters. Nearby, a noble woman in a large white medieval cap and a blue dressing gown with a long train kneels at a parapet to offer a drinking-bowl to a nun-like figure and a bizarre trunkless male. Kneeling at the parapet beside the woman in blue, St. Anthony focuses the eyes on the viewer, while the blessing gesture of his right hand is pointing at a Christ Chapel inside the tomb, just above the nun’s head.
The outer wall of the ruined tomb tower is decorated with three scenes representing the human nature of idolatry, the Adoration of the Golden Calf, men making offerings to an enthroned ape and the Israelites returning from Canaan with a bunch of grapes.
To the right of the outer wall at its base, a group of devils are striding in a hallucinatory procession, with a woman as central figure, sitting on the back of a giant rat and holding a baby, her body metamorphosed into a dry tree trunk extending in a scaly lizard tail.
In the water on the foreground, a man has been imprisoned into a headless duck, his hands enclosed by the outside of the vessel. The boat, equipped with a sail ornamented with a putrefied ray, is ridden by a black devil.
To the left on the foreground among other monsters, an armoured demon with a horse’s skull for a head plays lute, while sitting on a plucked goose who is wearing shoes and whose neck ends in a sheep’s snout drinking water from the river.
In the left wing, after St. Anthony - according to the medieval literature - had been overwhelmed by a horde of devils and left for dead, he is carried over the bridge by fellow hermits towards an old tomb where he had been praying, but where he is again attacked and tossed high into the air so as to be borne and surrounded by several demons, while clasping his hands in desperate prayer. Three monsters beneath the bridge argue about a paper that a skating demon-messenger has brought to them, and to the left, a bird gulps its newly hatched young.
In the middle of the left wing, a male giant with bare buttocks is kneeling, his breast forming the roof of a brothel whose entrance lies between his open thighs. To the left, a sea monster is painted with the sea in the far background.
The right wing is about St. Antony enticed by food and sex scenes. Standing in the water at the left of the hermit, a devil-queen surrounded by her servants, offers Anthony a glimpse of her infatuating naked body from a cavity in a dead trunk partly covered by a red curtain, held at one side by a frog-like demon savouring wine, poured from above. Anthony averts his eyes from this obscenity, only to be aroused by the half-naked demonic herald towards a devilish feast around a game table on the foreground. In the background looms the bewitching city of the devil-queen.
For several details of the triptych, see next pictures
