Copy after Hieronymus Bosch

The panel is tall and narrow, 90 centimetres by 37, the shape of the wing of a triptych. It repeats, at reduced size and with small changes, a wing of Hieronymus Bosch's Temptation of Saint Anthony, the triptych now in Lisbon. The Prado's author line for it reads Copia El Bosco. Another painter copied a work by Bosch. Bosch himself had no hand in this panel.

Of the three formulas a catalogue uses when a master's name will not quite fit, this one claims the least. Attributed to would mean the museum thinks Bosch probably did paint the thing. Follower of would mean an unnamed painter inventing a scene of his own in Bosch's manner. Copy after says something narrower, that an identified composition by Bosch has been repeated by another hand. The Prado dates the panel only to the 15th or 16th century. Bosch died in 1516, so that bracket covers his own lifetime and the long decades after it, when copies and imitations of his devils were still in demand. A companion panel in the same museum is copied from the same triptych.