Temptation of St. Anthony

Saint Anthony sits on a rock in a burnt landscape with a book in his hands, and everything around him is working to break his concentration. A battle goes on behind him, a city burns, and a monster with an enormous head swings a ladle, scooping up sinners. The composition closes around the saint in rings. He turns his head out towards us, which was deliberate. Pictures like this asked the viewer to take the hermit's side and feel what he felt. Almost all of it is borrowed from Hieronymus Bosch, who died in 1516, and the panel was once given to him outright. What rules that out are the two naked temptresses. That figure type was current in Italy around the middle of the 1500s, a generation after Bosch, and the museum now dates the oak panel to between 1550 and 1560 and calls its painter a follower. Bosch's own collector, Diego de Guevara, had complained before his death in 1520 that Spain was filling up with paintings made to look like Bosch.