The Temptation of Saint Anthony (after Hieronymus Bosch)

Hieronymus Bosch died in 1516, and that is roughly where this picture's story begins. His vision of Saint Anthony, the desert hermit swarmed by demons as he tries to pray, had become one of the most admired and most copied inventions in Netherlandish art. The great original is the triptych now in Lisbon. This panel in Berlin is a later version after it, painted around 1550 by a follower rather than by Bosch's own hand. Anthony kneels in a landscape that keeps sprouting hybrid creatures, with fires on the horizon and figures that are part animal, part machine. It comes from a century hungry for images of sin and temptation, when copyists kept Bosch's monsters in wide circulation, and this Berlin panel is one of roughly twenty surviving versions of the subject.