The Temptation of Saint Anthony

The Gallerie degli Uffizi will date this canvas no more precisely than the 17th century. The literature narrows it. David Ryckaert the third spent most of his Antwerp career painting peasant interiors and drinking parties, and only in his last decade, after about 1650, turned to devils and hell scenes.

Saint Anthony is under assault in the desert, and the assault takes the usual Antwerp form. A young woman leans in on one side, and next to her a grotesque figure works at a stringed instrument. The formula runs back through Bruegel to Bosch, and by the 1650s it was a local speciality that collectors knew how to ask for.

For much of its life here the picture answered to another name. The grand-ducal inventories of the 18th and early 19th centuries carried it as a Teniers. It hung in the Uffizi until 1928, when it was moved across the Arno to the Palatina, where a second Ryckaert Temptation, a smaller panel, is also kept.