The Temptations of Saint Anthony Abbot

The Prado dates this panel between 1510 and 1515, and anyone looking at it then would have read the hermit's kit at once. The T on his shoulder is the Tau cross of the Antonines, a hospital order that nursed people burned by ergotism, the poisoning from infected rye known as Saint Anthony's fire. The Antonines had the right to let their pigs run loose through the streets with bells at their necks, and both are here. The pig lies against his knee. The bell hangs at his hip, over a green book.

Around him the ground is busy with small monsters. A devil hammers at a little house shaped like an anvil, another wades in the pond, a third crawls out of the dark under the tree. The saint looks past all of it with his hands folded on his stick.

Who painted it has been argued over for years. The Prado gives the panel to Bosch himself. A Dutch research team that studied it around the 500th anniversary of his death in 2016 called it a free imitation made a generation after he died. The Baltic oak it is painted on could have been ready for use by the 1460s.