The Temptations of Saint Anthony

Around 1510 Bosch was in his last years in 's-Hertogenbosch, and his workshop was turning out versions of the subjects people kept asking him for. The Prado gives this panel to that workshop and dates it 1510 to 1515. Some scholars think it repeats a lost late painting by Bosch himself. The shape is the unusual thing here. A wide panel let the painter set Anthony large in the front corner, arms resting on a mound of earth, hands joined, absorbed, his back to everything going on behind him. The temptation is out in the water. A hut rises there roofed with an old woman's head, and the head wears a dovecote for a hat, with a young woman naked in the doorway and a swan on the sign beside her, which marked a brothel. Far off to the left, tiny, monks stand in front of their burning convent while the demons that set the fire fly away.