La Tentation de saint Antoine

Around 1501, in a Netherlands gripped by fear of plague, sin and the approaching Last Judgement, Bosch painted this triptych about a man trying to hold his mind together. The saint is Anthony, a hermit who went into the Egyptian desert in the late 3rd century and was tormented, the old stories say, by demons. Bosch fills the panels with them. Half-animal creatures, a fish that flies, buildings that seem to be alive, a whole procession of temptations closing in. In the center Anthony kneels and simply looks out at us, steady, while the world around him comes apart. It was one of the first of Bosch's works to leave the Low Countries. It reached Portugal in the 16th century and has stayed in Lisbon ever since.