聖アントニウスの誘惑

Before Cézanne became the painter of still, carefully built landscapes and apples, he made pictures like this, dark and turbulent and full of appetite. Saint Anthony was a hermit in the Egyptian desert, tormented, the story goes, by visions sent to break his faith. Cézanne gives him a nude woman stepping out of the shadows and a demon looming at the edge. He painted it around 1877, and the theme was in the air. Flaubert had published his own feverish Temptation of Saint Anthony only a few years before. What strikes many viewers is how the hermit shrinks from the woman, hunched and turned away, while Cézanne lays the paint on thickly, more sculpted than described.