The Temptation of St Anthony

This unusually large drawing of fantastical, hybrid creatures draws on the imagery of the early Renaissance Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450–1516). Bosch’s startlingly original imagination translated the religious and political anxieties of late fifteenth-century society into densely populated panels that pictured the horrifying consequences of immoral behaviour.

The story of Saint Anthony of Egypt (c.251–356) was particularly popular amongst artists interested in depicting demons and monstrous creatures. Saint Anthony spent fifteen years of hermetic existence in the desert, where he described being tormented by a multitude of devils. Bosch’s painting of Saint Anthony from 1505–15 (Museum of Art, Lisbon) was influential on his contemporaries and the following generation of artists, including the Dutch painter Jan Mandijn (c.1500–1559). This drawing shares many compositional similarities to a panel painting of Saint Anthony attributed to Mandjn (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). 

The drawing technique, with its unfaltering pen and ink outlines over black chalk, suggests this is a copy. The practice of copying drawings was popular in the Renaissance, and ‘model books’ were kept in workshops for apprentices to work from in order to build their skills. This copy, in its ambitious scale and complexity of figures, suggests it was used as a tool for recording a composition rather than refining a particular detail or individual figure.

Maria Zagala, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs