The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Jan Wellens de Cock was an Antwerp painter who specialized in fantastic, visionary subjects influenced by Hieronymus Bosch. His Temptation of Saint Anthony, dated 1524 and held in Warsaw, participates in a long tradition of depicting the Egyptian desert father beset by grotesque demonic visions — a tradition Bosch had pushed to hallucinatory extremes only decades earlier. The subject was intensely popular in the Netherlands because it lent itself to inventive horror and moral allegory simultaneously. De Cock's engagement with the Boschian vocabulary shows how the older master's idiom continued to animate Flemish painting long after Bosch's death in 1516.

De Cock populates the picture with hybrid demonic creatures drawn from the Boschian repertoire, set against a landscape of burning buildings and murky water. The palette mixes warm earthen tones with lurid reds and blues, with Anthony as a calm devotional centre.