Den hellige Antonius’ fristelser

In the desert the aged Anthony kneels unmoved amid the carnival of temptations his legend accumulated: the grotesque crew of demons that Bosch and Bruegel invented and that Antwerp’s seventeenth-century painters inherited. David Teniers the Younger — the genre master of the Flemish village, court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and curator of the archducal collection — painted the subject on a panel scarcely larger than a hand, compressing the whole theatre of the temptation into a cabinet picture made for a connoisseur’s cabinet rather than a church wall. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).