The Temptation of St Anthony, David Teniers (II), c. 1645 – (David Teniers The Elder) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: David Teniers The Elder

Date: 1645

Size: 31 x 23 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

St Anthony Abbot, an Egyptian hermit, and the founder of monasticism, died aged 105 in 356 CE. He is shown wearing the black habit of an Augustinian and is to be identified by his attribute, a Tau cross sewn on his cowl. The saint’s temptations by the devil were recounted in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend: ‘And anon they [temptations] came in the form of divers beasts wild and savage, of whom one howled, another sniffled and another cried and another brayed and assailed S. Anthony.’11 The devilish phantoms that were to torment the saint in the later Netherlandish tradition owed much to the inventions of Hieronymus Bosch (1440/60-1516).12 There is no reason to doubt David Teniers II’s execution of the present picture depicting a theme which was popular with the artist from his early activity until the 1660s, and which he rendered in both vertical and horizontal formats. The basic formula he followed was established in his earliest dated example of 1634: the elderly, bearded saint is shown kneeling in a grotto distracted from reading a holy book, presumably the Bible, usually propped against a Crucifix.13 The Rijksmuseum picture is one of a smaller category in which a prominent she-devil in contemporary costume is absent. The details of the physiognomy of the saint’s face here seem not exactly repeated in other versions, but it relates closely to that in the Dresden picture, dated by Klinge to the mid-1640s.14 The present picture is probably of about the same time;15 the exceptionally thin support of a single piece of oak timber is from a tree grown in the Baltic/Polish region which would have been ready for use from 1634. In this picture the saint’s chief assailant is a bearded, capped devil, who points out of the picture space to divert him, as on other occasions in Teniers’s oeuvre.16 The characteristics of this figure are unique in Teniers’s extant treatments of the theme. His physiognomy relates closely to an equally prominent devil in a similarly composed Temptation that was acquired by the Berlin Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (now Bode-Museum) as the work of Brouwer, but is no longer accepted as such.17 A Temptation of St Anthony by Brouwer was listed as no. 280 in the 1640 inventory of pictures in Peter Paul Rubens’s collection after his death, but has since been lost sight of.18 Thus its relation to the Berlin picture and to the Rijksmuseum account of the subject is hypothetical. Whether the devil-tempter in the Berlin picture was an invention of Brouwer’s is an open question; but the similarity of the two faces points to a common source, which may have been the lost painting by Brouwer. In two of his Temptation renderings, Teniers introduced personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins as the saint’s assailants.19 In the present picture, as in the majority of others by Teniers, the grotesque and fantastic devil humans and animals – including those in the variegated aerial jousts above20 – probably had no specific meanings such as seem to have been attached to them by Bosch in his Temptation of St Anthony at Lisbon. At least according to Bax, who gives antecedents and interpretations for the aerial combatants, the devil with a beak, the funnel and the fish.21 Rather Teniers’s intentions were probably accurately conveyed in the rubric to the print by Frans van den Wijngaerde (1614-1679): ‘Blessed is the man who endureth temptation for he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love Him... (Beatus vir qui suffert tentationem: quoniam cum probatus fuerit, Accipiet coronam vitae, quam Repromisit Deus diligentibus....)’.22 The first certain owner of this Temptation of St Anthony was a member of the wealthy de Walé family, who as Catholics in Protestant Holland would have maintained the tradition of the veneration of saints. Gregory Martin, 2022