Around the year 270, a young Egyptian named Anthony gave away his inheritance and walked into the desert. He lived alone for decades, first in a tomb, then in an abandoned fort, and according to his biographer, Athanasius of Alexandria, he was attacked there night after night by demons. They came as wild beasts, as seductive women, as heaps of gold, and sometimes as a pack of monsters that beat him until he lay senseless. He refused to break. Anthony became the father of Christian monasticism, and his temptations became one of the great subjects of Western art.
Ercole Procaccini the Younger, a member of a Milanese dynasty of painters, sketched the scene in the 17th century. It is a working drawing, not a finished picture, and it keeps the energy of an idea being worked out, the temptations still swirling.
The story attracted artists partly because it gave them permission to invent monsters. Martin Schongauer's engraving of Anthony carried aloft by demons, made around 1470, was so admired that the teenage Michelangelo painted a version of it. Hieronymus Bosch filled a triptych with nightmare hybrids, Matthias Grünewald painted a hideous assault on the Isenheim Altarpiece, and centuries later Flaubert spent nearly thirty years rewriting a novel on the theme, while Dalí and Max Ernst both painted it in the 1940s.
There's a strange medical history behind the image too. In the Middle Ages a terrifying illness called "Saint Anthony's Fire" swept through Europe: burning pain in the limbs, gangrene, convulsions and vivid hallucinations. The religious Order of Saint Anthony, the Antonines, ran hospitals that treated the victims. We now know the disease was ergotism, caused by a fungus that grows on rye and produces compounds related to LSD. Some historians have suggested that the hallucinations of ergot poisoning fed the demon-filled imagery of Anthony's temptations, especially in the Isenheim Altarpiece, which was painted for an Antonine hospital.
Anthony's symbols are worth knowing: a T-shaped staff called a tau cross, a small bell, and a pig, which recalls the Antonine monks' privilege of letting their pigs roam free in towns. He is invoked against skin diseases, fire and, fittingly, against infection.
What's most modern about the story is its psychology. Anthony's demons are the things that visit anyone alone long enough with their own mind: fear, desire, doubt and old regrets taking on shapes. Procaccini's sketch catches them mid-swirl, and catches the saint at the one thing that finally defeated them, simply refusing to leave.
Procaccini's The Temptation of Saint Anthony appears on our: