St. Antony of Egypt
The Temptation of St. Antony- Hieronymus Bosch.
One of my favorite artists in history. I found a very interesting narrative on the work shown above - and repeated off to the side here - in case the linked image is deleted. When photos are taken from another website, bandwidth is used up every time someone reads my blog. This is why I save photos to “My photos” and post them on Rome-ing Catholics - my other blog - then I take the photos from there. That way, no one’s bandwidth is gobbbled up. But Blogger would not reproduce the image large enough - so I took the original from the website I took the narrative from - I hope it stays - it is stunning in the large format.
Anyway, I’m still taking time off from the blog and the Internet. But I’ll check in to do a quick post of interest and publish any comments I may receive.
I have other things to do and I am sick of blogging and blogs - no offense to anyone. I need to rethink all of this idle time I spend writing about nothing. I read some earlier posts of mine and find my writing style embarrassing.
Anyway - for the feast of St. Antony, what follows is the narrative I found:
“Anthony averts his gaze from the witch-queen who tried to seduce him into marrying her. The witch-queen, wearing a flower-petal headdress, is pouring something out of a jug into a bowl held by a frog. The frog is winged, like the one on whose pale belly Anthony sprawls in the left panel.
Closer to Anthony, a naked woman stands in the hollow of a dead tree. Behind Anthony is a robed gryllus in a child’s walker; below him another, who has legs but no arms. In the corner, under a round tabletop, are two naked men, one with his foot in a jar, the other having his throat cut by a demon. A third man, naked except for a cape, is blowing a fantastic horn.
In the middle ground, a hero with a sword is battling a dragon in the water. The two domed buildings behind them are beacons; one has a fire kindled on top, the other has glowing coals in a bucket at the end of a pivoted arm. We can just make out that the building on the right is being assaulted by a Moorish army with lances and ladders.
These panels, in suggesting that the triptych as a whole is about the St. Anthony legend, have the same function as the radar-reflective chaff that used to be dropped by warplanes. They have little significance of their own, and merely distract us from the real message of the center panel, which we’ll come to in a moment.
Meanwhile, notice how deftly the artist has made it appear that the narrative of the three inner panels is continuous. The barren ground in all three supports this idea, and the bridge on the left is so much like the platform in the middle that we naturally think the platform is a bridge too.
Several writers have referred to the puddle as “wastewater,” and I think that’s an apt expression. This isn’t part of a natural system of flowing water, it’s the kind of grey water that is dumped out of a washtub—or perhaps, considering the dead fish, we ought to think of it as the effluent of a sewer.
In the center panel of Bosch’s triptych The Flood, the receding waters are represented by a stagnant pool in which a drowned woman and child are floating. It is this stagnant water, I believe, that turns up in other Bosch paintings to remind us that ever since the Flood we have been living in a suburb of Hell.” - Will the Real Hieronymus Bosch Please Stand Up?
