Art: Temptations of St. Anthony

In the 3rd Century, Saint Anthony the Egyptian renounced all worldly joys, went off into the Arabian Desert to live the life of a hermit. He had a terrible time of it. Often he would glance up from his prayers to see Satan hovering before him in the gloom of his abandoned fort. And Satan was hard to recognize; usually he looked like the things Anthony missed most.*

In the 20th Century, Max Ernst (see col. 3) renounced the pleasures of painting the sunlit world he saw around him. By concentrating on the feathered, taloned, sharp-toothed horrors visible to his inner...