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Notice the devil’s pointing hand above and the woman leaning in at the left, then the saint’s calm, lowered face between them.
Saint Anthony, an Egyptian hermit, was said to have been tormented in the desert by demons and by tempting visions. Here a winged devil hovers over the old saint and a nude woman leans toward him, but he keeps his head bent over his book. An inscription on the back records the drawing’s sale in Venice in 1760, ten years before Tiepolo’s death.
Pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash, with black chalk and traces of charcoal, heightened with touches of white gouache, on ivory laid paper · 40 × 24.7 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Rococo
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Details and source
- Museum title
- The Temptation of Saint Anthony
- Artist
- Giovanni Battista Tiepolo Italian, 1696–1770
- Date
- c. 1734
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash, with black chalk and traces of charcoal, heightened with touches of white gouache, on ivory laid paper
- Dimensions
- 40 × 24.7 cm (15 3/4 × 9 3/4 in.)
- Credit line
- Helen Regenstein Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.