The Temptation of Saint Anthony (second version)

Neither fantasy nor horrifying reality, Callot’s image of the temptation of St. Anthony is typically theatrical: it casts the battle between good and evil not as a mystical vision but as a high-pitched dramatic performance. It is an epic, fictive conflict acted out on the stage, and the beleaguered Anthony is a bit player relegated to a small corner of the scene. Here, at the end of his life, Callot indulged his passion for grotesque minutiae in the creatures that populate the print: the central monster belching fire and demons, a cavalcade led by the Whore of Babylon, bellows-wielding devils, lobster-creatures, and a multitude of other hideous, comic and scatological details.