Anthony was born in Egypt in the third century to Christian parents and, wanting a stricter piety than they practised, withdrew alone into the desert, where he lived in physical deprivation^[1]. Curious visitors who intruded on his solitude carried word of his abstinence back to the wider world, and it was Athanasius of Alexandria's account of his battles with demons, written around 360, that fixed his image for later centuries and made him the founding figure of Christian monasticism^[1]. Anthony's mission was directed as much against idolatry as against the demons themselves. He retreated not only into the desert but, according to the tradition Bosch drew on, into an old pagan tomb, the kind of place magicians used to conjure spirits with the aid of images; Anthony, by contrast, loathed those images so completely that he ministered against them even while tolerating the demonic visions that tormented him^[1].

In the Lisbon triptych, a tiny Anthony at the centre of the composition points two blessing fingers toward a candlelit crucifix set inside a ruin, a sacred sign nearly lost among the demons crowding the scene, enraged by the saint's withdrawal and multiplying their phantasms the more steadily he ignores them^[1]. Unusually for an altarpiece, the triptych has no single central cult image; instead it distributes specific episodes from Anthony's life across its wings, following Athanasius closely. One wing shows demons lifting and tormenting the saint during ecstatic meditation, and shows him afterward, beaten nearly to death, carried back to his hermitage at his own request; the same wing includes devils huddled over a written document, a detail drawn directly from Athanasius's account of demons bringing false testimony against Anthony^[1]. The other wing shows a seductive devil-queen tempting him with food and sex, a story that reached Bosch by way of translated Arab sources^[1].

Bosch did not confine himself to a single image of Anthony. He devoted an entire separate panel to the devil-queen's temptation alone, and painted a further, poorly preserved Hermit Saints Triptych that treats Anthony alongside Saints Jerome and Giles, not as protective, miracle-working figures but as models of contempt for the world, absorbed in their own devotion rather than performing for the viewer^[1]. A version of the Temptation subject attributed to Bosch's circle rather than to the artist himself is also recorded, a reminder of how often his most popular compositions were copied and adapted after his death^[1]. Set against this pattern, it is entirely plausible that Bosch, or his workshop, produced more than one independent treatment of Anthony's temptation over the course of his career.