The temptation of Saint Antoine (La tentation de Saint Antoine in French) – 1874
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
Born from an encounter with a painting by Bruegel and the memory of the fairground shows at the Saint-Romain fair in Rouen, The Temptation of Saint Antoine sums up romantic devilry, its monsters, its obsessions, its darkness. “Work of my entire life”, said Flaubert, it is also “the secret cabinet of his mind” according to Baudelaire who wanted “above all to draw the reader’s attention to this suffering, underground and rebellious faculty, which runs through all the work, this dark vein which illuminates and which serves as a guide through this pandemonic carphanaum of solitude.