Lead us to “Temptation”
“The Temptation of St Anthony”
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Substantial in its wow factor, Dali’s 1946 oil “The Temptation of St Anthony” has visitors to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels getting into fistfights over whether it’s better or worse than the literally dozens of other depictions of the poor, beleagured old Saint of the Egyptian desert.
Interestingly, a panel of judges once weighed it up against 10 other versions, all done at the same time and for the same reason – it was needed for a movie – and decided that Dali’s wasn’t the one they preferred. He must have been gutted, ready to swear off cinema forever (unless Hitchcock phoned, of course).
Yes, the only time he ever entered a contest, Sal lost. The gimmick-happy movie company Loew-Lewin Productions invited some big names in art to compete to have their work featured in its silver-screen version of Guy de Maupassant’s novella “Bel Ami”. The theme had to be St Anthony’s temptation.
Eleven painters vied for the “prize”, and a jury that included Marcel Duchamp picked the piece submitted by Dali’s fellow dadaist and surrealist Max Ernst. This is his “Temptation of St Anthony”:
Max Ernst weighs in.
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All the contest entries were later shown together in Brussels, and that’s where Dali’s painting stayed and is still driving people crazy. He had the last laugh, of course, because hardly anybody remembers Ernst’s picture at all.
“The Private Affairs of Bel Ami” came out in 1947 and starred a very young Angela Lansbury alongside George Sanders. Sanders played a social-climbing cad in belle epoche Paris, and it was the third movie he made with director Alan Lewin that centred on artists. Lewin was making something of a trilogy: He had Sanders as George Strickland in 1942’s “The Moon and Sixpence” and in the title role in 1945’s “The Picture Of Dorian Gray”. And get this: All three films were in black and white except for for one scene each in which a painting is shown in full colour! Told ya – gimmicks “R” us.
But at least you can see why getting your painting to be THE painting in the film would seem like something of a coup for the starving(ish) young surrealists of post-war New York.
The German Max Ernst (1891-1976) actually acted in several movies in his time (including “Dreams That Money Can Buy”, which was based on his art) and directed one. For his contribution to “Bel Ami”, he is immortalised in the credits of the International Movie Data Base as “Art Department”. Just him. Fortunately he ended up far more famous for his frottage than his films, and justifably so – I’ll get him back to Dali House again soon.
Another surrealist who had a go at the contest was the Briton Leonora Carrington. This is her entry. But there are plenty of artists who had a bash at St Anthony. Here’s a site that has nearly 50 of them piled up in a heap. It’s not a pretty sight, but then after all old Anthony was treated to some real horrorshow stuff out there among the dunes.
Saint Anthony the Great, aka the Father of All Monks (which seems a contradiction in terms, really) was a Christian saint and the outstanding leader among the Desert Fathers, who were Christian monks in the Egyptian wilderness in the third and fourth centuries. According to Athanasius, as interpreted by the mystical Wikipedia, he was out wandering in the Wadi al-Natrun west of Alexandria when the devil took offence, as devils do, and plied Anthony with boredom, laziness and women to distract him from his incessant praying, but Anthony overcame these, erm, afflictions by, well, praying some more.
He moved into a tomb and slammed the door behind him, though the local villagers brought him food, as villagers will. The devil showed up again and tried to beat the asceticism out of him, but Anthony recovered and actually headed back out to the desert, to Der el Memun, and lived in an abandoned Roman fort for 20 years, but not without frequent reunions with his old pal the devil, who brought along wolves, lions, snakes and scorpions. Anthony laughed, the beasts fled and God gave him a medal or something.
Anthony’s second claim to beatitude stemmed from the locals’ frank disbelief when he finally came out of the fort. They’d been feeding him crusts of bread through a hole in the wall cause he’d bricked up the door and wouldn’t let anyone in. He repaid them with advice. When he finally emerged, they didn’t expect him to be breathing any more, let along walking. Emperor Constantine heard about “Skinny Tony” and wrote to him in the hope of cadging a good word with the Lord, but Anthony said nope, though he said he might pray for a peaceful empire. If he did, it didn’t work.
Anthony saw some appeal in martyrdom and went to Alexandria and thumbed his nose at the governor by flaunting his Christianity. That didn’t work either, so he returned to his fort, but by now the stoned-up doors were no longer keeping the devotees out so it was back into the dunes for old Anthony. He found a spring and some palm trees and saw that it was swell, and this is where you can see today the monastery of Saint Anthony the Great. It was round about here that he saw an angel wearing nothing but a girdle and a head shawl who was braiding palm leaves. A voice told him to take over the weaving chores, so he did, and not long after his 105th birthday, he stretched out on the ground and said that’s enough. It sure was, for him, but not for the storytellers of paint and prose.
Heironymous heard from.
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Hieronymus Bosch was among the first A-list artists to see the possibilities in Anthony’s tale of devils, wild beasts and shameless women. In about 1500 he did a triptych that’s now in Lisbon. It’s got a mess of physical punishment on the left, food and sex on the right and a Black Mass in the centre panel, seen here, showing St Anthony tormented by devils, among them a man with a thistle for a head and a fish that is half gondola.
Crazy? Not as much as you’d think, Nicolas Pioch points out at WebMuseum. The images “relate to Flemish proverbs and religious terminology. What is so extraordinary is that these imaginary creatures are painted with utter conviction, as though they truly existed.”
Before the 1500s were out, Luca Bertelli had done the handsome engraving of “The Temptation of St Anthony” shown above a ways, and so had “a follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder”, as seen here.
The Flemish contender David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) whipped up this nice oil version, complete with a ruined castle and a claw-footed woman offering the old man a guzzle. Jean François Millet set aside his usual Gleaners and Diggers long enough to have a go at a “Temptation” in the mid-19th century, and not long after Gustave Flaubert wrote “La Tentation de Saint Antoine”, written in the form of a play script, which focuses on one particularly crazy night in the monk’s lurid life.
In Dali’s version, the saint is frantically waving a cross at a horse, a powerful creature even when it’s not rearing and whinnying. The horse is leading an elephant caravan, one of which is carrying the golden chalice of lust on which a nekkid woman stands, another has an obelisk like Bernini’s in Rome, and two more tote Venetian edifices. The pachyderm way in the back is patiently hauling phallus. Up in the clouds is the Escorial, symbol of earthly as well as spiritual order.
Dali painted elephants a few times, and always with tall, spindly legs, inverting the notions of solidity and trustworthiness. What they’ve got to do with St Anthony I have absolutely no idea, but they must have been weighing heavily (pardon the pun) on his mind in the late ’40s cause he rattled off a famous bunch of them. This painting was a complete rush, too, in the sense of him being in a hurry.
