Michelangelo, St. Anthony, and rye mold

I corrected the Wampus cat post by taking out a stray phrase I forgot to edit out.



Recently , the Kimbell Museum in Dallas acquired a painting , "The Torment of St. Anthony " , which may have been painted by Michelangelo at the age of 12 or 13, when he was a student of Domenico Ghirlandiao's studio in 1477 and 1478.Although the painting is clearly from Ghirlandiao's studio, there is a great deal of scholarly dispute as to whether or not the painting is Michelangelo's. it's based on a lithograph by Martin Schongauer. The painting is not an exact copy of the lithograph, it's larger, and has added features, such as fish scales.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/arts/design/13pain.html



The Schongauer lithograph

The painting is reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch. Here's Bosch's St. Anthony triptych. (Sorry for the really long URL here).





http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/70/BoschPaintingTheTemptationOfStAnthony.jpg/300px-BoschPaintingTheTemptationOfStAnthony.jpg&imgrefurl=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St_Anthony_(Bosch_painting)&usg=__3RZYAJT6-7PSp1QXg9SrSSPwN7E=&h=428&w=300&sz=51&hl=en&start=6&sig2=Z_TBmKjCXq2d23dwOy0I1g&um=1&tbnid=TnTXz9H2E_NavM:&tbnh=126&tbnw=88&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpaintings%2Bst%2Banthony%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=ZUp7Sq_1Hc-3lAfKrJ3iAQ


St. Anthony was a third century Christian ascetic and monastic who spent his adult life in the Egyptian desert, largely in solitude. His time there included living in a tomb and twenty years living in solitude in a small cell in a fort. Food was slipped into the cell through a small crevice. No one was allowed to actually enter the cell where he lived. He had visions of being attacked by wild animals and scorpions, but overcame them. He is credited with a number of miraculous healings of those suffering from ergotism, which became known as St. Anthony's Fire. This is represented in the Bosch triptych shown above. The symptoms included hallucinations , severe pain and gangrene. Amputation was usually required.The disease was caused by ergot, a fungus found in moldy rye flour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temptation_of_St._Anthony


Here's a 1946 painting of Salvador Dali's "Temptation of St. Anthony".





http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Salvador_Dali/The-Temptation-of-Saint-Anthony