In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke concludes that paintings rarely succeed in producing terror:

For Burke the often ‘very fanciful and terrible ideas’ in the Bible and in Milton’s Paradise Lost are sublime ‘principally due to the terrible uncertainty of the thing described’, so that ‘[t]he mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud [sic] of great and confused images’ (234–5). Similar scenes in painting, on the other hand, are devoid of ‘serious passion’ as they involve ‘clear representations’ that ‘can only affect simply’ (234–5). In selecting St Anthony’s temptation by the devils in the Egyptian desert as his chief example of such failure, Burke may have any number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings in mind, by artists as varied as Martin Schöngauer, Hieronymus Bosch, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grünewald, Jan Brueghel or Salvator Rosa. David Teniers the Younger produced at least eleven treatments of the subject, most of which feature a motley group of grotesque figures of the kind that Burke describes, as well as the now-familiar Gothic triptych of a skull, hourglass and bat, and which were reproduced in a variety of media in the eighteenth century (see Smith 1831, 414; see fig. 2.1). The physician and collector Dr Richard Mead, one of Burke’s contemporaries, owned a copper engraving of St Anthony’s trials by Teniers (Anonymous, ‘A Compleat Catalogue’ 1754), and stained-glass copies were made by the artists James and Elizabeth Pearson, active from the 1770s to the 1790s (Altick 1978, 111).