A saint’s lonely struggle with demonic temptations — and his ultimate victory over them — was a favorite theme in medieval and Renaissance art. The French engraver and draftsman Jacques Callot addressed this subject twice. His first print, “The Temptation of St. Anthony” (in a smaller format), was made in Florence around 1617. He completed the second, larger, and more elaborate version — often informally called “The Second Temptation of St. Anthony” — in Nancy in 1635. This was Callot’s last major work before his death.
While the second composition echoes the first, it is far richer in detail and more dramatically charged. The engraving depicts a fiery, apocalyptic landscape: the ruins of a monastery and a cave engulfed in flames, a colossal Devil towering over the scene, and a grotesque horde of monstrous creatures. At the periphery, St. Anthony — besieged by demons — defends himself with a crucifix.
St. Anthony the Great, considered the founder of Christian monasticism, lived in the 3rd and 4th centuries. At the age of 20, after his parents’ death, he gave his inheritance to the poor, entrusted his sister to a community of devout women, and withdrew into the Eastern Desert in Egypt. After years of wandering, he settled in an abandoned fortress near the Nile, where he endured relentless demonic assaults and took solemn vows of asceticism. He communicated with rare visitors through a small hole in his wall, preserving the solitude of his hermitage.
Anthony emerged from isolation twice: first, to guide fellow hermits and to encourage persecuted Christians during the reign of Emperor Maximinus; second, to refute the Arian heresy, which falsely claimed he supported their doctrines. He died at the age of 105 in the desert near the Red Sea.
Researchers believe that for Callot the religious subject served as a veiled satire — anti-war and anti-clerical. Just two years earlier, in 1633, Callot had published “Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre” (“the Miseries and Misfortunes of War”) — a series of large anti-war etchings. In “The Second Temptation”, demons are armed with muskets and arquebuses, march in military formation under banners, disembark, haul cannons, and stage mock rituals: a demonic choir — led by a donkey soloist — celebrates a Black Mass atop temple ruins, while devilish figures in clerical cassocks recite the Euchologion.
Callot was also a technical innovator in etching. He developed a new, tougher (acid-resistant) coating that allowed for finer, more controlled swelling lines and introduced a perfected “multiple stoppings-out” technique (repeated etching) to achieve subtle tonal gradations. He used an etching needle with a finely tapered point, enabling him to create continuous lines of varying thickness. Over his lifetime, Callot produced more than 1,400 etchings, profoundly influencing generations of printmakers. His work was avidly collected and studied by Rembrandt.
