Temptation of St. Anthony

“Temptation of St. Anthony”

Other painters with less psychological insight have placed sin [...] somewhere next to the Savior. Rops, however, put it in the very place of the Savior Himself. He seemed to know that when the repressed returns, it emerges from the very institution that repressed it.

Sigmund Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume (1907)

A DECADENT ARTIST

A restored cut-out of Félicien Rops from a Société Libre des Beaux-Arts painting, showing him with a melancholic expression, dark mustache, and wearing a polka-dot cravat.

A provocateur, close friends with Baudelaire, and a dark moralist of his time—who did not shy away from approaching erotic and blasphemous themes—Félicien Rops (1833-1898) was a sought-after artist.

He is particularly well-known for illustrating the works of authors such as Jules B. d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire's masterpiece The Flowers of Evil: writers whose works are considered founding contributions to Decadence, an artistic movement focused on pleasure, aestheticism and individualism, pushing the moral boundaries of late 19th century society.

You know what importance I attach to light and profound art, to seriousness masked by frivolity.

Charles Baudelaire, in a letter written directly to Rops, perfectly summarizing the Decadent approach to hiding dark truths behind aesthetic beauty.

A SCANDALOUS PRIVATE LIFE

To truly understand Rops’s art, one must understand his unconventional life.

While legally married in Belgium to a wife who refused to grant him a divorce, Rops spent much of his time in Paris. There, he defied societal norms by moving in with Aurélie and Léontine Duluc, two sisters who ran a local fashion boutique. Rops lived with them in a scandalous ménage à trois (a three-way relationship) for the rest of his life. Léontine, with whom he had a daughter, became one of his most important muses.

An etching by Félicien Rops advertising the Duluc Sisters' dress shop in Paris, showing an oval sign framed by fashionable headless dresses and a cherub.

AN OLD SUBJECT – THROUGH A NEW LENS

In The Temptation of St. Anthony (1878), Rops approaches a medieval subject from a contemporary point of view.

Saint Anthony was a Christian saint who was said to have spent years in the desert as a hermit, where the devil plagued him with sinful visions that he overcame through prayer. In painting him, Rops built on a centuries-old tradition.

A VISION OF LUST

Temptation of St. Anthony Pocket Square in Walnut — Saint Anthony confronted by a naked woman, accompanied by his attribute the hermit's pig, from Félicien Rops' The Temptation of St. Anthony (1878), framed by our signature house-style border.

Satan, in a red monk’s hood, hides behind the vision of lust that unfolds before Anthony.

Instead of demons, we see a naked woman taking Christ’s place on the cross. Strikingly, the model for this figure was Rops's actual mistress, Léontine Duluc.

The inscription above the woman’s head reads not INRI, but EROS: the sexual drive.

A pig symbolises animal lust, a motif also found in Rops’s most famous work, Pornocrates. However, it also acted as a clever shield against accusations of blasphemy.

The putti a dark "counter-image" to traditional heavenly angels have fleshless skulls for heads, alerting us to the transience of desire and the flesh.

Satan, in a red monk’s hood, hides behind the vision of lust that unfolds before Anthony.

Instead of demons, we see a naked woman taking Christ’s place on the cross. Strikingly, the model for this figure was Rops's actual mistress, Léontine Duluc.

The inscription above the woman’s head reads not INRI, but EROS: the sexual drive.

A pig symbolises animal lust, a motif also found in Rops’s most famous work, Pornocrates. However, it also acted as a clever shield against accusations of blasphemy.

The putti a dark "counter-image" to traditional heavenly angels have fleshless skulls for heads, alerting us to the transience of desire and the flesh.

Unlike the medieval artists that came before him, Rops does not represent St. Anthony’s temptations through demons.

In his work, temptation is embodied by a naked woman - his mistres Léontine Duluc -, bound to a cross. A pig – hidden to Anthony, yet present to the viewer – symbolises man’s animal lust, as in Rops’ work Pornocrates, dating to the same year. Rops makes it clear that there is only one temptation here: that of the flesh.

The pig is also the traditional historical attribute of St. Anthony, because monks of his order historically kept pigs for the poor. Rops deliberately used this innocent historical fact as a clever shield: if accused of obscenity, he could claim it was merely a traditional religious symbol, while fully knowing his audience would read it as a symbol of pure lust.

FREE FROM BLASPHEMY

To protect himself from censorship and outrage, Rops actively played innocent. In a letter to a friend, he used these traditional symbols to defend the painting against its critics:

Keep above all any idea of an attack on religion or of erotica far from people's minds. When Goya has Lucifer take away the Holy Sacrament, he has no more anti-religious ideas than I do.

Félicien Rops, in a letter to his friend François Taelemans.

Michelangelo Buonarroti the Torment of Saint Anthony.

LUST FOR LIFE

In Rops’s version, the nude woman appears proud and triumphant.

Did the grinning Devil hiding behind the cross violently shove the dead Christ aside, or does it seem the Savior is, not unwillingly, making way for her? The reclaiming of pleasures that Christian society deemed sinful is a theme often found in Decadent art, which rebelled against societal constraints. In a letter, Rops wrote:

Here is more or less what I wanted Satan to say to the good Anthony […] Even if the Gods are gone, Woman remains. The love of Woman remains and with it the abounding love of Life.

Portrait of Félicien Rops drawn by Jean-François Taelemans in 1871. Rops is depicted with an intense gaze, dark wavy hair, and a goatee.

THE ARTIST AS PSYCHOLOGIST

Years later, the work also caught the eye of Sigmund Freud.

To Freud, it was an astute representation of the psychological process of religious repression. According to him, Rops ‘seemed to know that the repressed thought returns at the very moment of its repression’. Indeed, Rops depicts his time’s complicated attitudes to sex with psychological sharpness – and makes us wonder how much of them still resound in our lives today.