Although he lived in the third century, the saint is depicted in contemporary guise. The arms of a prominent Sienese family appear over a doorway, and some of the architecture may reflect specific buildings in the city and surrounding area. Here are beggars with patches on their clothing, a blind man being led by his small dog, and on the balcony, the iron spikes that supported awnings against the summer sun. Like the dramatic sermons of street preachers and the performance of religious plays, in which townspeople acted the parts of saints, these details helped viewers visualize sacred events with immediacy and vividness.

The artist combined tradition—note the typically Sienese brilliance of his pinks and greens—with a new interest in landscape and experiments in perspective. Through windows and doorways overlapping layers make depth legible.

This panel depicts Anthony's second temptation on a rock-strewn path. The deep wilderness is uncanny, punctuated by fire-blasted trees and a sequence of still beasts — a rabbit, two deer, another rabbit — leading back to the sinister lake and the dark tower, surveyed by ominous crows. Anthony, now white-haired, throws up his hands in frozen horror. The focus of his gaze was originally a heap of diabolic riches, overpainted in a restoration.

The theme of Anthony's tribulations has called forth some of the greatest images in European art - from Bosch's Lisbon Triptych and Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, to the 20th-century artists Ensor and Beckmann. Yet the Sienese images remain perhaps the most 'schizoid' and inward of them all.