Salvador Dali's The Temptation of Saint Anthony
This work by Dali is often identified as Surrealism, an art of the unconscious, and a major style of the Modern World Art period. In The Temptation, St. Anthony appears as a gaunt figure, besieged yet strong, holding off a nightmare parade of fantastic creatures stalking across an endless plain on giant legs. Dali's demons are not monsters from Hell, but demons of the mind. As Dali continually displays imaginative treatment of religious subjects throughout his works, he addresses a subject that was particularly popular throughout this time period: the struggle of the mind not only to be aware of the gods, but also to understand them. The story of this particular painting concerns efforts by the holy man, St. Anthony, to fend off temptations of the flesh that tormented him in his thoughts and dreams. Dali's painting powerfully shows how a man's mind was often his greatest enemy when struggling with religion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This image from Greg's GIF-JPEG
collection.