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The left wing of the triptych represents the Flight and Failure of St Anthony.
As we learn from medieval compendia of saints' lives, St Anthony passed most of his long life (c. 251 -356) in the Egyptian desert, where his extraordinary piety made him an object of special attention for Satan. Once while praying in the shelter of an old tomb, Anthony was overwhelmed by a horde of devils who beat him so relentlessly that he was left for dead. After several fellow hermits had rescued and revived him, however, he returned to the tomb, where the devils caught him a second time and tossed him high into the air. This time his torments ended only when a Divine light illuminated the tomb and dispersed the devils. Satan then appeared in the guise of a beautiful and saintly queen whom Anthony encountered bathing in a river. Taking the hermit into her city, the Devil-Queen showed him all her supposed works of charity, and it was only when she sought to seduce the bedazzled Anthony that he recognized her true nature and intentions.
Two of these episodes are represented on the left inner wing of the Lisbon altarpiece. In the foreground, the unconscious Anthony is carried across a bridge by two companions dressed in the habit of the Antonite Order, accompanied by a secular figure who has been identified with some plausibility as a self-portrait of Bosch. Anthony appears again in the sky, borne aloft by demons, while other monsters buzz around him like angry insects. These scenes conform fairly closely to the written sources but as in so many other instances, Bosch enriched the original accounts with a wealth of inventive and dramatic detail. Three monsters confer beneath the bridge as an equally grotesque messenger skates towards them on the ice. A bird gulps down its newly hatched young at lower left. On the road ahead of Anthony and his companions, another group of demons approach a kneeling male figure whose body forms the roof and entrance of a brothel; a false beacon lures ships to their destruction in the sea beyond; and the shore is littered with corpses.
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