According to Dr. Paul Vandenbroeck would this painting the influence of Jheronimus Bosch in Italy can show. Savoldo worked before 1520 in Venice. See also a painting from him with the same subject in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

According the Museum: It is possible Savoldo studied works by Bosch firsthand in Venice, but he was unlikely to do so before 1521. He painted a remarkably similar composition, The Temptation of Saint Jerome (after 1515) which is today at the Pushkin Museum. That painting suggests more or less direct knowledge of Bosch, or Pieter Bruegel, among others (Michael Jacobsen points out that the closest actual source is a woodcut by Lucas Cranach), so much so that it was acquired by the Moscow museum as a work by an anonymous Netherlandish painter. The Pushkin’s St. Jerome was mistaken for an image of St. Anthony at one point, too. Subsequent iconographical studies of the image identified the figure as St. Jerome because of his red Cardinal’s robe. Like the Timken’s slightly larger panel, the Pushkin’s image is separated into two roughly equal parts: one “light/good,” the other “dark/bad.”  Both Saints look up to the right toward a fiery menace; Jerome recoils as a large, nearly nude figure carrying a decaying body moves toward him; St. Anthony bears the same terrified look on his face.

 Another thing that the Saints Jerome and Anthony have in common is their association with pandemics. St. Jerome is credited as an early recorder of bubonic plague in his translation of the Greek bible to Latin. Similarly, a common, but devastating, illness known as St. Anthony’s Fire (today thought to be caused by fungus in grain supplies) ravaged Medieval Europe. Furthermore, the so-called Black Death was a recurrent part of Venetian life--at least 23 outbreaks were recorded in Venice between 1348 and 1528. Savoldo’s interest in these tormented saints seems highly self-conscious, therefore. Direct experience of human suffering during these repeated health crises must have informed his choice of subjects as well as his imagination. The many small inhuman threats that bedevil St. Anthony are somewhat baffling to us today, but Savoldo insisted on their real, terrifying presence. Not usually admired for understatement, maybe this is what Vasari had in mind when he characterized this artist as fanciful and smart.