Abstract That Gustave Flaubert found inspiration for his Tentation de saint Antoine in a painting ascribed to Breughel the younger, which he saw during his Italian travels in Genoa, has often been noted and commented on. Yet while the source has been named regularly, it has often been reduced to a mere thematic inspiration. This article seeks to show how the painting, together with an etching by Jacques Callot owned by Flaubert, informed seminal structural decisions, above all the dramatic form. The article provides a discussion of both the images of the saint conceived in the textual tradition of Saint Anthony’s legend and the pictorial tradition that proliferated in the early modern period. While both underpin the text, it is the pictorial tradition which, together with a musical rendering of the legend by Jean-Michel Sédaine, provides the seminal clues for the psychology of Flaubert’s Antoine. For the first time, it will also be shown how the Callot print may have informed the incongruous juxtaposition of religious temptation and scientific microscopic vision in Antoine’s final temptation.