] Displaced Iconography and Symbolic Rereading: Visual Ecosystem and Sacred Deactivation of The Temptations of Saint Anthony in Albert Merino's Digital Homage.

Abstract

The Great Arsenic is an audiovisual allegory inspired by the Flemish sacred painting tradition of the 15th to 16th centuries, particularly The Temptations of Saint Anthony by Pieter Huys, with echoes of Bosch and Beccafumi. Drawing on this iconographic archive, Albert Merino constructs a visual universe that deactivates the moralizing dimension of sacred images and reconfigures them from a contemporary, critical, and non-normative perspective. The article analyzes how the work transforms these sources into a fragmentary visual system, in which the absence of the saint shifts the interpretive focus toward secondary figures and autonomous symbolic elements. Through a qualitative approach that combines visual analysis, film analysis, and an interview with the artist, the formal and symbolic strategies that articulate the piece are examined. It is argued that The Great Arsenic does not reinterpret sacred iconography in narrative terms, but rather activates it as an open visual archive, characterized by ambiguity, fragmentation, and the suspension of meaning. From this perspective, the work allows us to consider the persistence of forms of devotional visuality in contemporary culture not as a transmission of religious values, but as symbolic structures reconfigured through an aesthetic and critical logic. This visual logic shifts the meaning toward an open interpretive experience, in which images associated with temptation, desire, or evil cease to function as fixed moral categories.