Saint Sebastian in a Landscape

A saint filed under landscape

Sebastian is named by arrows, and that sign is portable enough to survive any setting. What the record shows here is how far the setting can travel. Alongside Religion, the catalogue files this work under Landscapes with Forest as a subheading, and under Botanicals with Tree — three landscape categories against one religious one. The title agrees: the saint is not simply Sebastian, he is Sebastian in a landscape.

What the record holds

The entry gives 1853 as the date of creation and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as the collection. No dimensions are recorded. The style is Romanticism, the nationality French, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.

The tree that was always there

The tree is not an intrusion of nineteenth-century taste into an old subject. Sebastian's legend requires that he be bound to something, and painters have used a tree or a column for that purpose since the fifteenth century. What changes by 1853 is proportion: in a picture indexed first as forest and only then as religion, the thing he is tied to has become the greater part of the subject. The attribute still names him. The category fields record where the weight of the picture has moved.