The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

Arrows, and only arrows

Saint Sebastian is the clearest case in the whole vocabulary of saintly attributes: he is named by arrows. The convention has held for centuries and needs no gloss — a bound young man pierced by arrows is Sebastian, and nothing else in the tradition competes for that sign. A tree or column he is tied to usually comes with it. His legend adds a detail painters mostly leave out, that the arrows did not kill him; the attribute survives as the shorthand for the whole story rather than its ending.

What the record holds

The entry dates this canvas to 1616 and gives the Boston Athenaeum in Boston, Massachusetts, as its location. The dimensions are 146 x 113 cm — an upright format, the natural shape for a standing bound figure. It is filed under male portraiture and Religion, with Baroque as the single style term, and the measured colour family of the image is brown.

Why the subject repeats

Sebastian recurs across this collection under several hands, which is a fact about the subject rather than about any one painter: an attribute this unambiguous makes a picture instantly readable, and a legend that involves a nearly nude standing body gave Western painting one of its few sanctioned occasions for the male nude.