Saint Sebastian
Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) · c. 1480
Bound to the shaft of a ruined classical column and pierced by arrows, Sebastian turns his eyes upward with an expression closer to stoic endurance than agony. He was a Roman officer executed, according to legend, for his Christian faith, and by the fifteenth century he was invoked against plague, since arrows were the traditional image of epidemic striking at random. Two archers appear at the lower right, calmly observing their work. Around the saint lie the shattered remains of antiquity: fragments of a carved capital, a foot from a colossal statue, an inscription. Behind him a road winds up to a fortified hill town under a pale sky.
Mantegna painted in tempera on canvas rather than panel, which gives the surface a dry, chalky crispness, and he drew everything as though he were carving it. The saint's body has the hardness of marble, the veins and tendons cut in sharp relief, and he is seen from slightly below so that he looms. A painted trompe l'oeil border imitating red porphyry frames the scene, a reminder that Mantegna trained in Padua amid a cult of Roman archaeology and collected antiquities himself. Notice how the broken pagan fragments at the bottom are literally beneath the Christian martyr, an argument in stone about which faith survived.
The canvas is thought to have travelled to the church of Aigueperse in the Auvergne after the 1481 marriage of Chiara Gonzaga, daughter of Mantegna's Mantuan patrons, to Gilbert de Bourbon. It remained there for centuries before entering the Louvre in 1910. Two other Sebastians by Mantegna survive, in Vienna and in the Ca' d'Oro in Venice.
Did You Know? The candle-like cloud formation at the upper left has long been read by some viewers as containing the shape of a horseman, one of several hidden figures people claim to find in Mantegna's rocks and skies.
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