Behind the famous saint lies a little-known survival story
Ask most people with a passing interest in iconography about the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, and they'll refer to the flood of paintings of him shot through with arrows. They quite naturally conclude that he died from being skewered by soldiers dispatched by the Roman emperor Diocletian.
He didn't. The Museum of Fine Arts' Bernardo Strozzi painting "Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene and Her Maid" shows the two women removing the arrows as delicately as if they were acupuncture needles. Sebastian not only survived the attack, but went back to Diocletian to brag about it. Dumb move. The angry emperor then had him beaten to death and thrown in a sewer.
So throughout the history of religious painting, artists and their patrons have had a choice: Go with the image of the luscious young man tied to a tree, or with the ignominious and decidedly unpicturesque sewer-dumping.
Not many have opted for the latter, says MFA curator Ronni Baer: "It's such a downer."
Baer and her fellow curator Frederick Ilchman go on to explain that the ties between Strozzi, Sebastian, the Catholic Church, Venice, and the plague are another part of the painting's history. Strozzi was a Capuchin friar in Genoa, Italy, who strayed from holy orders to pursue a more liberated life as a successful painter.
He moved to Venice, where he painted the MFA's "Saint Sebastian," as well as another work similar to it. Like other artists of his era, especially those in Southern Europe, he made the saint into a sinuous, handsome young man writhing -- just a bit, though -- in rather staged-looking agony. It was this sort of pictorial voluptuousness that had led the leaders of the Counter-Reformation in the early 16th century to decree that images of Sebastian shouldn't be too alluring, lest they "turn on the nuns," as Ilchman delicately puts it.
"Actually," counters MFA conservator Rhona MacBeth, "the nuns were just a front. It was the priests they didn't want turned on."
Baer disagrees with Ilchman on the painting's religious implications. She believes this Sebastian actually conforms to the Counter-Reformation campaign to paint saints as ordinary people, with whom other ordinary people could empathize.
Strozzi's Sebastians could have been part of the upsurge in piety that was a Venetian response to the plague that ravaged the city in 1630. Building on the great church of Santa Maria della Salute began then, as a way to thank God for releasing the city from the epidemic. Numerous altarpieces, possibly including the Strozzis, were painted for the same reason.
Sebastian figures into a lot of them -- as a symbol of survival. 