St. Sebastian’s Life in Art

The story artists inherited goes like this. Sebastian was a soldier in Emperor Diocletian’s guard, secretly helping fellow Christians in prison. When his faith was discovered, the emperor ordered him shot with arrows. The soldiers left him for dead.

But a Christian woman named Irene found him alive and cared for him until he recovered. Sebastian then returned to challenge the emperor’s persecution of Christians. This time, he was killed.

A few things to know before we look:

• His feast day is January 20 in the Western church calendar.
• He isn’t a person from the Bible. Scripture can help us reflect on his story, but it doesn’t tell it.
• The arrows aren’t the end. They belong to the ordeal he survived.
• We know more about his story than we can prove about his life. Christians in Rome remembered Sebastian by the fourth century; the detailed account of the soldier, the arrows, and Irene comes from a later saint’s life.

Source: Vatican News, “San Sebastiano, martire.”

Imagine keeping your faith hidden while working close to the emperor. In the traditional account, Sebastian used that position to help people the empire had imprisoned. Most painters skip this part, so it’s worth remembering: the man we’re about to meet had already been taking risks for others.

Botticelli’s Sebastian looks so calm that you might notice the lovely landscape before you count the arrows. Then you see what’s happened to him, and that quiet face becomes much harder to forget.

Soon the uniform is gone, and so is the protection of his position. The painters give him different surroundings, but the loneliness is there in every version.

Weisgerber kept coming back to Sebastian between 1909 and 1913, trying the subject again and again. Here, the trees crowd around the young man, and the little stump beneath his feet feels like a terribly lonely stage.

See the sunlit buildings beyond the wall? That’s the detail that hurts here: a whole world seems to be carrying on just a short distance from a man who needs help.

Mantegna gives you plenty to explore around Sebastian: broken stone, carved figures, and a town in the distance. You can spend a while looking at all that beautiful detail before coming back to the terrible thing at the center—a living person tied to a column.

Some painters show us who is holding the bows. Others let the soldiers leave, keeping us with the person they’ve left behind.

Here the archers are still at work, and Sebastian has his back to us. That distance is unsettling: we can see what’s happening, but we can’t even meet his eyes.

The colors almost catch you off guard after all that darkness: violet trees, warm pink ground, a flash of blue and white. Then you notice Sebastian’s bent head and awkward stance, and the brightness starts to feel painfully at odds with what he’s enduring.

His knees have given way, but his arms are still held up against the tree. Weisgerber makes you feel how tired this body is; even keeping his head raised seems beyond him now.

There are arrows everywhere, crossing the body and cutting through the dark space around it. Mantegna brings us so close that it’s difficult to look comfortably at this picture, which feels right for something so cruel.

Again and again, painters turn Sebastian’s face toward the sky. We can’t know his thoughts, but that upward gaze gives us somewhere to begin imagining his prayer.

Follow the curve of Sebastian’s raised arms, and you arrive at his face. Reni makes him beautiful, certainly, but it’s the searching look in his eyes that makes you want to stay.

This time, a single arrow is enough to tell you who he is; look behind him and you’ll spot the soldiers walking away. There’s a hidden detail, too: X-rays revealed that Reni first planned the cloth higher around Sebastian’s waist, then lowered it as he painted.

Daumier was famous for caricatures, so a church painting of Sebastian might seem an unexpected choice—but he picked the subject himself. This little study turned up in a private collection in 1978, and the large finished painting was rediscovered the following year: even the pictures have a story of being found again.

Irene arrives expecting to bury him. Instead, she finds someone she can still save.

This is the turn in the story I keep coming back to. After so many pictures of a man alone, another person reaches into the frame.

Look at how heavily Sebastian leans into the woman supporting him, while her companion works at his bonds. You can almost feel the effort in their arms: getting him down safely is going to take both of them.

There’s so much happening here—hands reaching, faces leaning in, red cloth tumbling around his body—that your eyes hardly know where to settle. Try the discarded armor at the bottom: it’s a small reminder that this helpless man was a soldier.

Sebastian’s arm is still stretched upward, even as the women bend close to help. The little angels above seem to have come to watch over them, but down here the women have the difficult work in hand.

Just enough light to help

In the next pictures, the world shrinks to a few faces and a flame. You almost find yourself leaning closer, as if you could help them see.

The name Maître à la chandelle means “Candlelight Master,” and you can see why it fits. We’re still uncertain who painted this work—it was once credited to Trophime Bigot—but the woman carefully drawing an arrow from Sebastian’s side gives us something wonderfully human to hold on to.

This one makes me want to lower my voice. The flame picks out the women gathered around Sebastian, and their bowed heads make you feel how frightening it must be to care for someone whose survival is still uncertain.

A lantern brings everyone close enough that the scene feels almost within reach. In this painting attributed to La Tour, the women’s faces and Sebastian’s outstretched body hold us in that small pool of warmth, with the darkness waiting just beyond it.

The rescue is only the beginning of caring for someone. These painters give us room to pause with Sebastian and the women, while the landscape stretches out around them.

Delacroix huddles the three figures together beneath a great sweep of dark landscape. Everything feels hurried and difficult, as though we’ve come upon them before anyone has had time to catch a breath.

This whole landscape fits on a wooden panel only about 25 by 32 centimeters—roughly the size of a magazine. Moreau still makes room for the women, the wounded man, and touches of red around the stake and rocks that keep the violence close in mind.

Look up into the branches and you’ll find the angels; look down and you’ll find the women tending Sebastian. I love how much room Corot gives to both, while keeping the hands-on work of helping someone right there at our feet.

There’s a line from Paul that feels especially close to these pictures:

“persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.”

2 Corinthians 4:9, Berean Standard Bible

Those are Paul’s words, not Sebastian’s. But after seeing Irene reach for him, “not forsaken” feels very concrete.

Here’s the choice that makes the rest of the story so hard to take in. Sebastian has survived. He has been cared for. According to the traditional account, he is urged to leave Rome.

He goes to confront the emperor instead.

He speaks against the persecution of Christians, and this time he is beaten to death. His body is thrown into the city’s sewer. Later, a Christian woman named Lucina recovers it for burial.

Sources: Vatican News, Sebastian’s recovery and return; Albert Weisgerber Foundation, the traditional account.

Carracci takes us to the part of Sebastian’s story that’s so easy to miss if we only know the arrows. His body hangs heavily over the edge as the men handle it, and it’s a painful picture to end his life with—especially after all those hands that worked so hard to save him.

The confrontation and the fatal beating happen between the scenes in our selection. This is their aftermath. Knowing what came before makes it difficult to look away.

His story didn’t disappear with his body. Christians remembered him, prayed for his intercession, and came to ask for his protection against plague. That devotion goes back long before the Black Death; Paul the Deacon tells of an altar to Sebastian being raised during a plague at Pavia around 680.

And artists kept coming back, too. Centuries later, Sebastian would find himself in some very unexpected colors.

Source: Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, book VI, chapter 5; English translation by William Dudley Foulke.

Those violet hills and that turquoise sky look like somewhere out of a dream, but Redon drew on a place he knew: the countryside around his childhood home at Peyrelebade. The Bordeaux museum also suggests that the flowers seem to spring from Sebastian’s fallen blood, giving this strange, lovely landscape a much more tender meaning.

You have to look a little longer to take in the arrows among all these soft blues and flowers. Redon lets the wounded figure almost melt into the tree, and after the darkness of the earlier pictures, I find that gentleness unexpectedly moving.