Reimagining Saint Sebastian: from Pretorian Guard to artistic lodestar

Peter Ogwen Jones• January 20, 2025

Today the Church commemorates Saint Sebastian, a 3rd-century member of the Pretorian Guard of the pagan emperor Diocletian, who, on discovering that his personal soldier was a Christian, ordered him to be shot by archers. They, believing Sebastian to have been finished off, left the scene. Along came Irene, a fellow Christian known to Sebastian, who took him to a secret location, tended his wounds and nursed him back to health.

Thereafter, Sebastian risked all for his faith and confronted Diocletian, rebuking him publicly for persecuting Christians. The alarmed emperor ordered his arrest yet again, demanding that Sebastian be beaten to death with clubs and his body dumped in a public sewer.

The emperor’s cruel orders were carried out, but once again a fellow Christian intervened, a woman named Lucina, who arranged for the body to be secretly retrieved from the sewer and taken for burial beyond Rome’s city walls. There, in the catacombs near the Appian Way, Sebastian was finally laid to rest. In 367, during the pontificate of Damasus I, a basilica was erected in honour of the saint, being rebuilt in the early 1600s to become the building we see today.

These events have captured the imaginations of artists throughout the centuries, culminating in a prodigious number of paintings and sculptures of this arrow-strewn martyr, particularly during Italy’s triumphant Renaissance.

Michelangelo (1475-1564) included Sebastian in the Sistine Chapel’s portrayal of the Last Judgement, showing the saint accompanied by Irene and her maid. However, unlike so many artists who pictured Sebastian bound and punctured with arrows, Michelangelo depicts the martyr’s posture as though drawing upon an imaginary bow.

By the 19th century the saint had been transformed into a literary metaphor for many writers, and Oscar Wilde encountered a Guido Reni (1575-1642) painting of Sebastian in Genoa’s Palazzo Rosso in 1877. In a letter Wilde described the saint as “raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening Heavens”. Wilde later adopted “Sebastian” as a pseudonym.

English poetry, too, celebrated the symbolism inherent in this martyr. John Gray (1866-1934) wrote a poem on the theme of Sebastian, while TS Eliot (1888-1965) published his “Love Song of St Sebastian” in 1914. Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913) was also inspired by Sebastian’s fate in his poem “Tarcissus” of 1880, an account of a fictional young martyr during Diocletian’s reign.

A composer was also to gain inspiration from Sebastian’s martyrdom. Claude Debussy (1862-1918) collaborated with the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) on a theatrical spectacular, with sets and costumes designed by the artist Leon Baskt (1866-1924). The show’s five, hour-long acts failed to score at the box office at the Parisian premiere in 1911. The Archbishop of Paris took a dim view of the production, ostensibly because a woman, Ida Rubinstein, was playing the part of Sebastian – and, when struck by an arrow, was heard to exclaim “Encore!”

For artists down the centuries, Sebastian became a regular source of commissions, particularly so from clients concerned about the incidence of bubonic plague, since he was believed to be a powerful intercessor in this regard. Many paintings depict Sebastian in sacra conversazione with the Madonna and Child. The saint’s association with this particular pestilence was recorded in 1265 by the Archbishop of Genoa, Jacobus Voragine, in his hagiographic account, the Golden Legend. He writes how, in the late 600s, all Italy was struck by plague, with Rome and Pavia experiencing particularly devastating mortality:

“Then at last it was shown to one by God’s grace that this pestilence should not cease until they had made an altar to Saint Sebastian at Pavia, and this was erected in the church of Saint Peter, and anon the pestilence ceased, and thither from Rome relics of Saint Sebastian were brought.”

For centuries thereafter, Sebastian was called upon for help in times of plague.

‘St. Sebastian’ (1525) by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi

As well as religious institutions generally, artists’ clients also included the confraternities of the late Middle Ages, and particularly during the Renaissance. These were spiritual brotherhoods operating in towns and cities, and functioned quite independently of monasteries. They provided opportunities for lay people to participate collectively in religious devotion, often focused on a particular saint, and at the same time engaging in charitable work in the communities where they were formed.

Their general popularity continued to grow, as did their financial resources, particularly through membership by wealthy citizens, enabling the confraternity to purchase land and build their own churches within a particular community. In Florence, there were over thirty confraternities by 1350; membership had tripled by the next century, and by the 1500s there was one devoted to Sebastian which held a relic of the saint.

In Rome in the 16th-century, well over a hundred confraternities had developed, each containing several hundred members. A similar growth occurred in Venice, where, in the late 1500s, local groups amounted to thousands of citizens – men and women – participating in various confraternities in the Venetian Republic.

Processions were often a key feature of their activities, sometimes involving members in self-mortification in penitential imitation of Christ’s flagellation. Referred to as “flagellants”, these men would whip themselves to purify themselves during processions in public places, usually en route to the churches they had founded and dedicated to one or more holy figures, or to particularly important sites such as Sebastian’s basilica beyond the old walls of Rome.

For the Italian artist Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549), it was a confraternity in Porto Camollia, north Siena, known as the Compagnia di San Sebastiano, which, in 1505, offered him 20 gold ducats to paint a banner that they could raise at the head of their processions as flagellants. The result was one of the most famous paintings of Sebastian, and the confraternity were so delighted with the result they gave Bazzi a bonus of 10 ducats.

In an account of Bazzi in his copious biographical writings of the 1500s on Renaissance art, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) refers to Bazzi as being known as “Il Sodoma” – “the sodomite” – because he consorted with “boys and beardless youths, whom he loved more than was decent”, as Vasari phrased it. By all accounts, Bazzi openly revelled in his often eccentric behaviour. When one of his horses won a race, he insisted that his ownership be announced using that derogatory term, as recorded by Vasari. And his sense of humour – particularly through practical jokes – added to his widespread notoriety.

He had a large collection of exotic pets, one such being a tame badger, which he included in a full-figure portrait of himself in a monastic fresco. In 1505, the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, near Siena, commissioned Bazzi to decorate the cloister walls with paintings illustrating the life of Saint Benedict, and by 1508 he had completed twenty-six.

One fresco illustrated the scene when Benedict sends away a group of women, whom an enemy had sent to the monastery to “entertain” the monks. Bazzi had painted several of the women naked to indicate they were members of the “oldest profession”, but the abbot demanded he paint clothing on the figures, so as to avoid lustful thoughts in the celibate community.

Bazzi grudgingly obliged – after all, he needed the money. 

Photo: ‘St Sebastian Thrown into the Cloaca Maxima’ (1612) by Lodovico Carracci.