Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni

Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni

A martyr who does not suffer

Reni painted Saint Sebastian half a dozen times, and in none of them does the saint look like a man in pain. He stands bound to a tree against a cloudy sky, three arrows in his body, his face turned up and away. The body is pale and composed, the expression one of patient attention. Reni’s point is theological rather than anatomical: the martyr has already passed beyond what is being done to him.

Why Reni painted it so often

Sebastian was one of the most requested subjects of the Counter-Reformation. He was a plague saint, invoked against an illness that still came back to Italian cities every generation, and he offered painters a sanctioned occasion to paint the idealised human body. Reni, who had trained in the Carracci academy in Bologna and absorbed classical sculpture in Rome, made the subject his own. His Sebastians were copied endlessly for two centuries.

Bologna, 1615

This version dates from about 1615, just after Reni left Rome for Bologna; in Rome he had been one of the painters most favoured by the Borghese and the papal court. The cool, silvery light and restrained colour are characteristic of that period.

Where it hangs

This version is in the Capitoline Museums in Rome and measures 128 by 98 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 3,276-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 21 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Capitoline Museums, Rome · Wikidata Q28796715 · Wikimedia Commons