The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna

The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna, 1506

A body against the dark

There is no landscape here, no column, no archers. Sebastian stands in a shallow, dark space on a panel more than two metres tall, framed at the sides and top by a painted border of veined marble. Across the top of the frame hangs a string of coral and crystal beads. His arms are pulled behind him and bound above the elbows with rope; his head is thrown back, eyes turned up, mouth open. A faint gold halo circles his head.

Arrows come at him from every side. They pierce his chest, his belly, his arms and his thighs, and several pass right through his legs, their shafts sticking out on both sides. Thin lines of blood run down from each wound. A white loincloth is knotted at his hips, and one fringed end of it flies out to the left as if caught by wind. Where the arrows cross over his legs they form a letter M, which has been read as standing for Morte, death, or for Mantegna himself.

In the lower right corner a candle has just gone out. Around it winds a paper scroll with a Latin motto: Nihil nisi divinum stabile est. Caetera fumus — nothing is stable except the divine; the rest is smoke. The inscription may have been needed because the fleetingness of life was not a theme usually attached to pictures of Sebastian.

Mantegna's third Sebastian

Mantegna painted the saint three times. The earlier two, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Louvre in Paris, set Sebastian against classical ruins, with landscape and sky behind. This one, in Venice, is different in kind: a single tortured figure before a neutral brown ground, with nothing to distract from him. It is often described as markedly pessimistic.

Its date is uncertain. It has been placed around 1490 and as late as 1506, the year of Mantegna's death; some historians put it earlier still, because of the painted marble frame, which recalls his years in Padua. Save Venice describes it as egg tempera on wood, 213 by 95 centimetres, from the 1490s, and notes that it may have been commissioned by Bishop Ludovico Gonzaga. Sebastian was invoked against plague, since his many wounds were likened to the sores the disease caused, and Mantegna lived through a period of frequent epidemics.

From Mantegna's studio to the Ca' d'Oro

The painting can be identified as one of the works still in Mantegna's studio when he died in 1506. In the first half of the sixteenth century it was in the house of Pietro Bembo in Padua, where it was seen and recorded by Marcantonio Michiel. From Bembo's heirs it was acquired in 1810 by the anatomist and surgeon Antonio Scarpa for his collection in Pavia. After Scarpa's death in 1832 it passed to his brother and then to his nephew at Motta di Livenza, near Treviso, where it stayed until 1893.

That year Baron Giorgio Franchetti bought it. Franchetti had acquired the Ca' d'Oro, a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal, and restored it; he built a marble-clad chapel inside it to show the Mantegna. The palace and his collection passed into public ownership, and the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca' d'Oro opened in 1927. The painting is still shown in Franchetti's chapel.

The painter

Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506) was born near Padua. He was the brother-in-law of the painters Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and for many years was court painter to the Gonzaga family in Mantua, where he lived near the church of San Sebastiano. He was a close student of ancient Roman architecture and sculpture, which shows in the other two Sebastians. In this one he set it all aside.

Sources: Wikimedia Commons, File:Andrea Mantegna - St Sebastian - WGA13989.jpg · Wikipedia, Saint Sebastian (Mantegna) · Save Venice, Andrea Mantegna's Saint Sebastian in the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti at the Ca' d'Oro