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Saint Sebastian

Pietro Perugino

1493

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Renaissance Renaissance Religious

Dominant colour

Saint Sebastian is a 1493 by Pietro Perugino, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Pietro Perugino
When & what style?: 1493 · Renaissance
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

This is a painting of Saint Sebastian tied to a tree with arrows in his side. He stands with his hands tied behind his back, looking up. Soft light falls on his smooth, athletic body. Perugino reused this graceful pose in other works. He kept a book of poses to copy from. This figure appears in two other Saint Sebastian paintings now in Florence and Paris. It hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The story of this work

Overview

The Florentine painter Perugino made drawings to record figural types and poses that could be repeated throughout his finished paintings. He used the elegant, graceful figure seen here, with its soft athletic body and upwardly turned gaze, in at least two paintings of the 3rd-century martyr Saint Sebastian (the related paintings are now in the collection of the Galleria degli Uffizi, and the Louvre). Sebastian was shot with arrows after being exposed as a Christian convert; he was particularly revered during the Renaissance as a protector against illness such as the plague. Portrayal of the…