Der heilige Sebastian

Perugino signed this one in an odd place. An arrow has pierced the saint's neck, and along its shaft, where you would least look, runs the painter's name in small letters, Petrus Perusinus, Peter of Perugia. It is as if the arrow were his brush and the wound his signature. Sebastian was a Roman soldier executed, the legend says, with arrows for his Christian faith, and by the 1490s he was prayed to against the plague, since arrows had long stood for sudden disease. Perugino paints him calm, almost serene, tied and pierced but showing no pain, set against cool architecture and a soft Umbrian distance. He was at the height of his fame when he made this, the teacher in whose workshop a young Raphael would soon be learning.