Four Saints and Blesseds: Saint Sebastian

In the 1480s plague kept returning to the towns of the Marche, the hill country on Italy's Adriatic coast, and a community that feared it would commission the saints it trusted to keep the sickness away. This narrow panel is one of four such figures. Sebastian was a young officer in the Roman army, shot full of arrows on the emperor's orders and left for dead. People had prayed to him against plague since the Middle Ages, reading those arrows as the sudden, random strike of disease. Here he stands alone against gold, bound and pierced, painted by Crivelli with help from his workshop as one of a matching row of four.