Madonna and Child, St Roch and St Sebastian

The two saints kneeling beside the Madonna are there for a reason a 16th-century viewer would have read at once. Saint Sebastian, the young man pierced with arrows, and Saint Roch, who lifts his robe to show a sore high on his thigh, were the great protectors people invoked against plague. Giovanni da Mel painted them here in 1526, in the hill country north of Belluno, where the sickness swept the Venetian mainland again and again. An altarpiece like this worked as a votive object, a standing plea for protection as much as a picture to pray before. Roch is the pointed choice of the two. He was believed to have caught the plague himself and survived, which is exactly why he bares the healed sore: the saint for a community that hoped to live through the next outbreak.