Madonna with the Child and Sts Rock and Sebastian

Both of the saints standing here were called on for one specific fear: plague. On the left, Saint Roch pulls up his robe to show a sore on his thigh, the mark of the disease he was believed to have survived and to cure. On the right, Saint Sebastian, pierced with arrows, was invoked the same way, since those arrows were long read as the sudden, stabbing arrival of pestilence. Lotto painted this around 1518 in Bergamo, in northern Italy, for a friend of his, Battista Cucchi, who was a surgeon, a man whose whole working life turned on the body and its illnesses. So this is a private image of protection. The infant Christ twists in his mother's lap to give a blessing, and the two men who knew death professionally look on with real tenderness.