Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

As a boy Girolamo Genga trained under Luca Signorelli, then spent three years in Perugino's busy Umbrian workshop, sharing it with a young apprentice named Raphael. You can feel that schooling in this Saint Sebastian. The calm, softly rounded figure and the wide green landscape with its slender trees are Perugino's manner, absorbed by a pupil who would later turn architect and court designer for the dukes of Urbino. The saint is shown at the moment of his martyrdom, bound and pierced with arrows, a subject Renaissance patrons favored partly because Sebastian was invoked against the plague. Scholars date the panel anywhere from about 1500 to the mid-1510s, which places it early, while the lessons of that workshop were still fresh.