Martyrdom of St Agatha

On 29 December 1519 Sebastiano wrote from Rome to Michelangelo to say that the picture for Cardinal Rangone was finished. On the stone parapet in the foreground he then painted the date 1520, and the museum dates the panel to that year, while some scholars keep it in the winter before. Ercole Rangone held the Roman church of Sant'Agata, and that is where the subject comes from, a Sicilian woman of the third century whom the proconsul Quintianus had tortured after she refused him. The wide horizontal shape rules out an altar. A panel this long and low was meant for a room in the cardinal's own house, looked at close up. In the distance a building burns, standing for the earthquake that the story says shook the city as she died.