Saint Sebastian

A Roman soldier shot with arrows and left for dead, Sebastian lived through that first execution, and it was the surviving that mattered. Because the arrows failed to kill him, people prayed to him for protection against a killer that arrived without warning, the plague, which kept returning to the towns of northern Italy through the years Costa was at work. A small panel like this, barely half a metre high, was meant for private devotion, something a household could keep and pray before. Costa shows the saint young and almost calm beneath the arrows, more a graceful study of a standing body than a scene of pain. He painted it around 1492 in tempera, at a time when a fresh outbreak was never far off.