Saint Sebastian Healed by Angels

Rubens was in his mid-twenties and a few years into his long stay in Italy when he painted this, between about 1602 and 1604 by the museum's dating. A Flemish painter from Antwerp, he had come south in 1600 to study ancient sculpture and the Italian masters at first hand, and it shows in the muscular, statue-like body at the centre. The subject is an unusual one. Most images of Saint Sebastian show him pierced with arrows at the moment of martyrdom. Here the arrows are already being drawn out, angels tending the wounded man, and his armour lies discarded on the ground, a reminder that Sebastian had been an officer in the Roman army.