Saint Sebastian, Martyr

The Salon of 1865 is remembered for Manet's Olympia, the nude that crowds gathered to mock. At the same exhibition Ribot showed this Saint Sebastian, and the French state bought it there for the Musée du Luxembourg, the Paris museum of living artists. He took his lighting from Ribera and the Spanish painters of the 17th century, pulling pale flesh out of an almost black ground, and he gave the saint an ordinary, unidealised body, with bruised knees and dirty soles turned toward the viewer. In the old legend Sebastian survived the arrows, and a Roman widow named Irene came for his body and found him alive. The two hooded figures bending over him belong to that part of the story. A rope is still tied round his wrist, and an arrow still pierces his forearm.