Saint Sebastian

Saint Sebastian was a Roman soldier executed, so tradition holds, around the year 300, during the emperor Diocletian's persecution of Christians. He was tied up and shot with arrows, and over the centuries those arrows took on a second meaning. Because plague was pictured as arrows raining down from heaven, Sebastian became the saint people prayed to for protection from it, and painters returned to him through outbreak after outbreak. Redon took up that old subject in 1910 and drained the horror out of it. There is no crowd, no archers, no theatre of martyrdom. The saint stands alone against a pale gray tree, a thin blue cloth at his hips and a few slender arrows in his body, while the ground below breaks into patches of green, orange and blue. The tree itself is flecked with small, sparse red leaves.