Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene

When Hendrick ter Brugghen painted this in 1625, his city of Utrecht was living through plague. The sickness returned every year from 1624 to 1629, and it probably killed the painter himself in 1629, at around 40. That background presses on the subject, because Saint Sebastian, shot full of arrows and left for dead, was the saint people prayed to against plague. Ter Brugghen shows the moment just after, when a woman named Irene and her maid come to the body and find him still breathing. The light is the kind he had studied from Caravaggio in Italy, a low glow that leaves most of the canvas dark and picks out the pale, slack figure. Irene bends to loosen the cord at his wrist while the maid works an arrow free.