St Sebastian Altarpiece: The Martyrdom of St Sebastian

When plague reached a south German town, Sebastian was the saint people turned to. Here the Roman officer is tied up and shot full of arrows by a group of archers, and far behind them the story runs on to its end, with his body being thrown into the sewers of Rome. The two wings hang beside the centre panel in this room. They show Saint Barbara and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary standing in niches borrowed from ancient architecture, and all three were saints you called on in sickness or for a good death.

Holbein dated the work 1516, and he takes up the new Renaissance manner with real confidence, big figures pushed close to us, classical ornament, bright colour. On the Elizabeth wing a bearded man watches her tend the sick, and he is traditionally taken for the painter himself. Which church the altarpiece was made for is unknown. Its first firm trace is the college of St Salvator in Augsburg, which sold it to Bavaria in 1808 or 1809.