St Sebastian (inner side) and St Sebastian (reverse)

Between about 1470 and 1480, a South Tyrolean painter gave the same saint to both faces of one altarpiece wing. This narrow panel once stood to the left of a centre panel, the Holy Trinity with St Mark and St Anthony, now also in the Belvedere. The face you see is the inner one, shown when the altarpiece stood open. Sebastian, a Roman soldier condemned for his faith, is tied to a column and shot through with arrows, yet he stands upright, eyes raised. Around him the painter built a vaulted hall with a chequered floor and arched openings onto hills and trees, a deep perspective of the kind painters in the Pacher circle took from northern Italy. The outer face fared far worse. Most of its paint has flaked away to the bare fir, leaving a halo and fragments of the figure.