The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

No arrows have been shot yet. Van Dyck chose the moment before, while the soldiers are still binding Sebastian, so a picture called a martyrdom shows none. The Alte Pinakothek reads it as a contrast held in a single frame, the stripped and defenceless saint set against the haughty bearing of the officer on horseback at the right.

The canvas reached Munich in 1799 from the electoral gallery at Mannheim, whose pictures were moved east as French armies pushed into the Rhineland. Munich owns a second van Dyck Sebastian as well, painted two or three years later in Italy for a Flemish merchant in Naples and taken over in 1806 with the Dusseldorf collection. This one is the earlier and the larger, 228.5 centimetres tall, catalogued in Munich as number 371.