San Sebastiano

In 1456 and 1457 plague swept through Padua, where the young Mantegna was working. People prayed to Saint Sebastian for protection, because he had survived being shot full of arrows, and plague was imagined striking the same way, as unseen darts falling through the air. Mantegna was fascinated by ancient Rome, and he tied his saint to a broken classical arch and littered the ground at his feet with real Roman rubble, every fragment carved with an archaeologist's precision. He signed the panel in Greek letters, running down the stone beside the figure. Look up into the cloud at the top left and you can make out a rider on horseback shaped from the vapor. The picture was probably painted in thanks once the sickness had passed.