San Sebastiano

Saint Sebastian was a Roman soldier executed with arrows for his Christian faith under the emperor Diocletian, and Renaissance Italy prayed to him against the plague, since an arrow was an old image for sudden disease. Perugino painted this in the 1490s, at the height of his fame, not long after he had frescoed a wall of the Sistine Chapel and while a boy named Raphael was learning in his workshop. There is no agony in it. Sebastian stands calm and almost graceful, his weight on one leg in a pose lifted from ancient statues, tied to a column of red stone. Along the base runs a line of Latin from the Psalms, thy arrows are fixed in me. Only two arrows have struck, and he seems barely to notice.