San Sebastiano

In 1656 plague swept through Naples and killed perhaps half the city. Mattia Preti, newly arrived from Rome, threw himself into the crisis, painting huge votive frescoes of protecting saints on the city gates in the hope of divine mercy. Those gate paintings are lost now. This Saint Sebastian comes from the same moment, made for a convent just after the epidemic. Sebastian, the Roman soldier shot through with arrows, was for centuries the saint people prayed to against plague, each arrow imagined as a stroke of the disease. Preti shows him young and heavy-limbed, sinking under the arrows. Some Neapolitan painters thought the figure too plain and unheroic, and the picture was later moved out of its chapel.