San Sebastiano

Sebastian was the saint people prayed to against plague, his body stuck with arrows the way sickness was thought to strike from nowhere, and Mantegna returned to him more than once in years when outbreaks swept northern Italy. This version was painted around 1480 in Mantua, where Mantegna served the ruling Gonzaga family. It shows the saint bound among broken classical ruins, columns and carved fragments of a Rome that had fallen, which Mantegna studied and loved. Low at the right, half hidden, two archers who shot him stand looking on. Within a year or so the painting left Italy for France, likely part of the dowry when a Gonzaga daughter, Chiara, married a French nobleman, and it hung for centuries in a chapel at Aigueperse in the Auvergne.