Trittico di san Sebastiano

Of the four triptychs made in the 1460s for the Venetian church of Santa Maria della Carità, this one, centred on Saint Sebastian, is usually judged the finest. It comes from the moment the young Giovanni Bellini was setting himself up as an independent master, and specialists tend to give his own brush the standing saints here while leaving other passages to the workshop. Sebastian, tied to a column and pierced with arrows, was a plague saint, prayed to for protection in a city that lived in dread of outbreaks. The four panels were conceived as one ensemble for a raised choir, then broken up and moved when the church became the Accademia. Cleaning in recent decades has pushed opinion back toward Bellini as the guiding hand.