São Sebastião

This looks like a saint, but it is really a portrait of a particular young man got up as one. Around 1533 in Florence, Bronzino was stepping out of the shadow of his teacher Pontormo and finding his own manner, cooler and harder-edged, the figures sitting still and solid in the light. Saint Sebastian was usually shown bristling with the arrows of his execution. Here there is just one, resting against a bare, calm torso, and the young man gazes out with none of the agony you would expect. Fitting a living sitter into the pose of a holy figure was a fashionable kind of flattery then. Who he actually was has never been settled.