Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, 'Saint Sebastian', about 1500

A pale young man, naked but for a loincloth, stands in a stone niche, seemingly unaware of the arrows in his arm and leg. This is Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier who secretly converted to Christianity. When his faith was discovered, he was shot with arrows but miraculously survived.

Here, the saint seems more like a classical statue than a living figure. Cima must have been aware of Tullio Lombardo’s famous Adam (about 1490–9), the first nude marble statue sculpted since antiquity; he reproduces the figure’s stance, curly hair and slightly vacant expression almost precisely.

Saint Sebastian was enormously popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. He was thought to provide protection from the plague, which repeatedly ravaged central Italy in the fifteenth century: his arrow wounds were thought to be like the swellings it caused. He is often shown tied to a tree, as in The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian; the tree is missing here, but he still has his hands behind his back.

This painting is one of two panels from the S. Maria dei Crociferi Altarpiece. They must have formed the side panels of a triptych or polyptych, but we are not sure exactly when they were made, or where for.

Cima da Conegliano made a number of pictures of Saint Sebastian, beginning with the side panels of two large altarpieces, painted in around 1486–8. One is still in the parish church at Olera, near Bergamo; the other was from Oderzo, in the Venetian territories on the mainland. The series culminates in the figure of the saint in the side panel of the altarpiece for San Rocco, painted in about 1500–2, in Mestre, also on the Venetian mainland. Our panel probably comes towards the end of the series. In the earliest examples, the saint stands against a burnished gold background, as in medieval altarpieces, while the stone niche in our panel is much more Renaissance in style.

Like many Renaissance artists, Cima sped up the production process for altarpieces by reusing designs for different commissions. The saint in our panel is based on his figure in the so-called Dragan Altarpiece (Galleria dell'Accademia, Venice), commissioned in about 1499 by Venetian shipowner Giorgio Dragan for his family chapel in Santa Maria della Carita, Venice. Another painting of the saint (Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti, Settignano) also followed the same design.