Saint Sebastian is more conventionally depicted bound to a tree or pillar and pierced by arrows, or having his wounds tended to by Irene. Having recovered from the attempted execution by arrows, Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered that he be beaten to death and disposed of in the sewer. The denial of burial demonstrated the utmost contempt for fundamental Christian rites. Ludovico Carracci here chose to represent the moment when Roman soldiers dumped the saint’s limp body into the ancient sewage system, the Cloaca Maxima, thereby reducing a heroic martyr to a worthless corpse.
In 1612 Cardinal Maffeo Barberini commissioned this painting for a subterranean family chapel in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome. The church stood on the site where Saint Sebastian's body was recovered from a drain, the Euripus Agrippae. In a letter to his brother, Cardinal Barberini relayed his concerns that Carracci’s blunt naturalistic portrayal of the saint’s corpse was improper for its intended setting fearing that it would “not inspire much devotion”. Nevertheless, he appreciated the painting as a “good representation of brute force”, and opted not to display it in the chapel, but to keep it for his own private collection.
Sebastian is the patron saint of the plague-stricken, and was therefore a popular subject both in the artist’s hometown of Bologna, as well as in Rome, since both cities suffered devastating outbreaks of disease during the century previous. The relentless naturalism displayed in this painting, though shocking to Carracci’s patron, became a definitive feature of the newly-emerging seicento art.
Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.
