Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

Saint Sebastian's martyrdom — shot with arrows by Roman soldiers on the orders of Emperor Diocletian, then nursed back to health by Irene, only to be clubbed to death when he confronted the emperor again — made him one of the most frequently depicted saints in Renaissance Italy. His imagery served a double function: as a Christian martyr he was a model of faithful endurance, and his body — bound to a column and pierced with arrows — provided painters with one of the few sanctioned opportunities to depict the male nude in a devotional context. Sebastian was also the patron saint against plague, and his images proliferated dramatically after the Black Death. Gozzoli's Sebastian shows his characteristic combination of emotional clarity and decorative richness: the saint's suffering is present but not harrowing, his beauty intact, his eyes raised heavenward in ecstatic rather than agonised expression.

The Saint Sebastian formula presents compositional choices between full-figure and half-figure formats, and between outdoor landscape and interior architectural settings. Gozzoli favours the outdoor setting with a tree or column as the binding post, using landscape recession to create depth behind the figure. Arrows penetrating the body are painted with precise foreshortening to establish spatial illusionism.