Saint Sebastian

Titian's Saint Sebastian from around 1570-1575, now in the Hermitage, is among his most radical late devotional images — a figure built from the rough pigment deposits and exposed underpaint that characterize his most extreme non-finito technique. The subject, of the Roman officer martyred by arrows for his Christian faith and invoked as a protector against plague, had been one of the most depicted saints of the Italian Renaissance; Mantegna, Botticelli, and Perugino had all painted their versions with varying degrees of idealization and physical heroism. Titian's late Sebastian strips away idealization to create a figure that seems to emerge from the texture of the paint itself, the body built from rapid, gestural marks that evoke the physical reality of extreme suffering without the classical distance of formal anatomical study. The Hermitage's holding of this exceptional late work connects it to the extended Russian imperial collection of Titian's paintings, which includes the Danae, the Flight into Egypt, and several other major works.

The saint's muscular body is rendered with thick, agitated brushstrokes that almost destroy the figure's form, creating a powerful image of suffering through the sheer materiality of paint.

This late Titian shows the master's most radical handling, with passages that verge on abstraction. The painting has been cleaned and restored. The dark tonality is both intentional and exacerbated by aging. Conservation has sought to maintain the balance between the luminous flesh and the enveloping darkness. The canvas has been relined and is in stable condition. This is considered one of the key works of Titian's final period.