The Martyred Saint Sebastian

The Martyred Saint Sebastian (1869) at the Saint Louis Art Museum depicts the early Christian martyr shot with arrows by Roman soldiers — one of the most frequently depicted martyrdom subjects in Western art, from Bellini and Mantegna through Rubens and Reni. Sebastian's martyrdom had accumulated a rich iconographic tradition in which the half-naked young male body, beautiful and vulnerable, became an object of contemplative devotion. Moreau's treatment is consistent with his interest in male beauty in extremis — Prometheus bound, Diomedes devoured, Sebastian pierced — figures whose suffering reveals a kind of transcendent beauty. The 1869 date places this in the same productive period as his other mythological and religious works of the late 1860s.

Sebastian's bound, pierced figure creates a formal composition of vertical constraint punctuated by the horizontal lines of the arrows. Moreau renders the young male body with careful anatomical observation, the arrows' entry wounds handled with the restraint that distinguishes devotional from sensational treatment.