Saint John the Baptist, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Theodore

This panel of four saints—John the Baptist, John Chrysostom, John the Evangelist, and Theodore—dates from around 1516 and shows Sebastiano working in the altarpiece format he had mastered before leaving Venice. The grouping of saints reflects standard Italian altarpiece conventions for multi-figure devotional compositions. Sebastiano del Piombo, born Sebastiano Luciani in Venice around 1485 and active in Rome from 1511 until his death in 1547, occupied one of the most interesting positions in sixteenth-century Italian painting: trained in the Venetian tradition under Giorgione and influenced by the young Titian, he subsequently became the closest collaborator of Michelangelo in Rome, receiving figure compositions from the great Florentine that he executed with his Venetian command of color and atmosphere. The resulting fusion — Venetian surface and Roman form — was his most distinctive contribution to the tradition. His appointment as keeper of the Papal Seal (Piombo) in 1531 brought him financial security but somewhat reduced his artistic output in the final decades of his career.

The monumental saints demonstrate Sebastiano's evolving Roman style, with increasingly sculptural figures rendered in the warm, rich palette he inherited from the Venetian tradition.