Saint Sebastian

Saint Sebastian at the National Gallery, painted around 1500, depicts the arrow-pierced martyr in Cima's characteristically serene style. Unlike more dramatic Baroque treatments, Cima presents the saint with calm classical beauty. This work falls in the decades immediately around 1500, when Renaissance ideals of harmony and classical order were being synthesised across Europe. Cima da Conegliano's saint panels and altarpieces served the extensive network of churches and confraternities throughout the Veneto that required devotional images of quality and reliability. His figures of individual saints combine specific observation of physiognomy and attribute with the idealized composure appropriate to devotional subjects. Working between Conegliano and Venice across three decades, Cima became the most consistent and prolific supplier of quality devotional painting in northeastern Italy, his silvery palette and composed figure types recognizable across the region's churches as a guarantee of competent devotional art in the tradition descended from Giovanni Bellini.

Sebastian's figure is rendered with idealized proportions and luminous flesh tones. The landscape background demonstrates Cima's exceptional ability to integrate figures within detailed natural settings.