Guido Reni
Sebastian was a Roman soldier who aided Christians and was condemned to death by arrows by the Emperor Diocletian. This initial execution attempt was not fatal; he was nursed back to health by a pious lady before being clubbed to death. It was this miraculous recovery from the arrow wounds that led to his veneration as a source of protection in times of plague.
Reni's painting was one of the most celebrated at Dulwich in the 19th century, but by the turn of the 20th century its authenticity was in doubt. It is now accepted as one of two autograph replicas of an original in the Prado, the other being in the Louvre. Both replicas differ from the Prado picture in the inclusion of Sebastian's left hand, in the more revealing loincloth, and in the figures added to the landscape.
The story of Sebastian’s martyrdom made an ideal candidate for a male nude, and the startling eroticism of Reni’s Saint Sebastian has been a source of fascination for centuries. In the Dulwich version, a pentimento (alteration) shows that the loincloth has been reduced, whereas the Prado version was censured at some point in the 18th century so that more of the saint’s thigh and abdomen were hidden. The latter version is the inspiration for a voyage of sexual self-discovery in Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. A century before that, the novelist Charles Kingsley describes his character Alton Locke as being moved to tears before the Dulwich painting.
See this work in high-resolution as part of the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Online Collection.
P.S. Have you ever wondered why St Sebastian is a gay icon? The answer is here!