Portrait of a Youth as Saint Sebastian (late 1480s): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Youth as Saint Sebastian (late 1480s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Marco d'Oggiono (Italian, 1460-1524).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Sebastian, a bodyguard for the ancient Roman emperor Diocletian, was shot with arrows and was eventually drowned for his commitment to Christianity. While the arrow alludes to Saint Sebastian, the young man’s clothing dates to the late 1400s, indicating that this is a contemporary portrait, rather than an image of the historical saint. This haunting image was influenced by the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), particularly in the artist’s use of smoky shadows (called sfumato) to model the flesh. It was painted by Marco d’Oggiono, a Milanese artist who worked in Leonardo’s studio.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Youth as Saint Sebastian
• Date: late 1480s
• Creator attribution: Marco d'Oggiono (Italian, 1460-1524)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood, transferred to pressed wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 47.5 x 41 x 4 cm (18 11/16 x 16 1/8 x 1 9/16 in.); Unframed: 30.5 x 24 cm (12 x 9 7/16 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 15th Century and earlier
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1986.9

A detail from the museum

While Marco d'Oggiono made numerous copies of the masterpieces of his teacher Leonardo da Vinci, this is an original composition.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• New York World's Fair, George Henry McCall, and Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner. Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture from 1300-1800. [New York]: [Printed by Publishers Printing Company], 1939.
• Rama, Elena. “Un tentative di rilettura della ritrattistica di Boltraffio fra Quattrocento e Cinquecento,” Arte Lombarda 64 no. 1 (1983), 79-92.
• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1986." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, no. 2 (1987): 38-79.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.