Saint Sebastian (c. 1493): Art, History and Details

Saint Sebastian (c. 1493) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Perugino (Italian, c. 1450/55–1523).

The work and its context

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

The Florentine painter Perugino made drawings to record figural types and poses that could be repeated throughout his finished paintings. He used the elegant, graceful figure seen here, with its soft athletic body and upwardly turned gaze, in at least two paintings of the 3rd-century martyr Saint Sebastian (the related paintings are now in the collection of the Galleria degli Uffizi, and the Louvre). Sebastian was shot with arrows after being exposed as a Christian convert; he was particularly revered during the Renaissance as a protector against illness such as the plague. Portrayal of the saint required Perugino to express his knowledge of human anatomy, while evoking the gentle s-curve associated with classical sculpture. Drawn with metalpoint, a typical drawing medium in the 1400s, the reinforced lines along the contour of the figure indicate that it was probably used by the artist or by one of his many studio assistants to transfer the design to another sheet.

Object facts

• Title: Saint Sebastian
• Date: c. 1493
• Creator attribution: Perugino (Italian, c. 1450/55–1523)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: metalpoint
• Dimensions: Sheet: 25.6 x 14.6 cm (10 1/16 x 5 3/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1958.411

A detail from the museum

The elegant pose of Saint Sebastian here was used by the artist in at least two finished paintings of the saint.

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Marle, Raimond van, and Charlotte van Marle. The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1923.
• Lee, Sherman E. "Year in Review." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 46, no. 10 (1959): 210-31.
• "Accessions of American and Canadian Museums, July-September, 1959," Art Quarterly XXII, no. 4 (Winter, 1959): pp. 385-394.

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.