Chapter 4

The Making of a Plague Saint

SAINT SEBASTIAN’S IMAGERY AND CULT BEFORE THE COUNTER-REFORMATION

Sheila Barker

The popularity of Sebastian’s imagery since the Middle Ages can be largely attributed to the once widespread belief that he offered protection from epidemic diseases; however this belief arose much later—perhaps seven centuries later—than what has previously been assumed. Sebastian’s cult embraced a number of themes and concerns in addition to the particular problem of plague. When his cult and imagery did pertain to plague, however, this connection was profoundly implicated by evolving religious and secular perspectives on the human body and its diseases.

THE MARTYR’S BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC

Sebastian had been both venerated and depicted for many centuries prior to his assuming the role of a protector against plague. His cult originated sometime before 354 at his tomb in the catacombs on the Via Appia in Rome. It quickly flourished thanks to the stream of pilgrims to a basilica that was built above these catacombs in the late fourth century, originally called the Ecclesia Apostolorum.1 Sebastian’s biographical passio was probably composed during the pontificate of Sixtus III (432–440) by a monk from the monastery beside the Ecclesia Apostolorum.2 This passio does not associate the martyr with any specific disease, nor does it mention plague. Instead, it indicates Sebastian’s youth in Lombardy, places him in Diocletian’s Rome [91]within a witnessing community of saints, and chronicles the events leading to his martyrdom. Among these events are the first attempt on his life by the emperor’s archers, his recovery in the care of Irene, and his second arrest by the imperial guard, who bludgeoned him to death. The passio also recounts the saint’s posthumous history: after the imperial guard dumped his corpse into a sewer to prevent its recovery by the Christians, Sebastian appeared to Lucina in a dream to tell her where his corpse lay; Lucina then found it and had it buried in the catacombs beside the remains of the apostles Peter and Paul. Among the earliest surviving images of Sebastian is a fresco in the crypt of Saint Cecilia at the church of San Callisto in Rome. He appears here much the same as the two saints, Polycamus and Quirinus, depicted beside him: they are beardless men, dressed in white tunics fastened with clasps, and posed like philosophers.3

By the time that Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) designated Sebastian as Rome’s third patron saint (following Peter and Paul), Sebastian’s cult had already acquired an enduring territorial association with the city that was the site of his relics as well as the See of Peter. Several decades earlier, this territorial association had inflected the meaning of Sebastian’s cult in the Byzantine exarchy of Ravenna. Here, at San Martino (later renamed San Apollinare Nuovo), a church that had been converted from the Arian to the Catholic rite in 561, Sebastian was depicted in the mosaics on the right wall of the nave, dating from about 570.4 He stands amidst a long cortege of saints, all dressed identically as they pay homage to an imperially robed Christ.5 Like the other saints in this retinue, Sebastian can be identified with a distinct political territory to which Emperor Justinian claimed dominion as Constantine’s successor and as the defender of religious orthodoxy.6

This territorial association is largely responsible for the diffusion of Sebastian’s cult among the Byzantine, Lombard, and Frankish kingdoms over the following centuries. It certainly propelled the introduction of his cult to the Lombard capital of Pavia during the plague of 680, an event first recorded by Paul the Deacon (ca. 720–ca. 799).7 In the midst of this [92]epidemic, Sebastian’s arm relic was brought to the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, located a short walk from Pavia’s cathedral.8

Notably, modern historians have designated Pavia’s recourse to Sebastian during the seventh-century plague as the earliest evidence of Sebastian’s plague cult—that is, a cult predicated on the belief that Sebastian had special powers against plague.9 In the absence of further evidence, however, it seems an anachronism that, in this epoch, the cult of a Christian saint would have attained functional specificity. It is far more likely that Sebastian’s efficacious intervention against the plague of 680 was anticipated on the basis of his martyr’s status, his privileged burial near the apostles Peter and Paul, and the miraculous power of his relics—and was not due to any particular sanitary application of his cult.10

If Sebastian’s cult did not have a specialized antipestilential function at this time, it remains to be explained why his relics, and not some more readily available ones, were selected to help save Pavia from plague. The answer is politics.11 In 680, the same year that plague struck both Rome and the Longobard capital of Pavia, Pope Agatho sealed an important alliance with the Longobards and established a Catholic hierarchy in the Longobard territories.12 The transfer of some of Sebastian’s relics from Rome to Pavia’s church of San Pietro in Vincoli—a church consecrated to the most important of Roman saints and visited by pilgrims taking the Via Francigena route to Rome—symbolically reinforced the bond between two worldly hierarchies. Sebastian was ideally suited for this mediating role, since he had territorial associations with both Lombardy, where he spent his youth, and Rome, where he died.13

Pope Agatho’s alliance with the Lombards was commemorated in Rome that same year with the dedication of an altar to Saint Sebastian at Rome’s homonymous church of San Pietro in Vincoli, resulting in a cultic doppelganger of the Pavian model.14 Perhaps, just like the Sebastian altar in Pavia, the Sebastian altar in Rome constituted part of this city’s efforts to [93]obtain divine protection from the plague of 680. Sebastian would have been appropriate for a role in Rome’s petitions because, in addition to his generic theological merits, he had been especially charged with the tutelage of Rome by Pope Gregory the Great, as noted above. The eventual cessation of plague in both Rome and Pavia surely confirmed the miraculous powers of the saint and his relics; on a moral level, however, the plague’s end must have signaled heaven’s approbation of the Roman-Longobard alliance.

Still extant at San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome is a late seventh-century mosaic that presumably decorated the area of the original Sebastian altar.15 This mosaic shows Sebastian as an elderly man with a white beard, dressed in a ceremonial white tunic and holding his jeweled martyr’s crown; typologically, then, it conforms closely with the mosaic image of Sebastian in Ravenna. It should be noted that no aspect of this image recalls Apollo, the deity invoked against plagues in pre-Christian Rome; nor does the image include any of the arrows that functioned as metaphors for plague in classical literature.16 This observation should dispel the deeply problematic theory that Sebastian was first invoked to protect against plague because his appearance and his arrow attribute had invited the superstitious to conflate him with the pagan plague deity Apollo, for whom these “new Christians” required an orthodox substitute.17

In the early ninth century, the Franks officially adopted Sebastian’s cult. Like the Longobards and Byzantines before them, they did so for political motives.18 With Charlemagne’s grandson Lothair controlling papal and city politics through his Roman envoy Wal, some of Sebastian’s relics, along with those of Pope Gregory the Great, were released by Pope Eugenius II to Hilduin, the abbot of Saint-Denis, who in turn sent them to the abbey of Saint-Médard in Soissons in the year 826.19 Soissons was no casual destination: it was the former Roman outpost at which the Franks won their definitive battle in 486 against the last Roman ruler in Gaul, and it had been the setting for Pépin’s coronation by the archbishop of Mainz.20 At this sanctuary [94]steeped with Frankish memory, a place was hallowed for the relics of Sebastian and Gregory the Great, two saints profoundly associated with Rome. Thus, with this single gesture, Lothair betokened his fealty to the Roman Catholic Church and rekindled the Carolingian claim to Rome’s imperial legacy.

The symbolic fusion of Roman and Frankish destinies at Soissons did not reflect the political realities in Rome, where Pope Gregory IV (827–44) buckled against Lothair’s growing interference in church matters. As if to signal a breach in their alliance, Gregory IV blocked Lothair’s access to Sebastian’s remaining relics by transferring them from the extramural catacombs to the Oratory of Saint Gregory the Great at the Vatican Palace, where they were under the pope’s tight control and where Sebastian’s title of Defensor ecclesiae romanae gained new luster; a new silver reliquary made at this time for Sebastian’s skull would seem to indicate that the saint figured prominently in papal ceremonies.21 Again, then, Sebastian’s relics were instrumental in the staging of a political relationship—in this case, a hostile one.

THE SAINT, HIS ARROWS, AND THE RISE OF HIS LEGEND

The expansion of Sebastian’s cult following the strategic dissemination of his relics stimulated an interest in his Roman itinerary, especially among the growing number of pilgrims who were visiting Rome. Among the sites most associated with Sebastian’s martyrdom was the area of the Palatine hill where Sebastian was shot with arrows and where Irene tended to him. In the late tenth century, the church of Santa Maria in Pallara (now known as San Sebastianello) was built at this site, and on one of its nave walls the events of Sebastian’s passio were depicted for the first time ever in a fresco cycle.22 Judging from its narrative structure and its accessibility to lay audiences, Santa Maria in Pallara’s tenth-century mural cycle served to instruct pilgrims on the historical significance of the site.23 It depicted five events from Sebastian’s passio: the archers’ attempt to kill Sebastian, his convalescence at Irene’s house, the disposal of his corpse in a sewer, the transportation of his corpse to the catacombs, and his burial there.

Notably, this influential cycle omitted the episode in which Sebastian was clubbed to death. Thus, uninstructed visitors could have mistakenly concluded from this sequence that Sebastian died at the hands of the archers. Perhaps the confusion spawned by this omission is the reason that nearly all representations of Sebastian from the following centuries—[95]whether narrative cycles or isolated images—show the saint pierced by arrows, as if this were the moment of his death.24 One such example is the eleventh-century fresco at the Scala Santa in Rome, probably the oldest surviving isolated image to show Sebastian pierced by arrows. Just like its prototype at Santa Maria in Pallara, the Scala Santa fresco represents Sebastian with a brown beard and flanked symmetrically by archers.25

Sebastian was again portrayed with archers in an isolated scene in the frescoed crypt of the cathedral of Anagni (near Rome). Dating from 1173 to 1179, these frescoes (fig. 4.1) were occasioned by Pope Alexander III’s donation of some of Sebastian’s relics to this church, as well as those of Saints Stephen and Thomas à Becket (canonized in 1173).26 Alexander III (1159–81) spent much of his long, turbulent papacy in outlying towns such as Anagni because Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I had installed an antipope in Rome with the support of the Roman nobility. The pope’s erection of an altar in honor of these three intrepid martyrs may have been a rallying call for the church to stand up against its enemies. The inscription above the fresco of Sebastian with archers underlines this theme, indicating that Sebastian sustains his arrow wounds while serving the Lord.27

Following the emergence of isolated scenes of Sebastian with the archers, the arrow began to serve as Sebastian’s attribute. An early example occurs in the mid-thirteenth-century fresco formerly at the church of San Barnaba in Prato (now at Prato’s Ospedale della Misericordia e Dolce), which shows Sebastian with a blond beard, dressed in a richly embroidered tunic, and carrying an arrow.28 Both image types—Sebastian with the archers and Sebastian holding the arrow as an attribute—became standard in his imagery at a time when Sebastian’s cultic associations and applications often reflected his spiritual role as militant defender of the church and his worldly career as a professional soldier. The binomial association between Sebastian and plague was still well over a century away, as was the artistic representation of Sebastian as a beardless youth.

Decisive to the emergence of a direct cultic link between Sebastian and the plague was Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, composed around 1260 as an entertaining yet salutary resource for preachers.29 The Sebastian legend in this work consists of Jacobus’s paraphrase of the old passio and notices of two posthumous miracles: the punishment of a woman who [97]defiled Sebastian’s temple, and Paul the Deacon’s story of Sebastian’s intercession against the plague of Pavia and Rome in 680.30 Apparently, the latter miracle had lain in oblivion until Jacobus encountered it serendipitously while compiling his History of the Lombards based on Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century chronicle. Jacobus explains in the Legenda Aurea that he undertook a recapitulation of Paul the Deacon's De gestis langobardorum “because many do not know the history of this people”; from this statement, it can be assumed that Jacobus’s contemporaries were equally ignorant of the story contained therein of the Pavian and Roman plagues of 680.31 Jacobus concludes his expansive Sebastian legend with a passage he ascribed to Saint Ambrose:

Lord, the shedding of the blood of the blessed martyr Sebastian for the confession of your name shows your wonderful works: you confer strength in weakness and success to our efforts, and at his prayer give help to the infirm.32

Later events would prove that some members of Jacobus’s readership forged an associative chain between of the story of the Pavian epidemic and Ambrose’s endorsement of Sebastian as the advocate of the infirm, giving rise to the special application of Sebastian’s cult to the problem of plague.

Previous to the Legenda Aurea, there is no evidence that Sebastian’s intercession was believed to be particularly suited to countering plague. From 1330, however, there are signs that his formerly protean powers had been funneled into specific functions, including this one. That year, a chronicler noted that Sebastian’s annual feast day was traditionally celebrated at San Pietro in Vincoli in Pavia with the distribution of two different blessed items, each serving a distinct prophylactic purpose: bread rolls called avicule were eaten by humans and animals alike to ward off pestilence, and miniature arrows made by parish goldsmiths were worn as protection against arrow wounds.33

Significantly, the foodstuff, not the talismanic arrows, transmitted Sebastian’s protection against plague.34 Contrary to received wisdom, then, the origins of Sebastian’s plague cult did not require a metaphorical association of arrows with plague or with divine ire. Moreover, the phenomenon of Saint Sebastian’s healing breads suggests that resistance to plague was seen [98]as an effect not only of heavenly intercession, but also of the proper nourishment of the body. This latter theory, based in the materialistic theories of disease taught at the medieval universities, seems to have been seamlessly integrated with the religious forms of Sebastian’s early plague cult in Pavia.

A PLAGUE SAINT AND A SECULARIZED DISEASE

This secular medicine detectable at the incipit of Sebastian’s plague cult described above represents an influence other than Jacobus de Voragine’s Sebastian legend, since his interpretation of epidemic disease is exclusively religious. Paraphrasing his eighth-century source, Jacobus described how pestilence was dispersed throughout the city by angels knocking at the doors of its houses. Clearly, this plague was a supernatural event. Permitting no doubt on this point, Jacobus omitted from his paraphrased account the record of an eclipse that had preceded the Roman plague, presumably because he wished to depict only the plague’s religious causes and not its natural ones.35 He further removed this “divine disease” from the physicians’ realm by noting none of its symptoms and only vaguely alluding to its high mortality rate (“hardly anyone was left to bury the dead”).36 Indeed, even this reference to improper burial underlined Jacobus’s religious perspective, since it indicated a fate held by the church to be more dreadful than plague itself: a bad death laden with unatoned sins.

Some of Jacobus’s contemporaries were pursuing quite different theories about plague in particular, and about human disease in general. Weaned on medical treatises of classical origin such as the Articella, university-trained physicians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries believed that health could be optimized by adjusting the body’s humoral composition and regulating the body’s exposure to the “six nonnaturals”: environment, food, exercise, purgation, emotion, and sleep. They diagnosed diseases based on the functioning of organs within a systemic equilibrium, and they offered their patients specific cures as well as regimens to live by. Indicative of the extraordinary prominence some physicians attained in this age is Filippo Villani’s portrait of the Florentine physician Tommaso del Garbo:

His name being famous in all of Italy, [Tommaso del Garbo] acquired such esteem and such reputation for his learning and his diligent practice of medicine, that the mighty tyrants in which Italy abounds believe that they would die if Tommaso didn’t treat them . . . . Thus being regarded by Italians as an idol of medicine, [99]and considered almost an Asclepius, [Tommaso] was paid such large salaries that he became very wealthy.37

Recent studies suggest that university medicine was the primary lens through which the authorities of the Tuscan city-states analyzed and responded to the problem of epidemic disease, even as early as the plague of 1348.38 Giovanni Boccaccio’s picture of Florence during the Black Death upholds this assertion. His Decameron depicts a society replete with profane concepts of plague, and largely indifferent to the religious services at Santa Maria Novella, the seat of Jacopo Passavanti’s (1302–57) penitence movement. Although the Decameron’s female protagonists piously attended masses at Santa Maria Novella long after most others had quit, even they exhibit an essentially secular outlook on the plague, and their reasons for taking refuge in the countryside ignore altogether the calamity’s otherworldly dimensions.39 Boccaccio’s own views on the plague also evince a secular bias. He carefully balances religious and profane viewpoints when discussing the plague’s origin and the city’s failed efforts to stop it, yet in describing the disease itself, his clinical approach to its symptoms, pathology, and contagious transmission reveals a fundamental sympathy with the physician’s perspective.

Amidst this rift between lay and religious perspectives on plague, a priest named Filippo di Neri dell’Antella introduced Sebastian’s cult to Florence.40 A letter written in May 1348 by a Vallombrosan monk named Benigno offers precious insight into the event.41 It reports that dell’Antella contracted plague while at the papal court in Avignon and soon after, he feverishly recollected having read about Sebastian’s intercession during the Pavian plague “in some Roman chronicle.” Gravely ill, dell’Antella had his friends carry him to a church so he could dedicate a mass to Sebastian and subsequently he experienced a complete recovery. Dell’Antella, who went on to serve as Florence’s bishop from 1357 to 1363, demonstrated his gratitude to the saint who had saved his life by seeking to bring Sebastian to the forefront of the metropolitan cult. It was not a simple task, for the Sebastian legend was apparently rather obscure in these parts: Benigno wrote in his letter that when he first heard of dell’Antella’s experience, he had not known of Sebastian’s intercession against the Pavian plague. Having since located the account in the “new legends of the saints” (that is, the Legenda [100]Aurea), Benigno transcribed it in his letter, presuming that his interlocutor did not know the story either.

When the plague returned to Tuscany in 1353, dell’Antella donated to Florence’s cathedral a relic of Sebastian (apparently an arrow, since the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo still has a reliquary labeled “de sagittis sancti Sebastiani”).42 It is interesting to note that this donation occurred at approximately the same time that Petrarch was writing his Invectivae contra medicum, an attack on the excessive prestige and pride of physicians, particularly those who presumed to cure souls as well as bodies.43 In promoting Sebastian’s cult, dell’Antella may have shared Petrarch’s antagonism towards physicians. Surely he recognized that the miraculous healings worked by Sebastian’s relics would prove that the plague’s origin and cure were in the hands of God, thereby affirming ecclesiastic authority in the realm of illness.44

With Florence again in the grips of the plague in 1362, dell’Antella, now bishop of Florence, seized the opportunity to draw attention to Sebastian’s relics by consecrating one of the cathedral’s altars to the saint.45 Dell’Antella also commissioned a decoration for that altar: a polyptych with the Madonna and Child in the central panel and, in one of the side panels, the first unquestionable depiction of Saint Sebastian in Florence.46 That side panel, the so-called Wildenstein Panel identified by Richard Offner and attributed by him to the Master of the Fabriano Altarpiece, represents Sebastian with a light brown beard, dressed like a soldier, and holding both an arrow and a palm branch. Approximately ten years later, following another wave of plague in 1374, a new altarpiece took its place: Giovanni del Biondo’s Saint Sebastian Triptych (fig. 4.2), now at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence.

Though the plague outbreak was probably the catalyst for the substitution of the first altarpiece, it seems there was also an underlying need for an altarpiece that could teach the Florentine populace about the saint’s particular virtues. Del Biondo’s triptych remedies this ignorance, portraying in the wings four scenes from Jacobus de Voragine’s Sebastian legend. The first [101](upper right) depicts Sebastian clubbed to death and thrown in the cloaca; the second (lower right) shows Lucia’s dream and her burial of Sebastian beside the apostles; the third (upper left) shows punishment of a woman who profaned a temple dedicated to Sebastian; and the fourth (lower left) depicts Sebastian and Mary directing to heaven the prayers of the Pavians during the plague of 680. The central panel, synthesizing narrative and icon conventions, shows a light-bearded Sebastian bound to a pole, his nude body pierced by a multitude of arrows launched by the swarming archers below him, while a small angel at his ear presents him with the crown of martyrdom. This central image, although based on an established typology, also takes fresh inspiration from the ancient passio account repeated in Jacobus’s [102]Sebastian legend, exploiting the black humor of its memorable line about Sebastian being shot full of so many arrows that he looked like a hedgehog. As a skilled preacher might have done, the altarpiece exploits the rhetorical devices of analogy and hyperbole to make a calculated and lasting impression upon the congregation.

The smaller narrative scenes of del Biondo’s triptych may have played a key role in the subsequent development of Sebastian’s cult as a plague saint in Florence. They recount Sebastian’s posthumous history, beginning with his death and followed by dramatic and miraculous demonstrations of his power. Their arrangement results in a meaningful juxtaposition between the scene of the saint’s own salvation from a bad death and the one directly across from it, portraying plague as a sudden, unpredictable mortality that threatens a whole community with the danger of a bad death. Bridging the two narrative scenes, the central image of Sebastian pierced by arrows reinforces the idea of sudden death because the arrow was known for its speed as well as its deadliness. Continuously visible, del Biondo’s morbid imagery in Florence’s cathedral would have thus reminded citizens of the danger of sudden death, even when the city enjoyed perfect health.

As a memento mori, del Biondo’s triptych fueled the “cult of remembrance” that was one of the Black Death’s lasting legacies to Florentine culture.47 Nor was this an isolated instance: for centuries to come, Sebastian’s image was used to remind Italian audiences to prepare for death, particularly in the ambit of the mendicant orders. Clearly that is its function in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s circa 1493 Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece in the Museo Civico (Rimini), where Saint Vincent Ferrer stands between Sebastian and Rocco repeating the prophetic warning of the book of Revelation, “Timete deum et date illi honorem q[u]i[a] venit ora iudicii eius” (Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come [Rev. 14:7, AV]).48 The same memento mori function underlies a gruesome and horrifying image such as Andrea Mantegna’s Saint Sebastian from circa 1506 (fig. 4.3), whose chilling inscription warns of the evanescence of everything on earth. Such mortifying images of Sebastian may also pertain to the usage described by Elvio Lunghi in his study of the Sebastian imagery at the hospital church of San Sebastiano in Panicale.49 Lunghi suggests that to raise funds for building and running their charitable hospitals, confraternities and religious orders employed Sebastian’s image to alert communities to the danger of sudden death, and this in turn spurred individuals to prepare for death and the afterlife, often resulting in donations and legacies in favor of the annexed hospitals.

[104]PROTECTING THE PUBLIC WELFARE

Perhaps Florentines with predominantly secular outlooks on disease remained indifferent to the spiritual danger of plague represented in del Biondo’s Saint Sebastian Altarpiece. By the same token, however, they would have been startled by the material danger represented by its depiction of streets littered with unburied corpses, whose decomposition was thought to contaminate the air with pestilence. In contrast to Jacobus de Voragine’s account, del Biondo’s plague scene encourages such reflections upon the plague’s natural causes because it omits the angels that were so prominent in Jacobus de Voragine’s description of the Pavian plague. In effect, del Biondo’s altarpiece represents plague as a natural disease while bringing it into direct association with the iconic image of a Christian saint. The combination was unprecedented in Italy and it gave a tremendous impulse to the cult of Sebastian as a plague saint, that is to say, a saint whose intercession was particularly efficacious against the pestilential disease described by doctors.50

Since aspects of del Biondo’s Saint Sebastian Altarpiece reflect the physician’s understanding of the plague as a natural disease, it can be considered an instance of the convergence of religious and medical outlooks on disease, which was driven by two late fourteenth-century developments. One of these was the medicalization of ecclesiastic charity hospitals that has been documented by John Henderson.51 The other was the incursion of Christian values into the practice of learned medicine, as when Franciscan alchemist John of Rupescissa formulated medicines so that the poor could afford them, or when the lay congregation known as the Gesuati organized in 1350 with the mission of providing free medicines of its own manufacture.52 An exemplary synthesis of religious and secular perspectives on disease is found in Niccolò Falcucci’s Sermones medicinales (circa 1400). This work cites Galen and Avicenna to explain the plague’s causes, but as a plague defense it recommends—along with avoidance of the contagious sick and the miasmic city air—prayers to Saint Sebastian.53

Although a marked individualism underlies Falucci’s advice to flee from the cities and the sick, more typically the confluence of secular and religious medicine was animated by a communal ethic and directed towards [105]the welfare of an entire city. Public health had long been a concern in medieval cities and since at least the thirteenth century, it had been safeguarded through the municipal regulation of food and water safety, garbage disposal, air pollution, and street cleaning.54 As a result of the Black Death, however, it became clear that public health—and likewise public welfare—also depended upon the availability of medical care.55 For this service, the Italian city-states turned to the charitable hospitals run by ecclesiastic institutions, fueling rapid growth in this sector. By 1428, Florence boasted thirty-five hospitals.56

In 1448, the commune of Florence resolved to build a public hospital specifically for the treatment of plague victims; it was to be staffed by four doctors, four barbers, and sixty servants, and called San Bastiano.57 The naming of Florence’s plague hospital after Sebastian was doubly meaningful, for he had come to be identified not only with the problem of plague, but also with the related concepts of public welfare and communal preservation that were the plague hospital’s raison d’être. The story of Sebastian’s intercession on behalf of all Pavia during the plague of 680, along with his ancient title of Defensor ecclesiae romanae, had fomented the belief that the saint protected the welfare of entire communities. The belief had been transposed into modern terms as early as 1382, when the Signoria of Florence chose his feast day (along with Saint Anthony’s) for the annual celebration of their return to power.58 In 1386, the Signoria marked these celebrations by presenting a new relic (one of the martyr’s finger bones) to Sebastian’s altar at the cathedral; with this donation, they manifested their commitment to the city’s publica utilitas by consigning it—in a parallel spiritual realm—to Sebastian’s tutelage.59

In later decades, numerous Italian towns called on Sebastian to defend their welfare, particularly in times of plague: the commune of Parma sought his protection against plague in 1411, as did the communes of Assisi and Foligno in 1448 and the commune of San Gimignano in 1462.60 Related to the vow of San Gimignano is Benozzo Gozzoli’s 1464 Saint Sebastian fresco [106]for the church of Sant’Agostino, showing San Gimignano’s population gathered under the saint’s mantle, where they are safe from a shower of arrows sent from heaven and symbolizing divine anger.61 In 1457, the priors of Florence ordered the guild captains to make an offering at Sebastian’s altar at the church of the Santissima Annunziata to keep the plague at bay.62 Similarly, in 1476 the Sienese government decided, in light of the fear of plague and famine, that funds collected for their annual palio should instead be spent on a silver statue of Sebastian.63 This statue served to petition Sebastian’s protection, as well as to reserve in the form of the precious metal some public funds that could be used in case of emergency.

PACIFYING DIVINE IRE

Sebastian’s cult offered to late fourteenth-century Florence more than a banner of faith under which they could gather as a community during the repeated onslaughts of pestilence. Amidst the flowering of the flagellant movement fueled by the terror of the Black Death, Sebastian’s cult also helped to counter the heterodox perception that justification before God could be achieved through individual penitence without the mediation of the priesthood.64

This erroneous and antiauthoritarian stance had earned the flagellant bands that invaded Avignon in 1349 Clement VI’s harsh condemnation.65 Before long, autonomous lay penitential movements had given way in Italy to so-called disciplinati confraternities, an orthodox and socially advantageous alternative.66 No doubt, images of Sebastian’s martyrdom fostered the religious values of these disciplinati confraternities, particularly in cases where images of Sebastian’s elevated, wounded, and bleeding body evoke the Crucifixion or the Flagellation of Christ (as in Agnolo Gaddi’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian at Sant’Ambrogio in Florence).67 Such images of Christlike suffering could be seen as endorsements of penitential practices. At the same time, they discouraged the individual from viewing his body as an autonomous instrument of conversion and salvation by demonstrating to the flagellant that he or she was not in a closed, reciprocal relationship with Christ, but part of a larger Christian hierarchy, in which the suffering saint occupied an [107]intermediary position between the flagellant community and the perfection of Christ. Upon seeing themselves in relation to Sebastian’s place in this heavenly hierarchy, the flagellant community may have believed Sebastian’s suffering could supplement their penitential practices, the intensity of which diminished in the fourteenth though fifteenth centuries.68

Particularly relevant to the outlook of the disciplinati are images that represent Sebastian’s endurance of the arrows while indicating his position within the larger Christian scheme of salvation. Outstanding in this respect is Benozzo Gozzoli’s 1466 ex-voto image of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian at the Collegiata in San Gimignano (fig. 4.4), a work that, seen within its pictorial context, links up with an encyclopedic vision of salvation.69 For this commission, Gozzoli depicted Sebastian’s arrow-pierced body receiving a blessing from Christ above as Mary prays at Christ’s side. A continuation of the theological scheme can be seen outside Gozzoli’s image in the preexisting Last Judgment fresco program created by Taddeo di Bartolo in 1410 to 1415, depicting the hierarchies of heaven surmounted by Christ in judgment above, and paradise and hell on the flanking walls; attached to the wall on either side of Gozzoli’s fresco are Jacopo della Quercia’s circa 1421 to 1426 polychrome wood statues of the archangel Gabriel and the annunciate Virgin. Similar in their purpose are the prevalent pairings of Sebastian’s martyrdom scene with an image of the Annunciation to the Virgin or the resurrected Christ. Examples include Giovanni del Biondo’s above-mentioned 1374 Saint Sebastian Triptych; the Master of Staffolo’s 1449 Misericordia Standard for Fabriano (now at Palazzo Venezia in Rome); Giovanni Bellini’s circa 1468 Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece at Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice; the altar wall decoration in the Vaselli chapel at San Petronio in Bologna, dating from circa 1487–97; and Titian’s 1522 Resurrection Polyptych at Santi Nazaro e Celso in Brescia (fig. 4.5). Associated with such emblems of salvation, Sebastian’s extraordinary suffering opened a conduit for penitents seeking Mary’s and Christ’s power over sin and death.

Also relevant to the outlook of the disciplinati and the orthodox channeling of flagellant piety are the nearly life-size wooden statues of a naked, arrow-ridden Sebastian (fig. 4.6). These light and durable statues, whose popularity peaked in the early sixteenth century, must have figured prominently in public processions where they expressed the community’s penitential fervor by means of Sebastian’s patent suffering. Insight into the surrogate function of these Sebastian statues is offered by the ritual pilgrimage of the nuri (nudes) practiced for centuries in Melilli (Sicily). This annual ceremony originated after a nude statue of Sebastian washed ashore in 1411 and cured a leper. On the eve of the feast commemorating the [109]statue’s miraculous arrival, men of the region would leave their homes barefoot and naked except for a red sash, convening by morning at Sebastian’s sanctuary to make their offerings of flowers.70 Liliane Dufour has theorized that the participants’ nudity referred to the degradation endured by Sebastian as well as to the penitential nudity of the older flagellant confraternities that had probably given origin to Melilli’s pilgrimage ritual.71 Clearly nudity was central to the ritual’s meaning; by establishing a close analogy between the living bodies of the male participants and the emblematic body of the nude martyr, it seems to have facilitated a kind of symbolic transference that [111]“animated” the suffering Sebastian statue and enabled it to function as a surrogate for the participants.

The use of the wooden statues of Sebastian as penitential surrogates for the living bodies of a community provides a critical context for understanding Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (fig. 4.7). Completed in 1475, this panel was originally located in the Pucci chapel, an oratory attached to the Santissima Annunziata as well as the location of Florence’s second relic of Saint Sebastian, probably obtained shortly before 1451.72 With this altarpiece, the Pollaiuolo brothers sought as much as possible to render Sebastian the equivalent of a living body. They enhanced the illusionism of Sebastian’s three-dimensionality by disposing the archers around him in a circle; they modeled his appearance on the prominent Florentine youth Gino di Lodovico Capponi (1453–78); and they depicted his body with careful attention to anatomical verism (Vasari had admired especially their rendition of the swelling of the veins and muscles in the archer who bends over to adjust his weapon).73 The youth of this Sebastian was by now a common feature of the saint’s iconographic typology.74 Nevertheless, it also complemented the penitential interpretation of the image, recalling the participation of children and adolescents in penitential causes such as the processions led by itinerant preacher Roberto da Lecce during the plague of 1448.75

Pietro Perugino’s circa 1490 painting of Saint Sebastian (fig. 4.8) also pertains to the penitential dimension of Sebastian’s cult. However, whereas the Pollaiuolo brothers had explored the anecdotal aspects of Sebastian’s martyrdom, Perugino focused on its anagogical significance. By eliminating the archers from the scene and inclining the arrows stuck in Sebastian’s flesh so that they appear to have been launched from on high, Perugino had recast Sebastian’s arrows as emblems of divine ire.76 Indeed, Perugino’s [114]conception shares more in common with an emblematic image such as Benozzo Gozzoli’s 1464 Saint Sebastian at Sant’Agostino than it does with Pollaiuolo’s naturalistic and anecdotal representation in the altarpiece for the Pucci chapel. Making clear the expiatory purpose of Sebastian’s passion, Perugino inscribed along the painting’s base a line of a penitential psalm sung by King David to the Lord, here intoned by Sebastian with a heaven-bent head: “sagittae tuae infixi sunt michi” (Thine arrows stick fast in me. Psalm 38 [AV]). In the background, a paradisaical landscape free of all human traces suggests that Sebastian’s suffering pertains more to the history of salvation than to the history of men. This lovely prospect also affords the viewer a subtle note of pleasure, as if to anticipate the joyful reconciliation that is the goal of penitence.

SEBASTIAN’S BEAUTY

Like the landscape, the perfection of Sebastian’s form in Perugino’s work is also pleasant to look upon. Indeed, Perugino has clearly studied the heroic proportions of antique statuary and other artworks to achieve an abstracted ideal of beauty in contrast to the naturalism of the Pollaiuolo brothers’ Sebastian. This point leads one to consider the frequently made observation that Sebastian’s imagery in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century emphasizes his beauty.77 Mostly this is a result of general tendencies in Renaissance culture; however, there are some additional factors with particular relevance to Sebastian’s cult. One of these is the above-mentioned use of Sebastian’s image in association with penitential rituals to pacify divine anger. Since it was a widely accepted principle that the more precious the offering, the more God would be placated, the attractiveness of Sebastian’s imagery may have been regarded as a factor in attaining divine mercy. This seems to explain, for example, why the priors of San Gimignano vowed during the plague of 1464 to commission an image of Sebastian “as best, as fitting, and as beautiful as possible.”78

Janet Cox-Rearick has shown that the proliferation of beautiful Sebastians was also linked to the suitability of his nude body for demonstrations of artistic excellence, which in the Renaissance was equated with the graceful and expressive depiction of the human body, informed by the study of anatomy and ancient art.79 The tendency of artists to use Sebastian’s image as a platform for their skill explains why Giorgio Vasari praises so many different representations of this saint in his Vite.80 In the case of one of these, [115]Fra Bartolomeo’s 1514 Saint Sebastian, it would appear that the primary rationale for the image was the artist’s desire to vaunt his skill in depicting nudes. According to Vasari, other artists had often teased Fra Bartolomeo because of his inability to paint the nude figure. But after a trip to Rome to study nudes in both ancient and modern art,

he returned and at that point decided to prove himself, demonstrating with his labors that he was highly skilled in every aspect of that art [of painting], and as good as anyone else. To demonstrate this, he made a picture of Saint Sebastian, nude, painted to resemble living flesh, with a sweet appearance, and executed with a beauty that matched the beauty of the figure, and it won infinite praise from the other artists.81

A number of artists took such pride in their creations that they went so far as to seal Sebastian’s figure with their own identity. Andrea Mantegna prominently signed his 1459 Saint Sebastian (now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) in ancient Greek. Around 1495, Perugino inscribed his name on an arrow piercing the saint’s neck in his Saint Sebastian (fig. 4.9). Titian, in 1522, signed his above-mentioned Resurrection Polyptych on the marble column below Sebastian’s foot, metaphorically designating his painterly triumph over sculpture—in particular, his triumph over Michelangelo’s Rebellious Slave and Dying Slave (circa 1513–16), which served as models for Titian’s hulky, middle-aged Sebastian.82 A similar artistic paragone centered on Sebastian’s figure occurs in Veronese’s portrait of the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria (circa 1570, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Veronese painted Vittoria with a statuette of the work he was proudest of: his marble Saint Sebastian, made in 1561/62 for the church of San Francesco della Vigna, and based on Michelangelo’s Dying Slave.

With artists striving to endow Sebastian’s nude figure with both beauty and animate vitality, it was perhaps inevitable that some of their works would have an erotic impact on viewers. Vasari noted one such instance in his account of Fra Bartolomeo’s Saint Sebastian: apparently, its beauty and “lascivious” nudity had induced impure thoughts in some of San Marco’s female parishioners.83 Despite this, looking at and delighting in Sebastian’s [117]beauty was not discouraged—at least not yet. Leonardo Tassi’s nude wood sculpture of Sebastian in the Florentine church of Sant’Ambrogio remained on display long after Fra Bartolomeo’s disruptive work was removed from public sight around 1520. Andrea del Sarto’s circa 1527/28 Gambassi Altarpiece, with a mostly nude Sebastian as well as a barebacked Saint John the Baptist and a less appealing nude Saint Onofrius, was commissioned for a church belonging to Benedictine nuns.84 Moreover, for viewers who hesitated to look at Sebastian, there were saintly models to encourage them in this practice: in Perugino’s Saint Irene and Saint Sebastian panel (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble), Saint Irene fixes her eyes on Sebastian’s athletic build, while in Perugino’s 1493 Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (fig. 4.10), the Virgin Mary looks lovingly upon Sebastian’s torso. Evidently, these beautiful Sebastians were designed to enamor viewers in heaven and on earth.

By the close of the Council of Trent, artworks with a potential to inspire eros were often systematically removed from churches.85 The theme of agape, meanwhile, had become ever more explicit in church art. In 1606 through 1608, the Pucci chapel at the Santissima Annunziata was redecorated and emblematic figures representing Sebastian’s virtues were painted in the oratory’s four lunettes. One of these represents Sebastian’s love for Christ, and shows a man with a stag beside the inscription “Ita anima mea ad te deus,” referring to the first line of Psalm 42 (AV): “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, My God.”86 Of Florentine origins, Maffeo Barberini, the future Urban VIII, employed this same passage a few years later as the final conceit in his “In Imaginis Sancti Sebastiani,” a poem describing a painting of Sebastian transfixed with arrows and near death, praying to be near to his Lord.87 While these examples of the agape theme in Sebastian’s cult certainly reflect the goals of the Counter-Reformation, already in early sixteenth century the agape theme had been represented explicitly in Sebastian’s imagery. Bernardino Luini’s circa 1526–28 Saint Sebastian shows the saint as a brown-bearded, fully matured man of rather pedestrian features who stoically endures his martyrdom. He reveals the meaning of his agony by pointing to a sign that reads, “Quam [119]libens ob tui amorem dulces iaculos [p]atiar memento” (Remember how willingly I will suffer these sweet arrows on account of your love).88

PAINTED CURES AND PAINTED POISONS

One striking detail of Luini’s Saint Sebastian is the large yellow citron on a branch of the tree to which he is tied. In the Renaissance, citrons and lemons were highly prized pharmaceutical ingredients. Pietro Mattioli’s Discorsi, first published in 1544, recommends citron extract because it “calms the choleric humor and preserves [the body] against plague, and thus in the case of pestilential fevers, modern doctors use it in syrup form with great benefit.” Lemon extract, similarly, cures “the heat of cholera, pestilential fevers, and contagious fevers.”89 The juxtaposition of the citron with Saint Sebastian must have provoked contemporary viewers to compare the citron’s medicinal efficacy against plague with Sebastian’s spiritual power over the disease, or to compare the fruit’s medicinal suppression of the choleric humor with Sebastian’s pacification of divine ire.

Religious imagery of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century is rife with such allusions to medicinal substances, and images of Sebastian are no exception.90 Perugino’s circa 1489/90 Saint Sebastian (now in the National Museum of Stockholm) places the saint amidst a veritable garden of medicinal simples, including the iris, whose root was considered a universal antidote to poison, and the lily, whose root was used to heal wounds, lower fevers, and cure skin diseases.91 Bacchiacca’s circa 1550 Saint Sebastian also pairs the saint with the iris (fig. 4.11). But the most compelling image of this type is the right wing of Albrecht Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece (fig. 4.12), commissioned by Frederick the Wise in about 1503.92 In this work, Sebastian clasps his hands in prayer while looking towards the Madonna in the central panel of the altarpiece; his arrows are missing from his body—as is their association with divine anger. On the shelf in front of the saint, there are various objects, all with medicinal applications: an herb probably to be identified with betony (the wonder drug celebrated by Caesar Augustus’s doctor); the liquid in which it stands, either the water or white wine in which betony was decocted; a slice of the apple that was frequently combined [122]with betony in medicinal recipes; and a bulbous plant root of some kind, perhaps the groundnut (Apios) whose purgative effect was noted by Mattioli and Dioscorides.93

What might have been the rationale for depicting medicinal simples alongside Saint Sebastian in religious imagery? In cases where pictures of this kind were displayed at hospital churches, they would have reflected the ecclesiastical role in the production and distribution of plant-based medicines to patients who could not afford the cures of the private physician.94 The placement of herbal medicine under the auspices of Saint Sebastian in these images may have enhanced patients’ confidence in these remedies; it may have also reminded physicians employed by the hospitals that the practice of charitable medicine differed in motives, goals, and means with respect to private practice among the wealthy. Speaking more generally, however, the prominence of medicinal simples in depictions of Saint Sebastian indicates the image’s implicit consonance with both secular and religious explanations of illness.

This last point is particularly significant in light of the fact some images of Sebastian, when examined from the perspective of secular medicine, would have actually constituted a danger to health, especially during plagues. The scene of a plague-ridden city littered with human cadavers in del Biondo’s altarpiece, for example, stands in contradiction to Tommaso del Garbo’s warning issued during the plague of 1348 “not to think of death, or of anyone’s suffering, or of things that might make you sad or pain you, but instead let your thoughts be of delightful and pleasant things.”95 For Renaissance physicians and many of their patients, it was a prevailing belief that thoughts of plague and death could have disastrous consequences for a person’s health.96 From their point of view, pictures [123]whose morbid or terrifying imagery was designed to make viewers think of their own death, such as the above-mentioned Saint Vincent Ferrer Altarpiece by Ghirlandaio and the Saint Sebastian by Mantegna at the Ca’ d’Oro, would have been extremely dangerous objects.

THERAPEUTIC BEAUTY

In contrast to these horrific memento mori images of Sebastian are those that not only take into account both secular and religious explanations of illness, but also seem to follow medical prescriptions for sustaining health through the moderate happiness induced by specific viewing practices. Dating back at least to the composition of the Regimen sanitatis, these theories can be found in the plague treatise of Tommaso del Garbo, who recommended that to stay healthy during plagues “one of the best things in such times is to seek happiness with sound measure.”97 The activities that del Garbo indicated for this purpose—including spending time in gardens with fragrant herbs, looking at precious substances such as gold, silver, and gemstones, looking at things made of these precious substances, and wearing these same precious substances—provided pleasure through the senses, as pointed out in the analysis of this text by Francisco Javier Santa Eugenia.98 The conventionality of del Garbo’s advice is demonstrated by the fact that, more than a century later, Marsilio Ficino recommended nearly the same sensual pleasures for staying healthy (including looking at green plants, the color green, gold, coral, and gemstones; wearing silk; and smelling spicy aromas), noting that “the greater pleasure you gain daily in smelling, hearing, and seeing, … the longer you extend the thread of life.”99 Although del Garbo did not mention looking at paintings or sculptures as a source of this salutary pleasure, artworks could be considered “things made of precious substances” because of the composition of their mineral-based pigments and the gold, silver, and gemstones sometimes used to decorate them. Moreover, the painter’s art permitted the imitation of all these things, so as to create an equally pleasant impression on the senses through the illusion of them.100

[124]A work that conforms perfectly with del Garbo’s and Ficino’s medical advice for attaining salutary happiness through beautiful substances is the circa 1475–80 Saint Sebastian Tabernacle (fig. 4.13). This multimedia altarpiece comprises Bernardino Rossellino’s marble statue of Saint Sebastian (noted for its beauty by Vasari), a predella painted by Francesco Botticini with scenes from Sebastian’s life, and, flanking the statue, two large side panels painted by Botticini with adoring angels and the donors’ portraits, all set within a framework sumptuously decorated with gilded architectural ornaments. While the altarpiece’s resplendent gilded framework enables viewers to look upon gold, Botticini’s side panels cheer viewers with the pleasant things it represents: these sweet, graceful angels are dressed in gowns with golden embroidery; their green silk sleeves are studded with gemstones and pearls; they wear crowns of fragrant roses; and they stand in a verdant, flowering meadow. Rossellino’s marble statue of Sebastian in the center of the altarpiece, because of its pleasing form, may also have been among the things in this altarpiece that fortified the viewer’s health through means of moderate pleasure.

Many Renaissance images of Sebastian, in fact, may have been regarded as a form of visual medicine when the beauty of the saint’s form was sufficient to afford viewers with sensual gratification. This seems to apply above all when the saint’s visible perfection is accompanied by a mitigation of the wounding arrows’ frightening effect, as with Dürer’s Dresden Altarpiece and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio’s circa 1500 Casio Altarpiece (fig. 4.14), where Sebastian’s radiant flesh is blemished by only a few minuscule wounds, or as with Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child between Saints Peter and Sebastian (now in the Louvre), where Sebastian’s flesh is immaculate and unbroken. Images that portray Sebastian’s corporal beauty without violent or painful associations perhaps ought to be compared to the “perfect substances,” including precious gemstones, gold, bezoars, and the famous philosopher’s stone. These “perfect substances,” which were employed in the costly medicines that were the privilege of the wealthy, cured and protected the patient by disseminating their own tempering, rejuvenating, and fortifying force within the patient’s body to instigate a kind of “beneficial contagion.”101 Some Renaissance viewers may very well have expected analogous salutary effects from looking upon the pleasing form and perfect, harmonious proportions of the beautiful Sebastians.

This link between visible beauty and physical health would have been appreciated above all by the elite readership of Ficino’s De vita triplici (Three Books on Life). In this treatise, Ficino called vision “the principal part of the animal spirit” and he judged visual experience to be an integral [126]component of an individual’s life force, implying that the things we look at have an impact on our health.102 Looking at perfect things (temperata) was said to impart an exhilarating and rejuvenating effect upon the animal spirit and bring it into harmony with the supreme perfection of the macrocosmic heavenly order. In this same context, Ficino asserted that “nothing on earth, aside perhaps from gold, is more perfect than the human body.”103 Quite plausibly, then, Ficino’s readership would have regarded [127]beautiful images of Sebastian not only as sources of moderate, healthy pleasure, but also as visible expressions of the perfection of the human body, with the power to harmonize the viewer’s vital spirit with the heavenly order. Certainly, no saint was more easily associated with the human body than Sebastian, whether due to the frequent nudity of his images, the prevalence of three-dimensional statues of the saint, or the fact that the arrow wounds he often displays draw attention to his physiological dimension.

This essay has explored the wide range of functions that Sebastian’s cult and imagery served in its first millennium, with particular attention to the history of Sebastian’s body: it has been considered a relic of a Christian martyr, a symbol of a geopolitical body, a reminder of mortality, a suffering scapegoat for ritual transference, a platform for artistic skill, and a vision of beauty with therapeutic benefits for the viewer. No doubt, for most Renaissance audiences, Sebastian was what modern historians call a plague saint. However, this designation is only the initial step of a full investigation of Sebastian’s cultic function and the reception of his ever-changing image, especially in light of the interplay between secular and religious perspectives on human bodies and their diseases.

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1 Gordini, “Sebastiano, santo, martire di Roma,” 11:776, 784. The Ecclesia Apostolorum was later renamed after Sebastian.

2 “De S. Sebastiano Mart. Romanae Eccl. Defensore,” in Acta Sanctorum, January; and Pesci, “Il culto di San Sebastiano,” 180–82; and Ferrau, La Basilica e la Catacomba di S. Sebastiano, 33.

3 Pesci, “Il culto di San Sebastiano,” 191–94; and Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 367.

4 Deichmann, Geschichte und Monumente, vol. 1, Ravenna, 176–200.

5 The exception in this mosaic is Saint Martin of Tours, to whom the church is dedicated; he leads the procession and is distinguished by his dark cloak (his hagiological attribute).

6 On the relationship between Rome and the Byzantine Empire, see Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages, 141–72.

7 Paulus Diaconus [Paul the Deacon], Historia Langobardorum, vol. 9, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum. A reliable modern translation into Italian is in Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 406. Paul the Deacon’s account repeats a description in the Liber Pontificalis of a Roman plague that occurred in 680. To this, Paul adds an account of the same plague’s effects in Pavia. A good angel and a bad angel went through the streets of Pavia at night announcing the number of victims that would fall dead in each house the next morning. During this time, a man announced that the plague would end upon the building of an altar to Sebastian in the Pavian church of San Pietro in Vincoli; the plague ended when Sebastian’s relics were brought from Rome to Pavia. See Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 346.

8 On the Pavian church of San Pietro in Vincoli and its relic, see Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 408–21.

9 See, for example, Gordini, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 786–89. Until now, this assertion has not been questioned.

10 Brown, Cult of the Saints.

11 Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 393, 414–19. They note Jacobus de Voragine’s role in obscuring this meaning, “with the loss of the original emphasis on the bond between the two centers of power, one religious and one civil” (author’s translation).

12 Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 393. See also Davies, Emergence of Western Society, 81.

13 According to the passio, Sebastian was born in Narbonne, Gaul, and raised in Milan, but Saint Ambrose claimed he was born in Milan. See Gordini, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 776–77.

14 Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 393.

15 This image is probably based on the Dalmatian soldier saints in the mosaics (ca. 640–42) in the oratory of San Venanzio at San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome; Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 390.

16 On Apollo as a plague deity in Rome, see Gagé, Apollon romain.

17 The “romantic-evolutionary” general theory is dismantled by Peter Brown (Cult of the Saints, 1–22). With regard to Sebastian, it is disputed by Hippolyte Delehaye (Étude sur le légendier romain, 70), Gian Domenico Gordini (“Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 787), and Louise Marshall (“Reading the Body of a Plague Saint,” 240). Marshall traces the theory to Henry Sigerist (“Sebastian-Apollo”), but its origins are yet much earlier, for Franco Mormando (“Response to the Plague in Early Modern Italy,” 31) has discovered a seventeenth-century proponent of the Apollo-Sebastian theory.

18 On the political symbolism that determined the transfer of relics in the Carolingian and Ottonian periods, see Oberste, “Heilige und ihre Reliquien,” 73–75.

19 Shortly after this, some of the Sebastian relics at Saint-Médard were given to Saint-Victoire in Paris; Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 381.

20 Davies, Emergence of Western Society, 73, 144, 145

21 Gordini, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 785. Leo IV (847–55) transferred the skull reliquary to the church of Santi Quattro Coronati. Onorius III returned the relics from the Vatican to the Appian basilica in 1218.

22 Gigli, S. Sebastiano al Palatino, 67; and Krautheimer, Rome, 167.

23 On similar earlier narrative cycles, see Jessop, “Pictorial Cycles of Non-Biblical Saints.”

24 In the thirteenth century, an image of a bearded Saint Sebastian with arrows in his clothed body was made for the Roman church of San Giorgio in Velabro, and a similar one was made for the crypt of the basilica of San Sebastiano; Zupnick, “Saint Sebastian in Art,” 10, 14; and Cannata, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 790–95.

25 Ressouni-Demigneux, Saint-Sébastien, 17.

26 Giammaria, Un universo di simboli, 41.

27 In part, the inscription reads, “Sustinet affixas domino servante sagittas” (Serving the Lord, he bears the lodged arrows).

28 On the fresco, see Carrara and Mannini, Lo Spedale della Misericordia, 135.

29 Boureau, La légende dorée, 21–25.

30 If Sebastian’s cult had by this time attained fame as a plague saint, surely there would have been more notices of his intervention against epidemics than just this one in Paul the Deacon’s account.

31 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 2:367.

32 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 1:101.

33 Opicino de Canistris’s 1330 chronicle of Pavia is cited in Webb, Patrons and Defenders, 201.

34 On the related issue of bread and nourishment in Saint Roch’s imagery, see Worcester, “Saint Roch vs. Plague,” 154, 158–59. Healing breads have been traditionally distributed at the shrine of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino at the Basilica of Tolentino, commemorating the saint’s recovery from sickness after the Virgin Mary appeared to him in a vision and instructed him to eat such breads.

35 In the Liber Pontificalis, mention of an eclipse immediately precedes the notice of Rome’s epidemic; Paul the Deacon included the note of the eclipse in his own account of the epidemic, which in turn was consulted by Jacobus de Voragine. See Bartolozzi Casti and Mazzilli Savini, “Il culto parallelo,” 346.

36 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, trans. Ryan, 1:101.

37 Author’s translation. Filippo Villani, Le vite d’uomini illustri fiorentini, cited in Santa Eugenia, “Contre la mort,” 354.

38 Mazzi, “La peste e l’assistenza,” 37–38. Clerics, too, adopted the physician’s point of view on the plague; see the clinical description of plague symptoms by a monk in Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 375.

39 Battaglia Ricci, Ragionare nel giardino, 96–97.

40 Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 379–80.

41 Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 375–77.

42 Minerbetti, Relazione delle sante reliquie, 60; cf. Cardini, “Una nuova fonte,” 381. Dell’Antella may have obtained the arrow during a hypothetical pilgrimage to Rome during the Jubilee year 1350.

43 Petrarch was attacking the physicians, but not learned medicine itself; see Park, Doctors and Medicine , 221–22.

44 On the church’s critique of medicine during plagues, see Gianni, “Per una storia letteraria della peste,” 83–84. On learned medicine in the medieval church, see Amundsen, Medicine, Society, and Faith, 196–216; and Palmer, “The Church, Leprosy and Plague,” 79–99. For the later period, see Palmer, "Medicine at the Papal Court,” 49–78.

45 Franco Sacchetti’s statement in his Trecentonovelle that “il vescovo dell’Antella di Firenze [ha] fatto dipingere l’altare di santo Bastiano nella maggior chiesa” (Bishop dell’Antella of Florence had the Saint Sebastian altar at the main church painted) was first noticed by Detlev von Hadeln (Die wichtigsten Darstellungsformen, 8–9).

46 Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus, 162.

47 Cohn, Cult of Remembrance.

48 On this work’s authorship, see Milantoni, “S. Vincenzo Ferrer,” 50–53.

49 Lunghi, Il “Martirio di San Sebastiano,” 135–38.

50 Other saints would also be linked with specific diseases. Roch was identified with bubonic plague since the 1420s; Worcester, “Saint Roch vs. Plague,” 156. In Pistoia in 1479, Saint Blaise was associated with the cure of sore throats and Saint Sigismund with the cure of fever; Webb, Patrons and Defenders, 110.

51 Henderson, “‘Splendide case di cura,’” 40.

52 John of Rupescissa’s recipe for the gold-based quintessence employed gold coins but did not damage them; thus, the coins could be borrowed and then returned to owner almost intact, resulting in a low-cost alternative to other quintessences; Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies,” 16. On the Gesuati, who became a clerical order in 1611, see Bensi, “Gli arnesi dell’arte,” 33–34; Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies,” 22; and Vasari, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti, 534–35.

53 Park, Doctors and Medicine, 212.

54 García-Ballester, Medicine in a Multicultural Society, 120.

55 For example, Cardone de Spanzotis’s 1360 Preservatione a pestilentia describes how to protect the city of Milan from plague. It recognizes human-to-human contagion and advocates fumigation of goods brought into the city; Patetta, “Nuove ipotesi,” 25.

56 Henderson, “‘Splendide case di cura,’” 39–40; and Park, Doctors and Medicine, 94.

57 Park, Doctors and Medicine, 103

58 See Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 213; and Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 222–23. Wright and Trexler believe that Sebastian’s cult represented the “antiplebian” faction of Florence; however, the cult seems to have appealed to far more of the population than just the privileged families that promoted it in this instance.

59 del Migliore, Firenze città nobilissima illustrata, 24.

60 On Parma and San Gimignano, see Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 39, 50. Ahl suggests that Giovanni del Biondo’s altarpiece may have been a communal commission. On Assisi and Foligno, Lunghi (Il "Martirio di San Sebastiano," 132–33) states that the plague of 1447 to 1450 “brought about a kind of civic cult directed towards Saint Sebastian” (author’s translation).

61 Ahl (“Due San Sebastiano,” 42) compares the iconography of Gozzoli’s fresco to the Madonna della Misericordia type. Also relevant is Bicci di Lorenzo’s 1445 Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Protecting Empoli from the Plague, a gold-ground panel at Santo Stefano in Empoli that shows the saint using his hand to protect the city from the arrows Christ is shooting at it.

62 Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 32.

63 Webb, Patrons and Defenders, 211, 289.

64 For the Italian plagues of 1381 to 1389 and 1399 to 1400, see Corradi, Annali delle epidemie, 525–32, 536–41.

65 Henderson, “The Flagellant Movement,” 147–49.

66 Henderson, “The Flagellant Movement,” 147–60; and Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399, 165–69.

67 On the resemblance of Sebastian’s imagery to flagellation scenes, see Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 47–48.

68 Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 206–7.

69 Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 48–49.

70 The ritual was codified by 1588; Dufour, Il Santuario di San Sebastiano, 3–5, 22.

71 Dufour, Il Santuario di San Sebastiano, 22–23.

72 Construction of this oratory began in 1452. On the Sebastian cult at the Santissima Annunziata, see O’Brien, “The Compagnia di San Sebastiano.” On the altarpiece’s commission, see Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, 197–98. On a possible Eucharistic symbolism in the altarpiece, see Marshall, “Reading the Body,” 254–56.

73 Vasari, Le vite, 489

74 One of the earliest painted images of Sebastian as a youth is in Piero della Francesca’s circa 1445 to 1448 Polyptych of the Misericordia in Sansepolcro; however, sculpted images of Sebastian as a youth may predate painted ones. On the rejuvenation of Sebastian in art, see Cannata, “Sebastiano, santo, martire,” 789–801; Marshall, “Reading the Body,” 247; and Schütze, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” 76.

75 Trexler, Public Life, 368–87, 474–82; Corradi, Annali delle epidemie, 583–84; and Infessura, Diario della città, ed. Tommasini, 47–48. According to Infessura, when the friar reached Rome, a throng of “nude young men flagellated themselves while walking from the church of the Aracoeli all the way to Santa Maria Maggiore, continually crying for mercy because of the great plague at that time” (author’s translation).

76 In Perugino’s 1478 image of Sebastian in the fresco fragment at Santa Maria in Cerqueto, as well as his Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Sebastian (1493, Uffizi), the arrows seem to have been shot into Sebastian’s body from above; neither picture includes archers. In contrast, in Perugino’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in Panicale, the arrows are lodged in the saint at an angle that indicates they were launched by the archers depicted below him.

77 On Sebastian’s beauty, see Freedman, “Saint Sebastian in Veneto Painting,” 9–10; Schütze, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” 76; and Marshall, “Reading the Body,” 247.

78 Ahl, “Due San Sebastiano,” 39 (author’s translation). The image they commissioned was Gozzoli’s fresco of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian at the Collegiata.

79 See Cox-Rearick, “Fra Bartolomeo’s ‘St. Mark Evangelist,’” 344. On this topic in general, see Freedman, “Saint Sebastian in Veneto Painting,” 5–20.

80 Bernardo Rossellino’s Sebastian is “regarded as a very beautiful work”; Pollaiuolo’s is “the most highly praised work he ever made”; Perugino’s is “most highly praised”; Andrea del Sarto’s “shows its back, which appears to all who see it as being not painted, but completely alive”; Sodoma’s is “truly beautiful and very praiseworthy”; Titian’s is “studied after life and free of artifice … the whole figure seems to be taken from life, such is its carnal and natural appearance, but even so it is considered beautiful.” Vasari, Le vite, 438, 489, 534, 708, 1061, 1289 (author’s translation).

81 Vasari, Le vite, 593 (author’s translation).

82 On Titian’s Sebastian as a paragone of sculpture, see Rosand, “Titian’s Saint Sebastians.”

83 Cox-Rearick (“Fra Bartolomeo’s ‘St. Mark Evangelist,’” 351) believes Vasari’s story to be false. Yet even if the story is apocryphal, it nevertheless indicates that Vasari’s society had reservations about potential reactions to Sebastian’s nudity. On the erotic and the homoerotic appeal of Sebastian’s imagery, see Spear, The ‘Divine’ Guido, 69–76; and Bohde, “Ein Heiliger der Sodomiten?”

84 Natali and Cecchi, Andrea del Sarto, 112.

85 On this issue in relation to images of Sebastian, see Brown, “Between the Sacred and the Profane,” 282–90; see also Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 32.

86 According to the program for the chapel, the figure represents “Desiderio di stare sempre unito con il Signore Iddio” (Desire to be united eternally with the Lord God); Fabbri, “La sistemazione seicentesca," 98.

87 Written during Urban VIII’s cardinalate (1606-23), the poem was published in his Maphaei S.R.E. Card. Barberini, 184. On the poem and Sebastian’s cult in Rome, see Barker, “Art in a Time of Danger,” 60–65, 70–78, 113–14, 253–83; Schütze, “Urbano VIII,” 91; and Schütze, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” 80.

88 The author thanks Alessio Assonitis for this translation. It seems that a restorer has changed the p to a d in the word that should read as “patior.” Bohde (“Ein Heiliger der Sodomiten,” 85–98) interprets this inscription as a reference to earthly love—specifically of a homoerotic nature.

89 Mattioli, I discorsi, 1:269.

90 In addition to the works discussed here, other examples include the circa 1487 Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Master of the Augustinian Altar in the Germanisches National Museum in Nuremburg and the frescoed floral decoration by Veronese and his assistants on the walls beneath Veronese’s 1558 Saint Sebastian frescoes in the church of San Sebastiano in Venice.

91 Mattioli, I discorsi, 1:21, 3:872.

92 On the work’s patronage and dating, see Anzelewsky, Albrecht, 1:140–41. Elisabeth Hipp has kindly pointed out to the author that arrows do nevertheless appear in the picture: a bundle of them is held by a small angel, probably serving to identify the saint.

93 Mattioli, I discorsi, 4:993–96, 1335–36. An early example of betony’s use in a plague remedy is in Tommaso del Garbo (Consiglio contro a pistolenza, 45–47), where it is one of the primary ingredients of certain pills that “maravigliosamente conservan il corpo dell’uomo del tempo di pistolenza da febri e da ogni infermità di quore” (marvellously protect the human body in time of plague from fevers and every malady of the heart). The author is indebted to Dr. Alain Touwaide of the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, for his generous assistance in identifying the plant in Dürer’s work. This identification should be considered probable, not definitive.

94 Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies,” 10–12. By the fourteenth century, plants and herbals remedies are associated with the medicine of the poorer classes; the wealthy used expensive ingredients of animal or mineral origins, imported spices, and powders. The inscription of class and cultural divisions within these two different systems of medicine in the late Middle Ages is studied in Park, Doctors and Medicine, 36. On this topic, see also Gentilcore, Healers and Healing.

95 del Garbo, Consiglio contro a pistolenza, 40 (author’s translation). Cf. Santa Eugenia, “Contre la mort,” 353.

96 See, for instance, Cohn, “Triumph over Plague,” 41. On this relationship between fear and disease in later centuries, see Gentilcore, “Fear of Disease,” 184–208; and Barker, “Poussin, Plague and Early Modern Medicine,” 660–63. Medical warnings about the dangers of fear, sadness, and worry were not easily reconcilable with the exhortations of the mendicant orders to dwell on and prepare for death. The Dominican preacher Savonarola, for instance, insisted that the physician’s advice to avoid thinking of death was the work of the devil: “Il diavolo quando savede che tu vuoi pensare alla morte va excitando altri per levarti da questo pensiero: & mette in fantasia alla moglie tua & alli tuoi parenti cosi al medico che ti dichino che tu guarirai presto & che tu non ti dia pensiero & che tu non creda per questo avere ad morire” (The devil, when he realizes that you want to think about death, goes about provoking others to distract you from these thoughts; he sets it in the mind of your wife and your relatives as well as the doctor that they should tell you that you will soon recover and that you should not worry and that you should not think that this (illness) means that you shall die). Savonarola, Predica dell’arte, fol. 12r.

97 del Garbo, Consiglio contro a pistolenza, 40 (author’s translation).

98 del Garbo, Consiglio contro a pistolenza, 40–41; and Santa Eugenia, “Contre la mort,” 355.

99 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 207, 211

100 Boccaccio’s Decameron provides a literary precedent for the use of a representational work of art to substitute for actual sensory experiences that lead to a salutary happiness. Glending Olson (Literature as Recreation, 182) calls the pleasant imagery of the book “not merely escapist but therapeutic.”

101 Crisciani and Pereira, “Black Death and Golden Remedies,” 29–31. This information is drawn from Thomas of Bologna’s late fourteenth-century description of the philospher’s stone.

102 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 207.

103 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 207.