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Saint Sebastian SAINT SEBASTIAN In his semi-autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima described his sexual awakening as a young boy when he came upon a reproduction of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, a painting by the late Renaissance artist Guido Reni. The event is transferred to the fictional narrator, but recalled the actual event that had proved so formative for Mishima. A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk of a tree. His crossed hands were raised high, and the thongs binding his wrists were tied to the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the only covering for the youth's nakedness was a coarse white cloth knotted loosely about his loins... Were it not for the arrows with their shafts deeply sunk into his left armpit and right side, he would seem more a Roman athlete resting from fatigue... The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh, and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy.' The boy's hands embarked on a motion of which he had no experience; he played with his 'toy': "Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication... Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings I looked around the desk I was facing... There were cloud-splashes about... Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. Fortunately, a reflex motion of my hand to protect the picture had saved the book from being soiled. The martyrdom of Saint Sebastian would prove to be a pivotal theme in Mishima’s life and art to which he would return time and time again. It formed the basis of Mishima’s philosophy, which saw the complex intermingling of beauty, death, and sexuality. In general, the martyrdom is also one of the great themes of Decadent art, and over the centuries, the beautiful St. Sebastian has become a central image of homosexual identity. THE LIFE OF THE SAINT According to legend, Sebastian was born to a wealthy family in third century Gaul, converting to Christianity as a young adult. The Acts of the Saints, which were attributed to St. Ambrose, but were probably written in the fifth century, are the main source for the legend of Sebastian. They were used as the basis for all the later accounts; and in particular, that of Jacques de Voragine who, around 1264, popularised the life of the saint in the Golden Legend. The Acts of the Saints tell how Sebastian became an officer in the imperial bodyguard of the emperor Diocletian, eventually becoming Captain of the Guard in the Imperial Roman Army. He was a favorite of Diocletian, though the emperor was unaware of Sebastian's faith. During the persecution of the Christians, Sebastian visited Christian prisoners in order to provide them supplies and solace; going so far to also convert the jailers and the Prefect of Rome. When Diocletian discovered Sebastian’s faith in 286 CE, he demanded that the young man renounce Christianity, but Sebastian refused. The emperor ordered that Sebastian be executed. He was tied to a tree, and Mauretanian archers shot him with arrows, which Voragine describes in detail in the Golden Legend: "Diocletian had him bound to the medium of a plain and ordered to the archers that one bored him with blows of arrows. He was covered so much with it, that he appeared to be like a hedgehog; when it was believed dead.” Miraculously, and no doubt to the supreme annoyance of Diocletian, Sebastian did not die from the arrows, and after his wounds had been healed by the widowed St. Irene, he returned to the emperor's palace. Here, he confronted Diocletian and denounced his persecution of the Christians. Diocletian ordered that Sebastian be clubbed to death and tossed into a sewer. This time the death was final, and his fellow Christians retrieved Sebastian’s corpse from the sewer, and buried him on the Appian Way. In 367, a basilica, one of the seven chief churches of Rome, was built over his grave. Scipio Cardinal Borghese completed the present church in 1611. The saint’s relics in part were taken in the year 826 to St. Medard at Soissons. The canonization of Sebastian was confirmed by two miracles credited to him. The first, somewhat bizarrely, involved a womyn who slept with her husband before a religious festival (the dedication of a church to Saint Sebastian) and was tormented by it at length. The second miracle was less sexually charged, and established the reputation of Saint Sebastian as a guardian against the plague. Towards 680, a terrible epidemic devastated the cities of Pavie and Rome. In each of the cities, the plague ceased when, following a vision, furnace bridges were set up in honour of Saint Sebastian in the Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens church of each city. Following his apotheosis, Sebastian became the patron saint of archers, soldiers, athletes, and sufferers of the plague; with two other celebrated instances of his intervention occurring in the plagues of Milan in 1575, and Lisbon in 1599. His feast day is 20 January. The story of Sebastian’s martyrdom, like so many other examples from early Christian history, is without any basis in fact, and instead drew upon archetypes current at the time, and the myths and symbols of Europe’s pagan past. In turn, the basic story of the martyrdom was itself elaborated on to produce a more complex myth than that of a loyal Christian. The most obvious of these developments was the transformation of the saint into a beautiful young boy. Evidence suggests that Sebastian was not originally seen in the youthful guise we see him in now, but was a rather more conventional male figure. The earliest mosaic picture of St. Sebastian, which probably belongs to the year 682 (the time of his initial rise to prominence as protector against plague), shows a grown, bearded man in court dress, with no traces of the arrows that would come to figure so prominently in his legend. Later, in the 13th century, the dominant way in which painters represented Sebastian was at the time of his initial, but ineffective, martyrdom at the hand of the archers. This narrative image supports a metaphor seen in two frescos painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in San Giminiano around 1464. In one, the saint undergoes his martyrdom, with the archers thoroughly piercing his body with arrows. In the other, Sebastian shelters a family under his cape, protecting them from a barrage of arrows launched by God and an army of angels. The pervading theme given to Sebastian’s martyrdom here is therefore a limpid one, with the body of the saint acting as a passive shield which deflected the arrows of the plague. This metaphorical use of the martyrdom of Sebastian was a starting point from which painters of subsequent centuries would explore with infinite variations and interpretations. At the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th, a hybrid depiction of St. Sebastian began to emerge. These images show the piercing of the saint without the context of the actual scene of the martyrdom. Some of the images use nudity as an additional attribute, going to the extent of showing the saint stripped even of his piercing arrows. This scarcely veiled celebration of the naked male form came under attack following the Counter-Reformation, where the queer reading of the myth was denounced as being incompatible with the meaning of the holy legend. "O Vanity of the man who makes vain what is true, clean and principal, to give place to fictions which do not weigh more than one wisp of straw... I see Étienne lapidated without stones... Sebastian without arrows... O vain vanity, error infinite." It was the art of the Renaissance that first portrayed Sebastian as a youth pierced by arrows. The image of Sebastian gave artists, so many of them queer, the opportunity to paint the male form, at a time when the nude female predominated in art; the numerous depictions of Venus being the best example of this. But far from being just a chance to paint the male nude, Sebastian provided the possibility of exploring an image that was profoundly sexual, and profoundly homoerotic, without ever needing to explain or justify it. It is impossible to look at the vast majority of paintings of Sebastian from the Renaissance onwards and not sense something more in the intent of the artist than a mere religious depiction. SEBASTIAN, THE PAGAN SAINT The process of canonisation within the early church was often nothing more than the adoption of pagan deities as thinly veiled historical personages, and this can be clearly seen in many of the aspects of St. Sebastian. Indeed, the adoration of the saint as a naked youth by queer and transgressive artists in itself suggests a profoundly pagan approach. One of the gods with whom Sebastian shared a remarkable similarity was Apollo; a comparison that was acknowledged even during the Renaissance. The transformation of Sebastian from the bearded figure of the early centuries into the handsome youth immediately suggests Apollo. The saint acquired the latter’s beauty and sunny fairness, and in so doing recalled the aesthetic codes of ancient Greece, where the god was represented like a very beautiful god, very large, remarkable especially by its long black loops with the bluish reflections, like the petals of the pansy. The physical beauty of the two was not, however, the only quality they shared, and we find both figures associated with arrows, and furthermore with arrows as a symbol of disease; carried by Apollo and endured by Sebastian.
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