Saint Sebastian

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint Sebastian, a Christian martyr of the 3rd century, is described in one old account as a man the archers shot at until he was "as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks". The image is so vivid that it has outlasted almost everything else about him.

  Very little is firmly known about the real man. What survives is a few early mentions, a long and dramatic legend, and an enormous body of paintings.

  This documentary asks how much of the story rests on evidence. It asks what actually happened once the archers walked away. And it asks how one figure came to be claimed by so many different people, from medieval villagers to modern painters and poets.

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• 2. The Secret Captain

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  The oldest surviving mention of Sebastian sits in the Chronograph of 354, a compilation of chronological and calendrical texts. It was produced by the calligrapher and illustrator Furius Dionysius Filocalus, and it lists Sebastian as a martyr honored on the 20th of January.

  Ambrose of Milan, a 4th-century bishop, supplies a second early witness in his commentary on Psalm 118, dated to 386-390 AD. Ambrose says Sebastian came from Milan and was already venerated there.

  The first full account of his life is the Passio Sancti Sebastiani. For a long time it was believed to be the work of Ambrose in the 4th century. Scholars now date it to the 5th century and credit an unknown author, possibly Arnobius the Younger. The 17th-century hagiographer Jean Bolland still attributed it to Ambrose in the Acta Sanctorum entry on Sebastian.

  In these later tellings, Sebastian was a man of Gallia Narbonensis who studied in Mediolanum, the Roman name for Milan. In 283 he joined the army in Rome under Emperor Carinus, hoping to help the martyrs. His courage earned him a place as a captain of the Praetorian Guards under Diocletian and Maximian, who never suspected he was a Christian.

  The legend then moves to a Roman prison. The twin brothers Marcus and Marcellianus, deacons from a distinguished family, had refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Both were married with children, and their parents, Tranquillinus and Martia, came to beg them to renounce their faith. Sebastian instead won the parents over.

  He also converted Tiburtius, the son of the local prefect Chromatius. An official named Nicostratus and his wife Zoe followed. Zoe is said to have been mute for six years, and her speech returned the moment she asked to become a Christian. Nicostratus then brought in the remaining prisoners, and in total 16 people were converted by Sebastian.

  Chromatius freed his prisoners, resigned his post, and retired to the countryside in Campania. A Christian named Castulus hid Marcus and Marcellianus for a time, but they were later martyred, along with Nicostratus, Zoe, and Tiburtius. Castulus himself would matter to Sebastian's story through his widow.

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• 3. Two Martyrdoms

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  In 286, according to the legend, Sebastian's careful secrecy finally failed and his faith was discovered. Diocletian accused him of betraying the empire he served. The emperor ordered him led to a field and bound to a stake, where chosen archers from Mauretania were to shoot him.

  The arrows did not kill him. Irene of Rome, the widow of Castulus, went to collect his body for burial and found he was still breathing. She carried him to her house and nursed him back to health.

  The Passio is the source of this shape: two martyrdoms, with Irene's care between them. Every version of the tale agrees on what Sebastian did next.

  He waited by a staircase where Diocletian was due to pass, and he rebuked the emperor for his cruelty to Christians. Diocletian was stunned that a man he believed dead stood speaking so freely. Once he recovered, he ordered Sebastian seized and beaten to death with cudgels. His body was thrown into the common sewer.

  A holy woman named Lucina had been warned by the martyr in a vision. She secretly retrieved the body and buried it in the catacombs, at the entrance to the cemetery of Callixtus. That burial began a long trail of relics stretching across Europe.

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• 4. Bones and Relics

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  In Rome stands the Basilica Apostolorum, built by Pope Damasus I in 367 on the site where Saints Peter and Paul were temporarily laid. Remains said to be Sebastian's are kept there. The church is now called San Sebastiano fuori le mura, and it was rebuilt in the 1610s under the patronage of Scipione Borghese.

  Other remains have a different story. Chroniclers named Ado, Eginard, and Sigebert report that Pope Eugenius II gave Sebastian's body to Hilduin, Abbot of St Denys, during the reign of Louis Debonnair. Hilduin brought it into France, where it was placed at Saint Medard Abbey in Soissons on the 8th of December 826.

  In 934 Sebastian's cranium reached the German town of Ebersberg. A Benedictine abbey was founded there and grew into one of the most important pilgrimage sites in southern Germany. It is said that on the feast of Saint Sebastian, the faithful received the consecrated wine from the silver-encased skull itself, used as a cup.

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• 5. Protector Against Plague

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  In 680, according to the chronicler Paul the Deacon, Rome was freed from a raging pestilence through Sebastian's help. The Golden Legend tells a similar tale of a great plague among the Lombards in the time of King Gumburt. It ended once an altar to Sebastian was raised in the Church of Saint Peter in the province of Pavia.

  This role was a medieval addition to his reputation, and it largely explains his huge rise in importance in the Late Middle Ages. Devotion to him swelled whenever plague was active.

  The link between a man shot with arrows and a disease is not obvious. Sebastian's recovery from what is sometimes called his sagittation gave people hope. Arrow wounds can also look like the buboes, the swellings of bubonic plague.

  The writer Molanus put it this way: "the arrow wounds call to God for mercy to us, as the symptoms of the infirm call for pity from the passerby". His standing as a plague protector eventually placed Sebastian among the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

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• 6. Painted Again and Again

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  The earliest known image of Sebastian is a mosaic in the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, dated between 527 and 565. It shows a procession of 26 martyrs led by Saint Martin. They are drawn in Byzantine style, with no individuality and identical expressions.

  Around 682, a mosaic in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome showed him as a grown, bearded man in court dress. It has no trace of an arrow. Archers and arrows begin to appear by the year 1000, and they have been shown far more often than the clubbing. Many people wrongly believe the arrows killed him.

  In the period after the Black Death, Late Gothic and Renaissance artists depicted Sebastian more often than almost any other saint. He offered a chance to paint a semi-nude young man, often in a twisted pose. In the 1430s, the Master of the Playing Cards made his largest engraving of the saint, at a time when few subjects other than Christ allowed male nudes.

  The list of painters is long. It includes Botticelli, Perugino, Titian, Pollaiuolo, Giovanni Bellini, Mantegna three times, and Guido Reni seven times. It also includes Hans Memling, Gerrit van Honthorst, Luca Signorelli, El Greco, Honore Daumier, John Singer Sargent, and Louise Bourgeois. Bernini made an early sculpture of him, and Hans Holbein the Elder made a statuette in silver and parcel-gilt, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  A different scene took over in the 17th century, though it appears in predella panels as early as the 15th. It shows Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene. Georges de La Tour painted it, as did Trophime Bigot four times, Jusepe de Ribera, and Hendrick ter Brugghen, in perhaps his masterpiece.

  The Church may have encouraged this scene to move away from the lone nude. Vasari had recorded that such images sometimes stirred inappropriate thoughts among churchgoers. Baroque painters usually set the scene at night, lit by a single candle, torch, or lantern. Pietro Paolo Vasta painted a cycle of frescos from Sebastian's life in the basilica church of San Sebastiano in Acireale, Sicily.

  The subject did not fade with the Baroque. Egon Schiele, the Austrian Expressionist, painted himself as Saint Sebastian in 1915. Candido Portinari, a Brazilian Modernist, painted his own Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in 1952.

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• 7. Icon of Many Meanings

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  In 1911, the Italian playwright Gabriele d'Annunzio worked with Claude Debussy on Le Martyre de saint Sebastien. The American composer Gian Carlo Menotti wrote a ballet score for a Ballets Russes production, first given in 1944.

  Thomas Mann, in his novella Death in Venice, calls the "Sebastian-Figure" the supreme emblem of Apollonian beauty. He means beauty measured by discipline, proportion, and luminous distinctions. The image is tied to the writer Gustav Aschenbach, and it models a "heroism born of weakness", where calm under agonizing torment becomes an artistic triumph.

  In 1949 the film Fabiola showed Sebastian's death, with Massimo Girotti in the role. In 1964 the poet Frank O'Hara published Lunch Poems, including "Having a Coke With You". In it, the person he loves looks "like a better happier St. Sebastian."

  The saint also became an emblem within gay culture. In 1996 the author Richard A. Kaye wrote that gay men have seen in Sebastian "a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire" and also "a prototypical portrait of tortured closet case." Artists, gay or otherwise, have long been drawn to his strong shirtless body, the arrows, and his face of rapturous pain.

  Oscar Wilde adored Guido Reni's Saint Sebastian, held in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa. During his exile in Paris, Wilde took the alias Sebastian Melmoth for his remaining years. Federico Garcia Lorca and Pier Paolo Pasolini also stressed the saint's imagery in their work.

  In Yukio Mishima's novel Confessions of a Mask, the narrator Kochan has his first gay sexual experience while looking at a reproduction of Reni's painting. The novel nods to Magnus Hirschfeld's belief that gay men are drawn to certain artistic subjects, Sebastian among them.

  In 1976 the British director Derek Jarman made the film Sebastiane. It caused controversy, as critics said it treated the martyr as a "homosexual icon", reflecting a subtext in the imagery since the Renaissance. That same year, the horror film Carrie placed a figure of Saint Sebastian in Carrie's prayer closet, often mistaken for the crucified Christ. A fresco restoration of the saint is the central mystery of the giallo film The House with Laughing Windows.

  The 1991 R.E.M. music video for Losing My Religion briefly shows Sebastian imagery, with arrows plainly held on by tape. Director Tarsem Singh drew on paintings by Guido Reni and Caravaggio. In 1997, in an episode of the television series Millennium, the protagonists search for the hand of Saint Sebastian. In 2007 Damien Hirst showed Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain, a cow in formaldehyde bound in metal cable and shot with arrows.

  Musicians have borrowed him too. Alt-J's video for "Hunger of the Pine" adapts his death to fit the lyrics. The Mountain Goats have a song called "Hail, St. Sebastian". Momus included "Lucky like St Sebastian" on his 1986 debut album Circus Maximus. Madonna's "I'm a Sinner", from her 2012 album MDNA, includes the line "St. Sebastian, don't you cry; let those poisoned arrows fly."

  The Canadian drama Forgive Me, which ran from 2013 to 2018, follows a priest haunted by recurring visions of the saint. The look of the character Gemino in the videogame Blasphemous is clearly inspired by him.

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• 8. Patron of Places

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  The Church of Greece keeps Sebastian's feast on the 18th of December, while the Catholic Church marks him with an optional memorial. In Catholicism he is patron saint of archers, pin-makers, and a holy death. His patronage of athletes is a modern association.

  Many towns claim him. He is a patron of the city of Qormi in Malta. In Italy he watches over Acireale, Caserta, and Petilia Policastro, and in Sicily he is patron of Melilli. In Spain, he is patron of San Sebastian, Palma de Mallorca, Lubrin, and Huelva. Negombo in Sri Lanka and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil also count him as patron. In Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian syncretic religion, he is often informally linked with Oxossi, especially in Rio de Janeiro state. In Mexico, Leon City carries a depiction of his martyrdom in the upper left corner of its coat of arms.

  Every the 20th of January in Lubrin, a statue of the saint leads a procession through the village. People throw bread rolls from their balconies to the crowds below. The rolls have a hole in the middle, and some people string them on a rope around their bodies.

  The festival is thought to date from the 14th century, after cholera struck the area. The wealthy were said to have tossed bread and money down to the poor to avoid catching the disease. It is now a Fiesta of National Tourist Interest in Andalusia.

  King Sebastian I of Portugal, the only king with that name, received it because he was born on the saint's feast day. In Kerala, India, Catholic communities mark the feast with illuminated and decorated churches, and fireworks are a main event in many homes. Kanjoor Syro Malabar Church holds what is described as the largest procession of golden crosses and decorated umbrellas in Asia.

  In Manila, San Sebastian College - Recoletos stands beside the Minor Basilica of San Sebastian, an all-steel church run by the Order of Augustinian Recollect. He is patron of the Diocese of Bacolod and of Lipa City in the Philippines. At the University of Rochester, the St. Sebastian Society brings together Christian athletes for service in the community.

  He is also the patron of Knights of Columbus Council 4926 in the Diocese of San Jose in California, and of the Catholic War Veterans of the United States of America. The highest award of the Catholic War Veterans is the Honor Legion of the Order of St. Sebastian. In his 1906 Reminiscences, Carl Schurz recalled the annual bird shoot of the Rhenish town of Liblar, sponsored by a Saint Sebastian Society of sharpshooters that nearly every adult in town belonged to.

  His name even marks the map in Florida. The St. Sebastian River, a tributary of the Indian River Lagoon, forms part of the boundary between Indian River County and Brevard County. The nearby city of Sebastian and St. Sebastian River Preserve State Park carry his name as well.

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