The Transference of Apollonian Iconography to Images of Saint Sebastian in Italian Renaissance Art (original) (raw)

The long observed, yet little researched parallels between the pagan archer god Apollo and Saint Sebastian at once merit consideration because this close connection was not made between Apollo and other male martyrs, such as Christopher or Cosmas and Damian, who had also been tortured by arrows and were similarly invoked against the plague. However, if this transference from Apollo to Sebastian did in fact occur, it did so while also reversing, or ‘Christianising,’ the former’s relationship to the plague: whereas Apollo inflicted the disease through pestilential arrows, Sebastian protected believers against it. Such a reversal may evince what Erwin Panofsky considered the re-interpretation of classical figures, wherein their forms were either invested with a new symbolical content, or they were made subservient to specifically Christian ideas. As a rule, Panofsky posited, such re-interpretations were facilitated or even suggested by a certain iconographical affinity; Apollo, owing to his association with pestilence and arrows, would have thus formed the natural counterpart to Sebastian. While this postulation has yet to reach any semblance of consensus among art historians, I intend to demonstrate that early connections between the two figures did indeed exist, first in literary form and subsequently in the visual arts. Accordingly, Sebastian’s depiction in early Renaissance art as a distinctly Apollo-like youth represented not the random or otherwise thoughtless appropriation of antique forms, but rather the visual expression of factors that had long prompted associations between the two. In the last decades of Quattrocento, however, the increasing emphasis on the failure of the arrows to carry out his martyrdom gradually obfuscated such pagan connections, and the focus of his representation in art consequently shifted to his survival by divine power. Yet it is interesting to note that by the early decades of the sixteenth century, classical forms- often those explicitly appropriated from depictions of Apollo- were again reintegrated into Sebastian’s iconography, resulting in images that were distinctly pagan in form, though devotional in function.