Raphael’s Saint Sebastian (c.1502-3) (original) (raw)
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The Double Life of Saint Sebastian in Renaissance Art
The body in early modem Italy, 2010
The body in early modern Italy / edited by Julia L. Hairston and Walter 1. Human body in literature. 2. Human body (Philosophy). 3. Italian literature-History and criticism. 4. Italian literature-To 1400-History and criticism. 5. Italian literature-i5th century-History and criticism 6. Italian li,er.ture-t6,h century-History and criticism. 7. Human figure m art. 8. Art, Renaissanc^-Itaiy. I. Hairston. Julia L. II. Stephens, Walter Acatalog record for, hi, b"=k is available from the British Library. Stephens. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Divine Visions: Image-Making and Imagination in Pictures of Saint Luke Painting the Virgin
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) 61, no. 2, 2019
The early modern period saw the rise of a growing anxiety over the imagination of the artist and his problematic status as a mediator of the divine. This is nowhere more evident than in works made for the newly-established artists’ academies of Florence and Rome. The works of Giorgio Vasari and Passignano, and the altarpiece often attributed to Raphael that was installed by Federico Zuccaro in the Accademia di San Luca picture the well-known legend of Saint Luke painting the Virgin; yet neither the significance of their new formulation of the legend – portrayed as the artist’s vision, rather than a portrait sitting – nor the historical circumstances that would account for its collective emergence among painters belonging to Italy’s art theoretical and academic milieus have been examined. This essay shows that these works constitute a reflection on the medial nature of the artist’s imaginative vision at a moment when Catholic reformers sought to reign in this potentially threatening side of art-making, deemed too important to be entrusted to the ungovernable imagination, or fantasia, of the artist. Aware of the unruliness of the imagination, early modern academies of art defended and institutionalized the value of the aesthetic fiction as indispensable to the figuration of the invisible God. The artistic image could reveal divine truths under the condition that it was recognized for what it was: a fiction.
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2010
entered the thematic repertoire of post-Byzantine mural painting from the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two main iconographic types are encountered in post-Byzantine wall-paintings, both of them popular in Western art: The Ordeal of the Arrows and St Sebastian after the Martyrdom. The infl uences of Italian models on the iconography are obvious. Nonetheless, the loans from Western iconography and Renaissance art concern a limited number of scenes and subjects, because the post-Byzantine painters tried to renew painting within the framework of Orthodox tradition and its doctrinal content. St Sebastian 1 is a new subject of Western provenance that entered the thematic repertoire of post-Byzantine mural painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The fi rst images of him are identifi ed in Early Christian times. 2 The iconography 3 was enriched in the Middle Ages, as the ubiquitous fear of cholera led to a proliferation of votive offerings and icons of the healer-martyr. He enjoyed wide popularity during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, being depicted by the most famous painters this time, when an entire iconographic cycle was elaborated around Sebastian's life and activity. 4 1 Symeon Metaphrastes, Opera omnia, MPG 116, 794-816; Nikodemos, Συναξαριστής των δώδεκα μηνών του ενιαυτού, I (Athens 1868) 317. 2 J. S. Northcote and W. R. Brownlow, Roma sotterranea: Die römischen Katakomben (Freiburg 1879) 167 ff.); F. W. Deichmann, Ravenna, Haupstadt des spätnantiken Abendlandes, III: Frühchristliche Bauten und Mosaiken von Ravenna (Wiesbaden 1958) 98 ff.; Ravenna, i mosaici, i monumenti e l'ambiente (Ravenna n.d.) 72-3; E. Mâle and W. F. Volbach, Mosaïques chrétiennes primitives du IVe au VIIe siècle. Rome -Naples -Milan -Ravenne (Paris 1943) pl. XIII etc. 3 V. Kraehling, Saint Sébastien dans l'art (Paris 1938) 9 ff.; G. Nicodemi, 'L'iconografi a di San Sebastiano', Emporium 63 (1926), 163 ff.; L. Réau, Iconographie de l'art chrétien, III (Paris 1959), 1192 ff.; S. Barker, 'The making of a plague saint. Saint Sebastian's imagery and cult before the Counter-Reformation', in F. Mormando and T. Worcester (eds), Piety and Plague (Kirksville, MO 2007). 4 M. Levi d'Ancona, 'Il S. Sebastiano di Vienna del Mantegna', Commentari 28 (1977) 73 ff.; E. Lunghi, Il 'Martirio di San Sebastiano' di Pietro Perugino a Panicale (Perugia 2005); H. Hauvette, Le Sodoma (Paris 1911)
The Poetry of Drawing: Pre-Raphaelite Designs, Studies Watercolours Pre-Raphaelite Drawing
Journal of Victorian Culture, 2012
and design, in all their variety, at the forefront of the development of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers. The magnificent display includes drawings in pencil, chalk, pen and ink and watercolours alongside etchings, and includes a wide range of objects; in addition to works on paper there are examples of stained glass, manuscripts and applied art. Curated by Colin Cruise and organized by Victoria Osborne at BMAG, the exhibition travelled to Sydney later in the year and is accompanied by an excellent and beautifully illustrated book, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing. In the latter, Cruise makes the vital point that drawing has usually only been examined in terms of its technical aspects, arguing that 'the materials and techniques have been given too great an importance because the drawing is regarded as in some way unfinished or too unstable for more considered discussion' (pp. 13-14); as the exhibition makes clear, the unfinished drawing offers much more. While the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and, perhaps most notoriously, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were often criticized for their poor draughtsmanship, Cruise argues for 'the central importance of drawing in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism, both in the foundation of the Brotherhood and in the development of its members' art' (p. 12). The importance of Rossetti as a draughtsman is emphasized throughout. Working in media other than oil through most of his career, 'he neither adopted the academic convention for the representation of the human figure nor graduated immediately into painting as his central practice' (p. 27), preferring instead to concentrate on drawing and watercolours which allowed him to partner the visual with his other passion, the written word. Millais' youthful 'experimental draughtsmanship' (p. 16) matured into virtuoso displays of delicacy, spectacularly demonstrated by Study of the Head of Elizabeth Siddal for 'Ophelia' (1852, BMAG): 'intimate and probing, yet sensitive, it acts as both an imaginary and a real portrait' (p. 58). William Holman Hunt used
The Transference of Apollonian Iconography to Images of Saint Sebastian in Italian Renaissance Art
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.