Saint Sebastian

Attributed to Vannucci Pietro called Perugino

(Città della Pieve 1450 - Fontignano 1524)

Listed in an inventory of c.1633 as a work by Perugino, this panel is in fact a replica with variations of the famous Saint Sebastian of the collection of Sciarra Colonna – today in the Louvre – which Perugino executed during the last quarter of the 15th century. The work in question is characterised by a balanced compositional scheme dominated by the portrait of the Roman soldier, who is bound to a column. A broad landscape typical of Vannucci’s oeuvre opens up behind the architectural structure. As is narrated in the Passio Sancti Sebastiani, after being stripped naked Sebastian was riddled with numerous arrows by his fellow soldiers: believing him to be dead, they abandoned his body near the Cloaca Maxima, where the matron Irene found him and healed his wounds.

Object details

Commentary

This panel of unknown provenance was first documented in connection with the Borghese Collection in c.1633. Indeed, an inventory believed to be from that year contains the description of ‘a work on panel of Saint Sebastian tied to a tree riddled with arrows, with a carved, gilded frame, 4⅓ high 2½ wide, Pietro Perugino’. The document in question – an excerpt from an inventory – was found in 1998 by Sandro Corradini and dated by critics to the first half of the 1630s (see Pierguidi 2014).

The attribution to the Umbrian master was repeated by Iacomo Manilli (1650) and in subsequent Borghese inventories. Noting several qualitative inconsistencies compared to a similar painting in the Louvre (inv. no. RF957), however, Adolfo Venturi (1893) was the first scholar to claim that the Borghese panel was a derivation. His view was supported by Roberto Longhi (1928), who deemed the work an antique copy after Perugino. Likewise, Paola della Pergola (1955) was not completely persuaded by an attribution to the master. Yet beyond these dissenting voices, most critics have considered the work a Perugino autograph (Williamson 1900; Broussolle 1901; Bombe 1909; Id. 1914; Canuti 1931; Camesasca 1959; and, more recently, Herrmann Fiore 1997; Garibaldi 2004; Fiore 2008; Zalabra 2011; Henry 2014). More recently, two differing views were expressed by Pietro Scarpellini (1991), who maintained that the work was an antique copy after Perugino, and Federica Zalabra (2011), who deemed it a replica from roughly 1515-20.

As is well known, Perugino had a particular penchant for this subject, which was favourably noted by Giorgio Vasari, who praised a ‘Saint Sebastian’ by the Umbrian artist to complement the Madonna and Child with Saints in the Uffizi (inv. 1890, 1435). This is the exemplar which resembles the work in question in many ways, such as the pose of the martyr and the opening of an imagined rustic landscape beyond the column to which the saint is bound (Fiore 2008). The numerous versions painted by the master further include the fresco in Cerqueto and a partially autograph work in the Museo de Arte in São Paulo, Brazil (Inv. no. MASP013); yet the panel in the Louvre, which is from the Sciarra Colonna collection, seems closest to the Borghese composition. Nonetheless, the latter differs from the Parisian prototype in several respects: the absence of grotesque motifs on the columns behind the soldier, the greater number of arrows and the knot on the side of his loincloth.

As suggested by Louise S. Richards (1962) and reiterated by Edmund P. Pillsbury (1971) and Camilla Fiore (2008), the painter probably adopted the same drawing of the Madonna and Child with Saints in the Uffizi to create the Parisian and Roman versions of the martyr; indeed Richards identified the cartoon with the preparatory study as the one held at the Cleveland Museum of Art (inv. no. 1958.411), which was executed in 1495 – in time to paint the work held in Florence.

Regarding the dating of the panel in question, critics – beginning with Ettore Camesasca (1959) –agree that it was executed immediately after the version in the Louvre, which Perugino painted in the last quarter of the 15th century.

Antonio Iommelli