The feast day of Saint Sebastian falls in two days’ time so this week’s choice of picture is The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by the fifteenth-century Florentine artists Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo. According to early legend, Saint Sebastian was a crack Roman soldier in the pretorian guard who converted to Christianity and was shot through with many arrows during the course of his martyrdom. He is said to be the patron saint of archers, soldiers and athletes, but during the Middle Ages and Renaissance it was also common to pray to him for relief from the plague, thanks to a long-established tradition of likening bubonic sores to “the arrows of god”. It is probable that the Pucci family, who commissioned this splendid altarpiece for their family chapel in the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata, hoped to obtain special protection from that much feared disease. In 1857 the work was put up for sale by an evidently unsuperstitious descendant of their line, the Marchese Roberto Pucci, and purchased by the Trustees of the National Gallery in London, where it can still be seen today.
The Pollaiuolo brothers were the sons of a poulterer, or dealer in chickens (uno pollaiuolo in Tuscan), who each showed an early aptitude for art. Piero was apprenticed as a painter while Antonio worked for much of his career as a goldsmith and sculptor. Antonio was the more gifted of the two and is said to have taken up painting relatively late in life, for fear that his sculptures in bronze and his works in precious metals might not survive to posterity, being melted down – like so many Renaissance masterpieces in those media – for gold and silver or metal for armaments. The source for this story is Giorgio Vasari, the pioneering Renaissance compiler...
