San Sebastian

Bound to a fragment of a Roman column amid shattered classical masonry, Sebastian bears his arrows with the composure of a statue, eyes raised to heaven, his flesh as hard and pale as the marble around him. A Roman officer martyred under Diocletian, he was invoked against plague - each arrow read as a pestilent strike - which kept him in demand across an Italy haunted by epidemics; his legend comes through the Golden Legend. Mantegna, the supreme antiquarian among painters, rebuilds antiquity in convincing ruin around the saint, down to a toppled idol's feet and a carved capital lying in the grass.