One may think that Christian saints have little in common with gay culture, but there is an exception to every rule. If you see a handsome guy in his early 20s perforated by arrows, you know it’s St Sebastian, probably the earliest known gay icon. However, what does a captain in the Praetorian Guard, killed for converting Romans to Christianity, who is the patron saint of soldiers and athletes, have to do with that?
First of all, Sebastian was not killed by arrows. He was rescued from the stake by St Irene of Rome to later harangue Diocletian for his paganism. Unmoved by his tenacity, the emperor had Sebastian clubbed to death and his body dumped in Rome’s sewers.
St Sebastian as a gay icon: Egon Schiele, Self Portrait as St. Sebastian, 1914, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.
History, however, is far from the visual arts and iconography established by the painters of the Renaissance. St Sebastian is always shown at the stake, punctured by arrows, awaiting martyrdom with eyes raised to the heavens. His tense, naked body, covered only by a narrow loincloth, fueled the imagination of painters to such an extent that he might be the most frequently portrayed male saint in art history.
St Sebastian as a gay icon: El Greco, St Sebastian, 1612, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
The paintings of St Sebastian, with their languid eroticism, made men see in him:
At once a stunning advertisement for homosexual desire (indeed, a homoerotic ideal), and a prototypical portrait of a tortured closet case.
Yukio Mishima, one of the most important Japanese writers of the 20th century, wrote in the autobiographical Confession of a Mask (1949), that a glimpse of a reproduction of Guido Reni’s painting (which is also the cover of this article) marked the beginning of the author’s sexual self-discovery.
St Sebastian as a gay icon: Luigi Ontani, San Sebastian in Calvenzano forest (d’après Guido Reni), 1970, Museo Ontani, Vergato, Italy.
Why St Sebastian and not any other saint? Susan Sontag, the novelist, pointed out that his face doesn’t register physical pain, and that his beauty and his suffering are eternally divorced from one another. This can be interpreted in many ways: enduring the pain from the love that struck you as an arrow or even possessing some sexual contexts. The image of Saint Sebastian can also be seen as a depiction of suffering from misunderstanding and exclusion from society like what many people from the LGBTQ+ community have experienced.
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Magda, art historian and Italianist, she writes about art because she cannot make it herself. She loves committed and political artists like Ai Weiwei or the Futurists; like Joseph Beuys she believes that art can change us and we can change the world.
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