Anthony Van Dyck's St. Sebastian --Reimagining the Death of a Martyr
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There are few saints who exerted such a powerful hold over the artistic imagination of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century Europe as St. Sebastian, and the tremendous popularity he enjoyed during the Renaissance must to a very great extent be related to the astonishingly vivid and instantly recognizable iconographical characteristics that were conventionally attributed to him. For although Sebastian was portrayed in a wide variety of different settings and contexts during the Renaissance, he was almost always depicted as a beautiful young man whose near-naked body had been pierced with arrows; a visual trope that recalls not simply his martyrdom but his intense physical vulnerability as well.
The martyrdom of St. Sebastian was clearly a religious narrative that very deeply touched the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) as it is a subject to which he repeatedly returned at the beginning of his career, when he undertook a number of different studies of the episode. Van Dyck's depictions of this subject, however, constitute a radical break with Renaissance tradition, in that the artist dispensed with some of Sebastian's conventional [End Page 145] attributes and portrayed not the saint's martyrdom but his preparation for martyrdom. And this shift in focus—away from depicting the physical torments of martyrdom to showing instead the mental anguish of its fearful anticipation—profoundly alters both the aesthetic mood of the paintings and their broader religious and spiritual significance. This subtle change of scene led to a radical transformation in the presentation of the martyr's spirituality. Moving the chronology of the narrative briefly backwards in time enabled Van Dyck to reconceptualize the nature of Sebastian's sainthood. One of the principal aims of this article, then, will be to examine how Van Dyck's act of reimagining the external circumstances of Sebastian's martyrdom brought about such a fundamental shift in his portrayal of the saint's subjective spiritual and emotional states.
Anthony Van Dyck: English Court Culture and Catholic Spirituality
In many ways Van Dyck may be thought of as a rather unlikely creator of religious images—particularly ones as innovative as his St. Sebastians—since he is best remembered today as a painter of portraits, especially those portraits of the English royal family and nobility that he undertook after 1632 when he moved from Antwerp to London and entered the service of King Charles I.1 Indeed, Van Dyck's English portraits so brilliantly capture and evoke the elegance, refinement, and sophistication of his royal and aristocratic subjects that they have come to be seen as definitive. Our understanding of Charles I's reign has been so shaped by Van Dyck's representations of it that we now cannot help but view Charles and his era through Van Dyck's eyes.2
Nevertheless, in terms of Van Dyck's posthumous reputation, his connection with the Carolingian court has been something of a mixed blessing. While his influence on the tradition of English portraiture [End Page 146] has been profound (a debt acknowledged particularly clearly in the work of Thomas Gainsborough [1727–88]), this critical concentration on Van Dyck's English portraits has tended to exclude from consideration important works he undertook earlier in his career, not only in portraiture but also in other artistic genres such as mythological, historical, and religious painting. To a certain extent, Van Dyck's forays into these fields have been overshadowed by the work of his fellow Antwerp artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) for whom Van Dyck briefly acted as an assistant early on in his career. But the comparative neglect of Van Dyck's religious paintings may also be due—at least in the English-speaking world—to their Catholic subject matter and to the discomfort, even embarrassment, that certain English commentators have felt when addressing the artist's intensely Catholic religiosity.3 The poise, composure, and urbane charm of Van Dyck's royal and aristocratic English portraits seem a world away from the emotionally raw and febrile atmosphere evoked by his paintings of St. Sebastian. Yet his ability to master both of these...
