3. Italian Painting (13-18th c.)

The Golden Legend relates how Diocletian’s soldiers shot arrows in Sebastian, a Roman soldier who lived in the 3rd century, until he became “like a hedgehog”. Believed to be dead, the saint was left to his fate but he miraculously recovered from his wounds. The picture shows a rarely represented moment, when the soldiers tie the saint to a tree trunk before the torture. The painter deliberately contrasted Sebastian’s calm and gentle face with the brutal expression of the soldiers. The small panel, which is difficult to judge because of its style that contains heterogeneous elements, was attributed by Vilmos Tátrai to Riccardo Quartararo on the basis of the strong affinity of style with a St. Michael Archangel that Federico Zeri ascribed to Quartararo. Quartararo was primarily active in Sicily; in the course of his life he was exposed to wide-ranging – above all, Iberian-Flemish and north-Italian (Ferrarese, Veronese, Paduan) – influences. In 1472, he probably stayed in Valencia, and in 1491-92, he fulfilled several commissions in Naples. The south-Italian origin of the picture is rendered probable also by the fact that it was once in the possession of the Capese Zurlo family of Naples, from where it came to the Christian Museum with the transmission of Count San Marco’s collection.