St. Sebastian (detail) — c.1591 Cornelis van Haarlem

Photography of St. Sebastian’s Cathedral by Klim Musalimov

Saint Sebastian, Ali Franco, 2022

kate bush photographed by gered mankowitz / st. sebastian painted by guido reni

Obsessed with the St. Sebastian citrus saint on the The Ravening War set. The face, the pose, the arrows, the lemon slice halo.

Saint Sebastian (Florentine school, 17th cent.)

Eric Gill (English, 1882–1940)

"St. Sebastian", 1920

Tate Britain

Please have some original content for my "suggestive catholic art" segment: the delightful St. Sebastian at the St. Agnes Church in Piazza Navona, Rome

St. Sebastien (1931) - Serge Ivanoff (Russian/French, 1893-1983)

Mamuka Japharidze. St. Sebastian. Performance, Tbilisi History Museum, Georgia, 1992

In December 1992, 10th Floor and Marjanishvilebi member Mamuka Japharidze (born 1962) performed at the Tbilisi History Museum as St. Sebastian. Covered in white chalk and tied with rope to a pillar, the artist presented himself to the public as a sculpture of the Roman saint. Although St. Sebastian is considered the patron saint of homosexuality, Mamuka used the religious figure to reference the chaos of the Georgian civil war. In religious iconography, St. Sebastian is depicted pierced by the arrows of a Roman legionnaire, rendering the viewer—who is in the position of an archer—the unconscious executioner.6 By inviting the audience to look at both him and each other, Japharidze addressed the interaction between victim and abuser. After a thirty-minute performance in a semi-derelict space on a freezing cold day, the artist walked to the old Roman Sulphur Baths to wash himself clean. With references to the torturous nature of war, he also played with words and their meaning: in Georgian, romelia translates as “who is” and “Roman.”

https://post.moma.org/an-underground-bridge-to-georgian-collectiveness-finding-a-tribe-through-collective-trauma/

Sebastian in the Garden of the Tulips

Someone penetrate me.

-St. Sebastian, circa 2007, probably

St. Sebastian, patron saint of athletes and protection from plague. Often depicted tied to a tree or post, eyes rapturously heavenward, his body lithe, strong, and penetrated with arrows. His visage become an open secret sign of homosexuality in pop culture and the AIDs epidemic.

Title: St. Sebastian (detail) Artist: Augustin van den Berghe Date: ca. 1777 Medium: Oil on canvas Size: 192 cm × 129 cm

gallows-bird

St. Sebastian. Alessandro Vittoria. 1600.

April 1968. The photos are by Carl Fischer, but it was ESQUIRE art director George Lois who suggested posing Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian. Ali was uneasy about the Catholic symbolism (he ended up running the concept by Herbert Muhammad before agreeing), but Lois says Ali — who was convicted in June 1967 of violating the Universal Military Training and Service Act by refusing to be inducted into the U.S. Army — had a very clear idea what it all meant. As Lois told ROLLING STONE in 2016:

He took his right hand out from behind his back and pointed at each of the arrows. And then he’d say the names of the people in this world that were out to get him. He’d point to one arrow: “Lyndon Johnson.” The next one: “General [William] Westmoreland [who led the Vietnam operation].” Then: “Robert McNamara.” Each of the arrows [was] a person in the government that had hurt him. I can’t even tell you how stunning it was.”

On June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ali's conviction, ruling that the draft appeal board had not given cause for rejecting Ali's claim of conscientious objector status.