Study for a St Sebastian

Author: Esmé van der Krieke

With fluent lines and sharp diagonal hatching, this swift pen-and-ink drawing depicts a muscular male figure. With his right arm resting on the top of his head and his left twisted out to the side and back, he leans against something in a clearly uncomfortable position. He keeps his feet together. Tietze/Tietze-Conrat classified the drawing as a typical early seventeenth-century work by the Venetian artist Palma Giovane.^[1]

The drawing depicts St Sebastian, and is allied to some paintings in which Palma pictured the martyrdom of this saint around 1610-12.^[2] In those works he is tied to a tree, with his feet together as they are in our drawing, one arm raised and the other beside his body. Although the pose of the figure in our drawing is not exactly the same as any of those in Palma’s surviving paintings, in which the saint moves his body or head a little differently or lifts the other arm, it is nevertheless likely that the drawing functioned in Palma’s oeuvre as a preparatory study for one or more of these paintings. A very productive draughtsman, he made numerous different sketches and studies for a single painting. Interestingly, the Rotterdam St Sebastian was drawn solely with pen and ink on paper, although Palma frequently used washes in his drawings to indicate shadows. Since there are none here, it seems probable that our drawing is a rapid study in which the artist was looking primarily for the correct pose of the body.

On the verso there is a black chalk sketch of a full-length seated figure.