February art: Saint Sebastian
From arrow-pierced lions to arrow-pierced men – well, one man, many times, Saint Sebastian, a suffering nearly-nude figure allotted a sexual frisson Christ’s passion generally has not: martyrdom can be hot. For his initial iconography the saint appears closer to the grizzled Roman soldier he was, but increasingly his body was depicted as youthful, stripped, tied up, pierced; hardly surprising he became a gay icon. In Guido Reni’s pictures his loin cloth seems about to slip off, while Botticelli’s figure stares at us with the smouldering gaze of Seb the centrefold. So tall in El Greco’s cut up canvas he almost grows out of the painting, for De La Tour he is carried prone but lit up red-hot, while with his back to us Keith Vaughan’s group of stylised figures recalls a gym scene.
Glyn Warren Philpot’s take on the subject is more elusive and (for him at least) more experimental, as late in life he turned from sober society portraits under the influence of Catholicsm. Kept privately and sold way beyond its estimate, it does not lack in desire; before his death in 1937 Philpot became obsessed with male figures of acrobats and models, painting repeatedly and intimately a black model and companion Henry Thomas, and this model, Karl Heinz-Müller.
Here beneath St Sebastian’s glowing halo his face is turned in shadow, one hand reaching out to touch himself, the other (displaying the model’s severed fingers) falling towards the white lily of resurrection. Actually St Sebastian didn’t die by arrow wounds – he was rescued, apparently by St Irene; in this cropped composition the intensity wants no rescue, the transport almost ecstatic.
thebicyclops 