Saint Sebastian and Saint Francis of Assisi

Standing before a distant landscape are Saints Sebastian (at the left) and Francis of Assisi (at the right). According to legend, Sebastian was a Roman commander who was martyred under the Emperor Diocletian (284-305). He is shown semi-nude and tied to a tree, his body pierced by two arrows, a reference to the method of his martyrdom. He gazes toward the heavens where small angel appears from the clouds and confers his status as a holy martyr. Francis (1181-1226) is shown wearing the brown habit of his order and with his hands and feet marked with the "stigmata," or wounds of Christ, which he is said to have miraculously received in 1224 while meditating on Christ’s suffering.

It has been suggested that the painting was originally the wing of a triptych (three-paneled altarpiece) and that its central panel is identifiable with a panel of another Franciscan saint, Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444), now in a private collection. The paintings were executed in the early 1500s by an associate of Lorenzo di Credi, an artist best remembered as one of Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452-1519) fellow pupils in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-88). The identity of the associate responsible for the Walters' panel is unknown, but several paintings which are stylistically similar have been grouped under the conventional name “Tommaso." For other works attributed to the so-called "Tommaso," see his artist file at the Zeri Photoarchive at the University of Bologna.

Provenance

Provenance (from the French provenir, 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a historical object.

Don Marcello Massarenti Collection, Rome [date and mode of acquisition unknown] [1897 catalogue: no. 430, as Lorenzo Lotto]; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1902, by purchase; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.