St. Sebastian

Abstract

This sculpture of St. Sebastian (in the Church of Santi Cosma e Damiano in Polignano a Mare) took inspiration from Andrea Mantegna's paintings, showing him with his arms tied back and his head tilted up. The square shape of the jaw and the thin parallel grooves of the hair are typical of both the style of Stefano da Putignano (to whom this work was previously attributed) and the early work of Paolo Catalano da Cassano, a sculptor who achieved enough fame in his day to sign his mature works with only his first name, PAVLVS, the rest being superfluous. Paolo began as a follower of Stefano da Putignano, and so his early work is difficult to distinguish from that of the other master, though his later work differs in style. The expert in the sculpture of the period, Prof. Clara Gelao, had previously attributed this St. Sebastian and the St. Roche in the same church to Stefano da Putignano but now argues that they are both the work of Paolo, based on the similarity to Paolo's sculptures of the same two saints in Aquaviva delle Fonti (signed and PAVLVS CATALANVS and dated 1504). The statue's heavy repainting in the 1990s, which appears to have softened the sculpture's sharp features, may have been the cause of some of the confusion over attribution. The sculpture is situated in a niche in the presbytery, across from a sculpture of St. Roche, also by the same artist. A similar classicizing image of Sebastian as a beautiful young nude hero, his head thrown back in ecstatic devotion, by Stefano da Putignano in the Chiesa Matrice in Putignano (made in the previous decade) may have been a model for this work. The pose of the figure, type of bodily beauty, and form of the loincloth are all similar, though here the loincloth is more simply draped and the curvature of the back less dramatic. The arrows, which do not survive, were perhaps originally made of wood or metal. Photograph(s) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.