Artist and Model in Antonio Campi's St. Sebastian

Antonio Campi's Martyrdom of
St. Sebastian








In this large painting of St. Sebastian by the little-known artist, Antonio Campi (1523-1587), the archer’s expression seems so sympathetic towards his victim and his features so specifically individual that he is as likely to become the focus of our attention as the saint. This should lead us to recognize that the archer is a self-representation of the “artist” in the act of “painting” the saint with his arrows. Indeed his position to the side looking up at the saint’s figure closely approximates  how the artist would have looked up at his canvas while painting it. Yet the saint as “the archer’s painting” is also a self-representation because every painter paints himself. To confirm that aspect of the work’s meaning the artist has placed his inscription on the stone that the saint stands on. “I am the saint”, it implies. The artist has further indicated the saint status as “a work of art” by focussing our attention on the depiction of his nude torso. Spot-lit and essentially monochromatic, it resembles a sculpture and thus a work of art.

The artist/executioner holds his arrow together with a  small branch, a sucker, emerging from the large tree behind him. The sucker has begun to resemble a tree in its own right thus symbolizing the artist/executioner’s fertility as an off-shoot of the great masters that came before. The saint “as a  statue” stands in front of that tree with green drapery, the color of fertility, wrapped around him and with the section covering his groin emerging from where the artist/executioner holds the tree almost as if the drapery is just another “large leaf” of that tree.

The rest of the archer’s equipment, quiver and bow, lie in the lower right-hand corner where artists indicate their authorship. Above them, in the distance, is a white horse facing away from us with a figure trying to restrain it. The horse (cavalloin Italian) may well be a visual pun on cavaletto, the Italian for easel, because large easels traditionally had four legs like a horse. With the horse facing away from us, its form and not just its name more closely resembles how an easel would look in front of the artist. Visual puns like these have been commonly used by great masters across the centuries though they are virtually unknown by art scholars who have never, to my knowledge, recognized a pun on cavaletto.

See other similar examples of the same subject by Mantegna, Durer, Michelangelo ,Hans Baldung Grien, Carlo Crivelli, Perugino and, more recently, by Egon Schiele