According to ancient traditions collected by Jacobus de Voragine in his Legenda Aurea (1264), Saint Sebastian was a third-century Roman soldier who served in the Praetorian Guard, one of the most prestigious units of the imperial army, at the time when the emperor Diocletian was actively persecuting Christians. Sebastian’s beliefs urged him to encourage others to die rather than renounce their faith, and that was precisely what Sebastian himself did when he was pressed to apostatize. Because of the way in which he was tortured (he was bound naked to a tree and shot with arrows), depictions of Sebastian afforded artists the opportunity to experiment with the aesthetic possibilities of the male nude as a subject. The Prado’s Saint Sebastian is an excellent example of El Greco’s understanding of the nude. Rather than imitating nature, he reworks it to produce an intellectual, self-consciously artificial version of it; his purpose is to create a scene that belongs in the world of the artist’s imagination and he is not primarily concerned with replicating viewers’ everyday experience of seeing. El Greco achieved this, in the first place, by means of his characteristic elongation of the human form. Limbs and muscles are connected to each other with little regard for the normal proportions of the body; the artist seeks instead to make the most of the body’s expressive potential. The saint’s left foot is on tiptoes, barely touching the ground, and the figure with its pulsating outline seems to surge upward like a flame. This is El Greco’s way of representing his understanding of the martyr’s inward experience, that dramatic moment when his soul yearns to leave the body and ascend. This heavenward movement culminates in the head, atop an impossibly long neck as if it, too, were stretching upward. The saint’s gaze is turned up and his calm expression suggests an attitude of quiet acceptance, in accordance with Catholic teachings on the ideal way to meet death. The lighting of the scene enhances this silent drama: the background, with a view of Toledo on the right, is an eerie stormy darkness, whereas the saint’s body is bathed in a supernatural glow. A sort of halo is formed by the clouds behind Sebastian, creating an interesting ambiguity, as it is not clear whether the clouds belong in the natural realm or the supernatural.

The transitions between light and shade are painted with the very subtle brushstrokes characteristic of El Greco’s last years.

It is not clear why the painter added a view of Toledo to the background of this religious scene, since Saint Sebastian was never said to have set foot in Spain; such apparently incongruous views of Toledo are found in other paintings, such as his Laocoön (National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc). Exactly the same view appears in Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus (Toledo cathedral, chapel of St. Joseph) and Saint Martin and the Beggar (National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc). While no definitive explanation has been found, several hypotheses may help us understand the logic behind the choice of background in this particular case. It is possible that if the patron who commissioned the painting was from Toledo, he may have requested the inclusion of the familiar cityscape in the painting as a sign of identity, or perhaps symbolically to put his city under Saint Sebastian’s protection. However that may be, by placing the martyrdom scene in a location that was recognizable to viewers, El Greco may have meant to emphasize the relevance of Saint Sebastian’s example and mediation for his contemporaries in earlyseventeenth-century Spain.

The unusual appearance of this painting is due to the fact that at some point the canvas was cut into two different pieces, the upper part containing the body of St. Sebastian and the lower one with his legs and a view of Toledo in the background. There is no evidence as to when or why this was done, but fortunately, the lower fragment appeared on the market a few years after the upper portion was donated to the Prado, making it possible to reunite the two pieces (Pérez d´Ors, P.: El Greco to Goya. Masterpieces from the Prado Museum, Museo de Arte de Ponce, 2012, pp. 114-115).