In Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene (Hendrick ter Brugghen), how is the Subject discussed?
This painting depicts Sebastian, slumped in pain as he is tended to by Saint Irene and her maid. According to the traditional story, the Emperor Diocletian, in the Diocletianic Persecution, has the soldier Sebastian shot by archers as punishment for his treason. Looking for his body to bury, Irene found Saint Sebastian tied to a tree and miraculously alive, then nursed him back to health. Rather than painting the scene of Sebastian being shot with arrows, in the midst of his attempted execution, Ter Brugghen chooses to show the moments afterwards where Irene and her maid untie him from the tree. Some attribute this narrative shift to the emergence of the plague within Utrecht in the 1620s: several artists desiring a subject saved from agony, turn to painting the rescue of the Catholicism's personification of suffering.  Ter Brugghen depicts Sebastian with a sickly green pallor, his limp body lying in suffering and resembling much of the diseased or dead one would encounter in Utrecht at the time.
Diocletianic Persecution Utrecht Diocletian Ter Brugghen plague