Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Saint Sebastian
Alonso Berruguete Spanish
Not on view
Berruguete’s Saint Sebastian refers to Michelangelo’s Dying Slave (1513–16), the eroticized image of a nude youth that the Spanish sculptor would have seen during his training in Italy. As sculptural naturalism was increasingly used to express the human beauty of the protagonists of the Christian story, Church commentators grew anxious about the nudity of the crucified Christ or of certain saints. They feared that imaginative empathy might lead members of a congregation to the wrong kind of desire. Ecstatic languor, passivity, and pain might be misunderstood. This erotic confusion became all the more intense when color, clinging fabric, and rope were introduced, and when the sculpture was animated by candlelight.
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