Saint Sebastian is a popular image in the visual arts, which many artists turned to when depicting the cruel episode of his martyrdom – the suffering from arrows fired at him. Saint Sebastian secretly professed Christianity in the 3rd-4th centuries. Upon learning of this, Emperor Diocletian sentenced him to death. However, the wounds inflicted on the saint did not become fatal. His wife secretly left him, and he, not wanting to flee from Rome, appeared miraculously saved before Diocletian. The emperor again ordered the execution of the saint.

In the Louvre painting “Saint Sebastian” by Andrea Mantegna, a painter and engraver of the Early Renaissance, the saint is tied to a fragment of an ancient column, the lower part of his body is studded with arrows. The column, as part of the ruined ancient temple, symbolizes the world of paganism slowly fading into oblivion, for which the emperor held on so tightly and whose victim fell Saint Sebastian. Near the feet of the unfortunate young man, a
a marble fragment of a broken statue that once stood on this site and glorified the Greco-Roman gods.