Saint Sebastian lived in the 3rd century AD. An officer in Emperor Diocletian’s Praetorian Guard, he died in 287 as a martyr persecuted for being a Christian and converting others to Christianity. The Emperor ordered archers to tie his favourite soldier to a pillar and to shoot him dead. But the arrows did not kill Saint Sebastian. A woman named Irene found him alive and nursed him back to health. Saint Sebastian went back to the Emperor and accused him of barbarities against Christians. Diocletian had him clubbed to death and his body thrown in a privy.

In modern art, Sebastian became the new Adonis. Artists took pleasure in depicting his attractive, nude, passive and ecstatic body tied to a tree trunk and penetrated by other men’s arrows. The saint became the homoerotic icon of Christianity, also because he was unjustly persecuted for his beliefs. A patron of the sick at the time of plague, Sebastian became newly important to gay culture during the AIDS pandemic.

Saint Sebastian is one of the most popular themes of Christian art. He features in thousands of representations, not all homoerotic. Only some works have this unique quality thanks to an intensification of ecstasy and sensuality. The exhibition presents all depictions of Saint Sebastian in the collection of the National Museum of Warsaw. This experiment with perception and the eroticism of looking leaves the decision to the viewer.