Saint Sebastian healed by an angel

Born in Antwerp, Theodoor Rombouts was first apprenticed to the local painter Frans van Lanckvelt before completing his training with Abraham Janssens in or after 1608. He traveled to Italy in 1616, where he worked alongside Francesco Tornelli and Robert d’Orteil in Rome and subsequently came into the employ of Cosimo II de’Medici in Florence. His precise activities in Italy are largely shrouded in mystery. Among the few works that can be securely given to this period are the Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata (San Simone, Florence) and the State of Souls (Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, Rome). Rombouts returned to Antwerp by 1625, the year in which he became a master in the city’s Guild of St. Luke. In the ensuing decade, he would become the central figure among the Flemish Caravaggisti, producing both secular paintings for private collectors and large-scale religious commissions.

Saint Sebastian had been an officer in the Roman army before converting to Christianity, for which he was sentenced to death by the Emperor Diocletian. The martyr saint was tied to a tree, shot with arrows and left to die. One tradition holds that Saint Irene, a noble Roman lady, tended his wounds and brought him back to health, while another suggests that he was saved by angels who intervened on his behalf. Healed, Sebastian went before the emperor to warn him of his sins. In response, Diocletian ordered that Sebastian be beaten to death and his body discarded in the city’s sewer so that it would remain unburied.

While one more frequently encounters Saint Sebastian being tended by Saint Irene, the convention of portraying the martyred saint succored by one or more angels found particular appeal in Antwerp in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Among others, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Gerard Seghers and Gaspar de Crayer all treated the subject in this fashion. Despite the distinctly Roman architecture visible in the landscape, Gianni Papi (private communication) dates the present painting to circa 1626-27, shortly after Rombouts returned to Antwerp. It was in this period that Rombouts’ penchant for Caravaggio’s naturalism mixed with a certain Florentine softness gradually gave way to a more Rubensian approach, likely due to the expectations of the artist’s Flemish patrons. Papi cites in particular the similar physiognomies and landscapes found in the present painting and the Penitent Magdalene (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille); the concordance with a number of the foreground female figures in the large-scale Allegory of Justice (1627-28; Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent); and the comparable construction of the eyes using a single brushstroke to delineate the irises found in the Woman playing a guitar at Merevale Hall, Warwickshire.

We are grateful to Gianni Papi and Wayne Franits for independently endorsing the attribution on the basis of photographs.