Although the painting was not listed in the author's monograph on the artist, in letters written to the Nelson Atkins Museum, Pée has noted this work's close relationship to a slightly later painting of Saint Sebastian Condemned by Diocletian of circa 1650, in the collection of the Bayerischen Hypoteken und Wechsel-Bank, on loan to the Deutsche Barockgalerie, Augsburg. The artist returned to the theme of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in his altarpiece of Saints Sebastian and Roch of circa 1653 for the Cathedral in Salzburg (see Herbert Pée, Johann Heinrich Schönfeld. Die Gemälde, 1971, no. 70, fig. 78). Schönfeld also executed a lost painting of Sebastian's martyrdom known only through an engraving (ibid., no. NS20, fig. 199).