The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is a work by Piero del Pollaiolo, commissioned by the Florentine Pucci family

Pucci family

The Pucci family was a major political family in Florence.-History:The family surname derives from an ancestor named Jacopo, abbreviated to Jacopuccio, then to Puccio, who was considered wise and frequently called upon to settle disputes - there are records of two such interventions in 1264 and 1287...

 and now in the National Gallery, London

National Gallery, London

The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media...

.

History

The Pucci family commissioned it as the altarpiece for the family chapel, the oratory dedicated to Saint Sebastian in the church of Santissima Annunziata

Santissima Annunziata

The Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata Maggiore is a church in Naples in southern Italy.The Annunziatas origins goes back to 1320 and has always been, in one form or another, an orphanage. Remade a first time in the early 16th century, by the mid 17th century, it was a full-fledged home, church,...

 in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

. Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Italian artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.-Biography:...

 dates it to 1475 but misattributes it to Piero's brother, the more famous and artistically talented Antonio - a misattribution that lasted until the present day.

Roberto Pucci withdrew the work from the oratory on the pretext of restoration but then in 1857 sold it to the National Gallery.

Analysis

It is considered Piero's masterpiece, with a more rigid geometric control on the composition than in his previous works, without giving up his usual naturalness of poses and movement - the four archers in the foreground form two symmetrical poses, with the two central ones reloading and the two on the edges firing, in perfect equilibrium either side of the central post to which Sebastian is tied.

It can be contrasted with its near-contemporary, the Saint Sebastian by Botticelli, which instead puts the figure of the saint in isolation in a Flemish-inspired landscape. Borrowed from the Botticelli painting is the San Sebastiano by Francesco Botticini

Francesco Botticini

Francesco di Giovanni Botticini was an Italian Early Renaissance painter. He studied under Cosimo Rosselli and Andrea del Verrocchio. He was born in Florence in 1446 and is mostly remembered for his painting entitled "Assumption of the Virgin"; he died in 1498...

, formerly attributed to Andrea del Castagno

Andrea del Castagno

Andrea del Castagno was an Italian painter from Florence, influenced chiefly by Tommaso Masaccio and Giotto di Bondone. His works include frescoes in Sant'Apollonia in Florence and the painted equestrian monument of Niccolò da Tolentino in the Cathedral in Florence...

, dated to the years immediately after 1474.