She was standing in from of a small painting of a naked man all stuck through with arrows and
leaning against at tree.
“I know! It’s Saint Stephen Punished for His Sins.”
“Saint Sebastian,” she said. “He survived this persecution, so they beat him with clubs and threw him in a Roman sewer.”
From the book by Life Studies by Susan Vreeland p. 195
Stephen’s name means “crown”. He was the first disciple of Jesus to receive the martyr’s crown. Stephen was a deacon in the early Christian Church. The apostles had found that they needed helpers to look after the care of the widows and the poor, so they ordained seven deacons, and Stephen is the most famous of these. He converted many people but at the same time concealing to most people that he was a Christian.
He was finally detected and was reproached for his betrayal. Stephen was led to a field to be bound to a stake where certain archers from Mauritania would shoot arrows at him until he was dead. Miraculously, the arrows did not kill him. The widow of Castulus, Irene of Rome, went to retrieve his body to bury it, and she discovered he was still alive. She brought him back to her house and nursed him back to health.
The painting was done by Il Sodoma (1477 -1549) that was the name given to the Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi. Sodoma was invited to Rome in 1508 by the celebrated Sienese merchant Agostino Chigi and was employed there by Pope Julius II in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican. He executed two great compositions and various ornaments and grotesques in vaulted ceilings. Most of his painting depicted Biblical themes.
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