The Eroticized Austerity of the Male Body: Sebastiane (1976), Caravaggio, and El Greco

Fig. 1. Still from Sebastiane, written and directed by Paul Humfress and Derek Jarman, cinematography by Peter Middleton, U.K., 1976 (photo: FilmGrab)

The martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, a staple homoerotic subject in seventeenth-century European art, is revisited by Paul Humfress and Derek Jarman, a director at the forefront of experimental arthouse British cinema during the late twentieth century. In their directorial debut, Sebastiane (1976) becomes a meditation on the sadomasochistic nature of unyielding piety, transforming the crudeness of lust for the physical into pietistic devotion to the immaterial. While the gratuitous nudity present throughout the film was symptomatic of practical considerations, namely such a minimal budget that did not allow for elaborate or even much costuming, it also recalls the overt sexuality of seventeenth-century history painting, which in some sense became a genre staple as time and myth dislocated the subject from a tangible, present reality, pacifying the carnality of nakedness into the delicacy of nudity. 

Humfress and Jarman's fascination with an eroticized nude masculine youth, particularly one in communion with the holiness of God, could be characterized as a Caravaggesque sensibility. In the final sense of Sebastiane, as Saint Sebastian is persecuted for his sexual purity, there is an austere minimalism to his martyrdom where the directors reduce their composition to only the most fundamental details (Fig. 1).

Fig. 2. Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin, ca. 1601-06

Like Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (Fig. 2), there is a startling humanity present in the ascension of the human to the divine. At first glance, the image is just of a man dying as another shoots him with arrows, yet there is something strange about the scene.

Fig. 2. Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ, ca. 1603

Riddled with arrows as blood pours seductively down his body on the precipice of death, one is reminded of the physicality of Jesus’ flesh in Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ (Fig. 3) or his numerous depictions of John the Baptist in various states of underdress, his holiness enlivening his sensuality. In a Caravegessque vein, Humfress and Jarman capture the most poignant moment allowing the viewer to meditate on the paradoxical nature of death animating life. At this moment, Saint Sebastian is most alive, proving his love of God through the finality of death. Sebastiane eradicates the life and death binary comparable to Caravaggio’s tenebrist merging of luminosity and darkness to convey the unfathomable nature of the absolute.

In this scene, Humfress and Jarman perfectly capture the simultaneous ravenous desire for Saint Sebastian and his total separation from humanity due to divine transcendence, whereby Saint Sebastian’s completeness borders on grotesque othering existing at the limits of a comprehensive awareness. His spine’s severe arch emphasizes his emaciated ribs and protruding buttocks. Saint Sebastian is transformed into an object of desire but also serves as a model for humanity, existing apart from yet meant to be imitated, recalling the treatment of the Virgin Mary’s feet on Carvaggio’s Madonna di Loreto (ca. 1604).

Fig. 3. El Greco, Laocoön, ca. 1610/1614

As Sebastiane displays the unachievable allure of divinity in anguish, Saint Sebastian most closely resembles the elegant gruesomeness of El Greco. Comparable to El Greco’s Laocoön (Fig. 3), the positioning of the three male figures in a barren, oppressive landscape, twisting and turning, depicts the full magnitude of the human body. The mise-en-scène perilously balances on an inescapable moment, elevating the psychological intensity of the moment. Humfress and Jarman's depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is not a scene capable of existing in reality. Instead, it is a heightened ideal of the dialectical image between the brutality of persecution and the sexuality of flesh combining to create a perverse beauty rewarded to those for their unwavering devotion to God. The seventeenth-century understanding of the relationship between the divine and the human imbues Sebastiane with an ethereal sexuality just out of the viewer’s grasp. Something to be continuously emulated but never fully obtained.