Sebastian survived the arrows of Diocletian’s archers, so after the Black Death a San Sebastian painting hung in churches across Italy and Spain as a shield against plague.

St Sebastian Renaissance art made him serene. The first Andrea Mantegna Saint Sebastian, in Vienna, hides a horseman in the clouds. The Louvre Mantegna Saint Sebastian stands tied to a classical arch, and the last Mantegna St Sebastian, in Venice, wears a Latin banner. A Bandinelli Saint Sebastian survives in red and black chalk.

The Baroque made him flesh. No Caravaggio Saint Sebastian painting survives, yet his followers painted the Caravaggio St Sebastian everyone pictures, and the closest thing to a Caravaggio Saint Sebastian is by Cecco del Caravaggio, the young man thought to have posed for him. The Gerrit van Honthorst Saint Sebastian in London drips blood toward the viewer. The Peter Paul Rubens St Sebastian in Berlin is built like a Michelangelo nude.

Guido Reni returned to the saint again and again, and one canvas became the famous Saint Sebastian painting that Yukio Mishima wrote about in Confessions of a Mask. Guercino sank the background into shadow so the body glows. Since Oscar Wilde became Sebastian Melmoth, the dying Saint Sebastian painting has doubled as a gay love poem.

More saints painted with longing wait among sacred scenes, and candlelit Baroque bodies sit next door. Renaissance beauties and nudes with nothing piercing them have rooms of their own.

According to a fifth-century legend, Sebastian was a Roman soldier in the Praetorian Guard who kept his Christian faith hidden under the emperor Diocletian, around AD 288. Once it came out, he was tied to a tree and shot with arrows. He survived, and Irene of Rome nursed him back to health. He then confronted the emperor in public and was clubbed to death. Saint Lucy recovered his body, and he was buried in a Roman catacomb, where the Basilica of St Sebastian Outside the Walls now stands. His feast day falls on 20 January.

He lived through a storm of arrows, and frightened towns hoped to live through plague. Scripture had long linked arrows with sudden sickness, as in Psalm 64:7. In the late 600s Rome raised an altar holding his remains during an epidemic, and when the Black Death reached Paris in 1348 his bones went to the Abbey of St Victor. From then on, a San Sebastian painting above an altar was a prayer against disease. Guercino’s design for an altarpiece at Nonantola, near Cento, was probably commissioned in thanks after the town escaped the plague of 1630.

Renaissance painters wanted the classical Greek nude, and nearly every commission was religious. Sebastian solved the problem. His arrow wounds justified a body bare to the loincloth, and theologians compared his beauty to that of Christ. St Sebastian Renaissance art swapped the bearded older soldier of medieval panels for a youth in the Greek mould. Some proved too persuasive: Vasari reports that Fra Bartolomeo’s Sebastian was removed from San Marco after friars heard confessions from women who had sinned at the sight of it. In 1592 Pope Clement VIII counted loinclothed Sebastians among the most offensive religious images.

A beautiful young man, bound, pierced and gazing upward with something close to rapture: generations of gay viewers saw themselves in that image. Some read the wounds as erotic. Others saw a man punished the moment his hidden identity came to light. By the late nineteenth century the saint worked as a shared signal among writers such as Walter Pater and Marc-André Raffalovich, who took the name Brother Sebastian in 1896. Oscar Wilde chose the alias Sebastian Melmoth in Paris after Reading Gaol. In 1962 Susan Sontag singled him out as the archetype of glamorised suffering.

Demand. Collectors paid well for Guido Reni’s graceful young saints, and Reni, who made buyers name their own price, kept supplying them between 1610 and 1642. Scholars count six to nine versions. His Sebastians glow against dark grounds, each wound placed so it barely breaks the line of the body. One, in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, became the famous Saint Sebastian painting of modern literature. Oscar Wilde adored it, and in Yukio Mishima’s 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask the young narrator’s homosexual awakening happens in front of it. Mishima later posed as the saint for a photograph.

In 1976 Derek Jarman made Sebastiane, a film that brought the saint’s homoerotic story to the screen with frank male nudity and a loving gay couple among the soldiers. Its broadcast on British television in 1985 caused an uproar. During the AIDS crisis, Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, who both died of the disease, drew on Sebastian again, this time on his old role as a protector against plague. The dying Saint Sebastian painting became a portrait of a community under attack and still standing.