Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene (Hendrick ter Brugghen) in the Diocletianic Persecution, has the soldier Sebastian shot by archers as punishment for his treason. Looking for his body to bury, Irene found Saint Sebastian tied to a tree and miraculously alive, then nursed him back to health. Rather than painting the scene of Sebastian being shot with arrows, in the midst of his attempted execution, Ter Brugghen chooses to show the moments afterwards where Irene and her maid untie him from the tree. Some attribute this narrative shift to the emergence of the plague within Utrecht in the 1620s: several artists desiring a subject saved from agony, turn
European dragon Italian legends. The legend of Saint George and the wyvern is well known in Italy, but other saints are also depicted fighting wyverns. For instance, the first bishop of Forlì, Saint Mercurialis, was said to have killed a wyvern to save the city, so he is often depicted in the act of slaying a wyvern. Likewise, the first patron saint of Venice, Saint Theodore of Tyro, was a wyvern-slayer, and a statue representing his slaying of the wyvern still tops one of the two columns in St. Mark's square. St. Michael, the patron saint of paratroopers, is also frequently depicted