Saint Sebastian Saint Sebastian. The belief that Saint Sebastian was a defense against the plague was a medieval addition to his reputation, which largely accounts for the enormous increase in his importance in the Late Middle Ages. The connection of the martyr shot with arrows with the plague is not an intuitive one, however. In Greco-Roman myth, Apollo, the archer god, at times destroys his enemies by shooting plague-arrows from the heavens, but is also the deliverer from pestilence; the figure of Sebastian Christianizes this folkloric association. Similar metaphors for divine displeasure occur in the Hebrew Bible. The hopeful example of Sebastian
Adams Memorial (Saint-Gaudens) Henry Adams (a member of the Adams political family) as a memorial to his wife, Marian "Clover" Hooper Adams. Marian Adams, suffering from depression, had died by suicide through the ingestion of potassium cyanide, which she otherwise used to develop photographs. Adams advised Saint-Gaudens to contemplate iconic images from Buddhist devotional art. One such subject, Kannon (also known as Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion), is frequently depicted as a seated figure draped in cloth. In particular, a painting of Kannon by Kanō Motonobu, in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and shown to Saint-Gaudens by John