Durer's Martyrdom of St. Sebastian

    
 Durer, Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (c. 1495), Woodcut                        Bosse, Inverted detail of A Printer's Workshop  

Dürer’s woodcut of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian provides further evidence that even religious scenes are self-referential. Sebastian, as has been explained elsewhere, is one of art’s primary symbols for the idea that art is self-referential and that every painter paints himself. Identifying with the suffering of the saint, poetic craftsmen imagine the arrows hitting their alter ego as their own tools, punctured, so to speak, by a shower of paintbrushes. This, however, is not a painting but a woodcut as the executioner in the foreground, making eye contact with the artist, emphasizes. A crossbow is not part of the traditional story – regular archers are – but Dürer uses this narrative inconsistency to signal a point-of-entry for interpretation. Once recognized as a visual problem, a later artist can easily recognize the action of the crossbowman as that of a printer making the woodcut itself. Compare his gesture to that of the printer in the later engraving by Abraham Bosse.

See also Dürer’s Angel holding the Sudarium