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The human tenderness and sentiment which enters into Mantegna's work and fills his antique heroes with Christian yearning, is perceptible in his "San Sebastiano", endowed with all the physical splendour and deep feeling of which he was capable.
There is a rhytmical flow in the contours of this athletic body, as he stands cruelly transfixed and writhing before the tumbling classical edifice.
But although his eyes are raised heavenward, his lips parted in physical pain, his brow distraught, he seems beyond human suffering.
Mantegna has transmuted this heroic form in the bloom of youth with the visionary eye, into the Christian saint who nobly bears the palm of martyrdom.
While the blazing light falls from above upon the large planes of his Roman body distended under the strain of his posture, the antique world around him lies in ruin.
On the stony road that winds toward the distant city, on the circular mound in the white light under the azure sky, hurrying pygmies, his executioners, are seen to escape.
The tiles of the foreground, with the shattered remains of antiquity, lead the eye upon serpentine paths toward shining distances under the low horizon.
Mantegna inscribed with exquisite finish a wealth of architectural detail, the ornamental arch and noble column and glowing bricks: a perfect realisation of architectural form.
Thus over the antique world of broken splendour the Christian martyr is yet triumphant.
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