Saint Sebastian is a painting of the eponymous Christian saint by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, executed before January 1474 when it was endowed to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Florence.

Today the panel is housed in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

[1][2] Kenneth Clark considered this picture remarkable for its closeness to the spirit of harmonious repose found in classical sculpture: There are several reasons why for fifty years or more Donatello's David had no successors ... Another is the inherent restlessness of the Florentine temperament.

The two great masters of the nude in the late quattrocento, Pollaiuolo and Botticelli, are concerned with embodiments of energy or ecstatic motion, with a wrestling Hercules or a flying angel, and only once, in Botticelli's St. Sebastian, achieve a satisfactory nude in repose.

[3]Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Sankt Sebastian" (in Neue Gedichte, 1907) seems to have a close correspondence in description and mood to Botticelli's painting, as Rilke's translator J.