What moves me about St. Sebastian is the serenity in the midst of his misfortunes. Misfortune has always been Baroque. I am moved by his grace under torture and by the absolute lack of recognition he shows in his Hellenic face. He is not resigned but triumphant, someone who has triumphed, filled with elegance and different shades of grey, like a steady, faithful oarsmen, oblivious to the avenues of the city. This is why St. Sebastian is the loveliest figure in all of art, the art seen with the eyes. Isn’t it true that St. Sebastian is far, far from the sea? Isn’t it true that neither waves nor mountains can hope to understand him? St. Sebastian is a fresh-water myth in a glass of pure crystal. It was indoors that he became a martyr, not lashed to a gnarled tree trunk the way the Romantic Renaissance portrayed him. He was tied to a column of jasper as yellow and transparent as his flesh. The tree was invented in the Middle Ages. All of us are a little like St. Sebastian when they criticize and gossip about us. They were truly right to put St. Sebastian to his death: his martyrdom was truly right and just, at least in those days. He sinned against his epoch… without even realizing it ( the aesthetic of that scale). No martyr ever did realize it. And all of them were martyred for political reasons. They didn’t die for having adored their God, but for not respecting everybody else’s God. They were outlaws and they were wrong. In a pinch, perhaps Socrates would have chosen to obey the laws of the Republic. What a dramatic conflict! St. Sebastian obtained salvation because of his beauty and all the others because of their love. All of them made their martyrdom into a prayer, but St. Sebastian was different. He poses, he uses his body to lend eternity into whatever is fleeting, giving visible form to an abstract aesthetic idea, just as the wheel gives us the consummate idea of perpetual motion. That is why I love him. — Federico García Lorca about St. Sebastian From a letter to Salvador Dalí, 1927
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 04:08:37 +0000
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