Bastard Images of a Hybrid Saint: An Essay on the Survival of Saint Sebastian Iconology in Latin American Visual Culture

Ever since the early 20th century, artists from several minority artistic and cultural settings have made use of canonical images from the Baroque and Renaissance periods of Saint Sebastian to explore subjects such as death, religion, and homosexuality. However, the existing literature regarding the reappearances of Saint Sebastian over the last century and in contemporary times merely investigates minority artistic contexts located in the Global North. As such, this essay seeks to understand how the canonical iconologies of Saint Sebastian were appropriated, as well as their survival in the Latin American context, identifying a process of iconological inflection that connects and gives weight to topics such as religion, sexuality, ethnicity, coloniality, cultural hybridization processes, and minority aesthetic sensibilities, a process that the essay refers to as the production of “bastard images”.