The San Sebastiano from Montalcino

The San Sebastiano from Montalcino

Montalcino museum

Last August in Italy, I was writing a preface to Montaigne’s Travel Journal. Since Montaigne, in 1580, had passed right near where I was, I followed in his footsteps through the Val d’Orcia to Buonconvento, San Quirico, Bagno Vignoni, and, above all, Montalcino, a hilltop fortress held by the French only a few decades before his visit. There, he looked for the French sepultures in the church of Sant’Agostino, but the Duke of Florence had had them effaced. Since the municipal museum is located in the adjacent Augustinian convent, I visited it afterward with its director, also the town’s culture councilor. like all museums in the towns of Tuscany, this one has been wonderfully fitted out thanks to the generosity of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank, currently in difficulty. The museum director stopped me before this San Sebastiano by Andrea and Luca della Robbia, an enameled terracotta sculpture from the early sixteenth century, to tell me how proud she is that it was exhibited at the Louvre with other Italian Renaissance sculptures during the show Body and Soul: from Donatello to Michelangelo—a cursed exhibition, since it was supposed to go up in spring 2020, but the pandemic delayed its opening until autumn, and after eight days we were locked down again. I saw the exhibit during those eight days, including this San Sebastiano, one of the highlights. To find him again in his own home, at daybreak, without other visitors, was an epiphany. Let us pray that works continue to circulate from west to east and north to south, despite pandemics.