BASTARD IMAGES OF A HYBRID SAINT:

Appropriation and survival of the iconology of Saint Sebastian in Latin American visual culture

Abstract

Inspired by Aby Warburg’s montage method, this article analyses the survivals of classical iconologies of Saint Sebastian in Latin American visual culture. Since the early twentieth century, artists from distinct minority artistic and cultural contexts have appropriated Baroque and Renaissance images of Sebastian to explore, above all, a sensitive set of themes and aesthetics such as homoeroticism, death, cultural trauma, and homosexualities. However, the small existing bibliography regarding the intermittencies and reappearances of Saint Sebastian over the last century and in contemporary times has only stopped at investigating minority artistic contexts located in Europe and the United States. In view of this gap, we seek to understand how the classical iconologies of Saint Sebastian have been appropriated and survived in the work of different Latin American artists, revealing a process of iconological inflection that connects and tensions terrains such as religion, sexuality, race, coloniality, and processes of cultural hybridization. To better translate these aesthetic and political tensions, the article explores an idea of “bastard images”.