According to hagiographic legend, the martyr Sebastian, a Roman army officer who converted to Christianity, was tied to a tree and shot with arrows following an order by Diocletian. Thinking he was dead, he was left to marauding animals on the Palatine hill in Rome, but a group of pious women assisted him and nursed him back to health. The work, attributed to the little-known Camillo Berlinghieri, offers novel stylistic characteristics for the Venetian context (where the painter worked for a few years), with specific references to contemporary Emilian art and particularly to the styles of Guercino and Carlo Bononi, his master.