hellotailor:

Decoding the artistic inspiration behind Daredevil’s season 2 posters

After coming across an Imgur post comparing three of the new Daredevil posters to paintings by Caravaggio and Rubens, I decided to take a closer look. (N.B. the detailed multi-character poster is based on one of Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel! Intense.)

First up: Karen Page, whose solo poster (pictured above) was clearly inspired by Caravaggio’s “Saint Jerome Writing.” The Catholic saint is hard at work at his desk, accompanied by a skull as a memento mori—a symbolic reminder of death and mortality.

Daredevil’s own poster is a little harder to identify, although it’s probably Saint Sebastian. The original Imgur post links it to a painting by the 17th century Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, but there are plenty of St Sebastian paintings to choose from. Whichever one it is, he’s a fitting choice for Matt Murdock: a beautiful, tormented martyr.

For a more complete guide to Sebastian-related art, I recommend Mallory Ortberg’s piece in The Toast: ”The Martyrdom Of Saint Sebastian, In Ascending Order Of Sexiness And Descending Order Of Actual Martyring.“ Despite his actual role of being shot with arrows while tied to a tree, Sebastian became something of a homoerotic icon in religious art, depicted as mostly nude and oddly unbothered by his impending death.

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