06 — The Flaying Martyrdom
The tradition of Bartholomew’s death — flayed alive and beheaded at Albanopolis — and the extraordinary iconography it generated, in which the apostle is shown holding his own skin and the flaying-knife. These files set out the martyrdom as a tradition of later, largely apocryphal attestation, and then trace the iconographic motif that made Bartholomew one of the most visually distinctive of all the saints.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)
Of all the apostles’ deaths, Bartholomew’s is the most gruesome in the telling: tradition holds that he was flayed alive — his skin stripped from his body — and then beheaded, at a place the sources call Albanopolis (Urbanopolis), located by tradition on the Armenian or Caspian frontier. The narrative descends chiefly from the apocryphal Martyrdom of Bartholomew and the later passiones; the manner of death is a hagiographic tradition, not a datum of the New Testament or of the earliest historians. Yet precisely this manner of death gave Western art one of its most arresting images — the apostle bearing his own flayed skin, the knife in hand — culminating in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. This section treats both the martyrdom-tradition and its iconography, each pinned to its attestation.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Martyrdom | The tradition of the flaying and beheading at Albanopolis; its descent from the Martyrdom of Bartholomew and later passiones; the divergent details of place and manner; and the sober handling of a death known only through later hagiography. |
| The Iconography of the Flayed Apostle | The flaying-knife and the carried skin as the apostle’s identifying attributes; Eastern and Western depiction; Michelangelo’s self-portrait in Bartholomew’s flayed skin in the Last Judgment; and the report of all this as iconographic tradition. |
See Also
- The Bartholomew Apocrypha — the Martyrdom of Bartholomew, source of the flaying narrative
- The Relics and Their Journeys — what followed the death
- The Enlightener of Armenia — Armenia as the traditional place of the martyrdom
- Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm — the theology of the holy image
References
- James, M. R. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. (The Martyrdom of Bartholomew.)
- The Synaxarion / Menaion for June 11. (The Orthodox commemoration of the apostle’s martyrdom.)
- Hall, James. Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art. Rev. ed. London: John Murray, 1979. (Bartholomew’s attributes in art.)