The Iconography of the Flayed Apostle

The flaying-martyrdom gave Christian art one of its most arresting images: the apostle Bartholomew shown holding his own stripped skin and the flaying-knife, his identifying attributes. This file traces the iconographic tradition — the knife and the carried skin — through Eastern and Western depiction, to its most famous instance, Michelangelo’s self-portrait in Bartholomew’s flayed skin in the Last Judgment — all reported as iconographic tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Attributes: The Knife and the Skin

In Christian art the saints are commonly identified by attributes — objects that recall their lives or deaths — and Bartholomew’s are among the most unmistakable. He is shown with the flaying-knife (a curved or short blade, like a butcher’s or tanner’s knife), the instrument of his death; and, more dramatically, with his own flayed human skin, carried draped over his arm or held up in his hand, complete with the empty features of the face and limbs (Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, “Bartholomew”). These attributes derive directly from the flaying-tradition of the martyrdom (see The Martyrdom), and they make Bartholomew instantly recognizable in painting and sculpture wherever the apostles are depicted together.

The image is reported here as iconographic tradition — a convention of Christian art expressing the manner of the apostle’s death and the meaning the Church found in it — not as a depiction certified from historical record (the flaying itself being a hagiographic tradition; METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Eastern and Western Depiction

In Byzantine and Orthodox iconography Bartholomew is most often shown, like the other apostles, holding a scroll or a Gospel book, vested as one of the Twelve, his identity given by the inscription and his place in the apostolic rank rather than by the gruesome attribute; the flaying is more typically depicted in narrative martyrdom scenes than carried as a personal emblem. The restrained Orthodox icon emphasizes the apostle’s dignity and holiness over the horror of his death, in keeping with the iconographic principle that the icon shows the transfigured saint, not merely the historical event (on the theology of the icon, see Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm).

In Western art, by contrast, the flaying became the apostle’s defining motif, and the carried skin and knife his standard attributes from the later Middle Ages onward. Bartholomew appears holding his skin in countless altarpieces, statues, and apostle-cycles; the motif is found in sculpture (notably the unsettling marble figure of St. Bartholomew Flayed by Marco d’Agrate in the Cathedral of Milan, which shows the apostle draped in his own skin worn like a cloak), in painting, and in stained glass throughout Catholic Europe. The Western devotional imagination dwelt on the physical horror of the death as a measure of the martyr’s love.

Michelangelo’s Last Judgment

The most celebrated appearance of the flayed apostle is in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536–1541), the great fresco on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Among the saints gathered around the risen Christ, Bartholomew is shown holding in one hand his flaying-knife and in the other his empty, hanging human skin. Famously, the face on the flayed skin is not a portrait of the apostle but a distorted self-portrait of Michelangelo himself — the artist’s own features sagging in the lifeless hide. This identification, first noted in the sixteenth century and now widely accepted, has been read as Michelangelo’s meditation on his own unworthiness, mortality, and hope of being remade in the resurrection: the artist depicts himself as the cast-off skin, awaiting transformation, held by the apostle who likewise was stripped and glorified (the self-portrait identification is standard in the art-historical literature; see Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art; and the scholarship on the Sistine Last Judgment).

[Disputed: that the face on the flayed skin held by St. Bartholomew in Michelangelo's *Last Judgment* is a self-portrait of the artist is the widely accepted reading, first proposed in the sixteenth century and standard in modern art history (so the major scholarship on the Sistine Chapel); it is an interpretation of the image rather than a documented statement by Michelangelo, and a minority of scholars have questioned or nuanced it. The identification of the skin as Bartholomew's flayed hide and the knife as his attribute is, however, secure within the iconographic tradition.]

The Meaning of the Image

The iconography, in both its restrained Orthodox and its vivid Western forms, carries a theological charge. To be flayed is to be stripped utterly — to give not only one’s life but one’s very skin, the outermost self, the covering of the body. The carried skin became, in Christian meditation, an emblem of the total self-emptying of the martyr in imitation of Christ, who was Himself stripped and scourged; and of the Pauline “putting off the old man with his deeds” (Col. 3:9) and putting on the new. The apostle who holds his own empty skin holds up the husk of mortality, his glorified body standing whole beside it — an image of the resurrection, in which the corruptible is stripped away and the incorruptible put on (cf. 1 Cor. 15:53). In this sense the most gruesome of apostolic attributes became one of the most hopeful: the flayed apostle is the figure of the man remade.

For the Orthodox reader the image is finally subordinate to the icon’s purpose — to show the saint as he now is, in glory, an “Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile” (John 1:47), who through the stripping of martyrdom passed into the joy of his Lord. The skin and the knife recall the cost; the icon proclaims the crown.

See Also

References

  • Hall, James. Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art. Rev. ed. London: John Murray, 1979. (Bartholomew’s attributes: the knife and the flayed skin.)
  • The Holy Bible, King James Version. (Col. 3:9; 1 Cor. 15:53; John 1:47.)
  • Hartt, Frederick, and David G. Wilkins. History of Italian Renaissance Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams. (Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and the self-portrait in Bartholomew’s skin.)
  • Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. (Entry “Bartholomew”; the iconographic attributes.)