Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew

By the time Valentin de Boulogne painted this around 1617, Caravaggio had been dead for several years, yet Rome was full of young painters from the north working in his shadow. Valentin had come down from France and fallen hard for that manner. Figures pulled out of deep shadow by a raking light, faces that look borrowed from men you might meet in a tavern. The apostle Bartholomew was said to have been flayed alive, and the scene turns on that cruelty, the executioners crowding in close, the saint's body lit as if on a stage. What you notice is how little distance there is between the holy and the everyday here, the martyr and his tormentors sharing the same coarse, sunburned skin. It hangs today in Room three of the Accademia, one of the French followers of Caravaggio set among the Venetians.