Saint Barthélemy

This single saint was never meant to stand alone. He was one of roughly 30 panels in a huge double-sided altarpiece that Perugino worked on for the church of Sant'Agostino in Perugia across the last two decades of his life, finishing parts of it not long before he died in 1523. Bartholomew is the apostle said to have been flayed alive, which is why painters gave him a knife to hold. In 1797 French troops under Napoleon took the altarpiece apart and carried pieces out of Italy, and over the following century its panels drifted into different hands and different countries. Perugia has since gathered about 20 of them back into a reconstruction. This one did not return. After passing through Paris and an American collection, it settled in Birmingham, Alabama, far from the choir it once helped enclose.