Il martirio di san Bartolomeo

Bartholomew was an apostle said to have been skinned alive, and Ribera returned to his story more than once. In this version from 1634 he holds back from the horror. The saint is stretched and bound, but the knife has not yet touched him. The executioner is still testing the edge of his blade, and Bartholomew looks upward in the last quiet moment before it begins. Ribera was a Spaniard who spent his working life in Naples, then ruled by Spain, and he had learned from Caravaggio how to drag a single raking light across ordinary aging skin. Painters of the Counter-Reformation used martyrdoms like this to reach worshippers through the body. This canvas came to the National Gallery in Washington in 1990.