The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew

Bartolomeo Manfredi was a Roman Caravagesque painter who became the key transmitter of Caravaggio's style to northern European artists visiting Rome in the 1610s and 1620s. His Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, painted around 1622, deploys Caravaggio's tenebrism with full confidence. Bartolomew's flaying was among the most brutal of apostolic martyrdoms and provided Manfredi with material for a dramatically lit scene of suffering.

The saint is shown bound, his tormented face turned upward in extremis. Manfredi's characteristic tenebrism — deep black shadows out of which lit forms emerge with startling intensity — structures the entire composition. The executioner's muscular body is rendered with the physicality Caravaggio made fashionable, and the colour is reduced to warm flesh against near-black ground.