The martyrs may look physically disfigured and wracked with pain, but they aren’t defeated. Quite the opposite.
I remember once being shown a statue of St. Bartholomew inside a church. The saint had a flowing robe elegantly wrapped around him. It seemed nice. I liked it. The tour guide asked us all to look again. It wasn’t a robe wrapped around him. It was his own skin.
St. Bartholomew, you see, was martyred by having his skin flayed from his body while he was still alive. Just typing that sentence made me queasy. When I realized what the statue was actually depicting, it also made me queasy. I apologize if I just gave you the same feeling.
Sometimes, the stories that describe the gruesome deaths of saints can be hard to take in. It isn’t that I struggle with the fact that there are martyrs who died young or even object to hearing stories about their deaths. It’s the amount of detail that gets to me. They’re heartbreaking. They put images in our mind that we would rather not dwell on and make us sad over events that happened a long time ago. I cannot help but think sometimes how could people have done that to another person? To make it worse, Catholic art seems to positively celebrate the horror.
The most famous statue of St. Bartholomew is in the Milan Duomo, which is so stunning that it halts tourists in their tracks when they see it.
The sculpture, even in pictures, is overwhelming powerful. It has a presence about it.
Mark Twain saw it when he visited Milan. He was appalled. Later, he wrote in Innocents Abroad, “It was a hideous thing, and yet there was a fascination about it some where. I am very sorry I saw it, because I shall always see it now. I shall dream of it sometimes. I shall dream that it is resting its corded arms on the bed’s head and looking down on me with its dead eyes; I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs.”
Twain goes on to note the anatomical accuracy of the sculpture, which admits of no abstraction or simplification of the human form. The observer cannot pretend that it is anything other than suffering body.
Why not focus on the beautiful parts?
There’s a long tradition of showing the saints with marks of death on their bodies and the instruments of their torture in their hands. There is also a tradition of saints triumphant and glorified in Heaven. So, why not limit ourselves to the latter? Why not focus on the glory and leave the rest behind?
I think it’s because, in the Christian tradition, suffering for the faith is glory. The martyrs may look physically disfigured and wracked with pain, but they aren’t defeated. Quite the opposite. They are victorious. To their dying breath, they defied their oppressors. They held to the truth and didn’t allow any amount of intimidation, suffering, and evil to change their mind. There is great beauty in this, and sacred art of the martyrs celebrates those who have won personal freedom at tremendous cost. They died, yes, but they died free.
St. Bartholomew wears his own death like the cape of a conquering hero. His gaze is absolute.
His soul is transcendent. His body stands and moves and breathes when it ought not. He is a miracle.
Photographer Carolyn Whitson, in a thoughtful meditation, calls the St. Bartholomew of Milan the “Anti-David” while comparing it to Michelangelo’s famous sculpture. She writes,
“Let's compare: a contrapposto stance, a severe and aggressive gaze, both hands holding weapons (if you'll permit me the concept of the gospel as Bartholomew's source of power), and a hyper-real nude body. But the difference is so striking! Where the David (ca. 1501) is every bit as sensual and celebratory of the flesh as a Classical Dionysus, Apollo, or Antinous, and gives us shrewd power held in resolve, the Bartholomew rips that sensuality off like a mask…”
The David is a masterpiece of beauty, a gorgeous achievement that rightly sits at the pinnacle of the sculptural arts. The statue of St. Bartholomew is something else entirely. He radiates beauty even as his surface form is grotesque. At first glance, the Bartholomew could even be said to be ugly. But if the statue is ugly, why does everyone stop to stare? Why is it so transfixing?
Sculpturing the soul
The answer is that it isn’t ugly at all. We have to carefully consider what beauty actually is. At the sensible level, beauty in the visual arts is a quality of surfaces. It is what we see – harmony, form, balance, color, and so on. But this isn’t all that beauty is. It’s more than a sensible phenomenon. Beauty arises from the depths of a person or thing. It emerges from the soul the creative depths where God continually holds that person or thing in existence with his love. The Milan Bartholomew is a sculpture of a soul. It uses visible surfaces to unveil the invisible. This is the power we sense within it. It is beauty completely set free from the visible surfaces and yet, somehow, showing up in our consciousness when we look at the statue.
There’s a lot to think about, here.
I know that I often opt for comfort over discomfort, and even the smallest of “martyrdoms” such as fasting and taking time for prayer are a struggle. My soul is not yet beautiful and I have to sit with the discomfort of knowing that if I’m a work of art, I’m still very much flawed. The discomfort is good, and that’s why I like the Church’s sacred art tradition of martyr-saints. The discomfort makes me ask hard questions about myself, about what it means to live a truly beautiful life, and why it is that beauty is a virtue that calls us out, challenges us, and even imposes suffering upon us. Maybe this is our reminder to keep looking, to not look away but keep searching out our destiny.
It’s never easy to go deep, but I cannot help but think that St. Bartholomew was glad, very glad indeed, to exchange his bodily skin for a robe of glory.
