The Preaching of St Bartholomew

Author: Rosie Razzall

The drawing depicts St Bartholomew with his arms raised, preaching to a group of men and women, both seated and standing. The saint carries his own flayed skin over his shoulder like a tasselled shawl, with his scalp and hair dangling at his waist. Among the crowd on the right, some stare at the preacher intently while others close their eyes or turn away in horror. The substantial blank space between the saint and the group, as well as the abrupt vertical ending of the composition on the right-hand side and the simple outlines of the figures have pointed scholars to a copy after a fresco. For many years, it was wrongly believed to show St John the Baptist preaching,^[1] with the flayed skin misinterpreted as John the Baptist’s furs. The intact stippled hairline of the preaching saint may also have caused scholars to overlook the gruesome evidence of Bartholomew’s martyrdom. The misidentification of the subject meant that the drawing was wrongly connected to the largely lost Lateran frescoes that Pisanello worked on at the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome during the 1430s. This led Fossi Todorow and others mistakenly to consider the sheet as part of Pisanello’s taccuino di viaggio (traveller’s notebook).^[2]

In fact, a close connection between this drawing and the illustrated scenes in a martyrology manuscript in Venice^[3] was first noted by Toesca in 1958.^[4] The Rotterdam drawing corresponds to a coloured illustration of the same scene in the manuscript (fig.), in which the preaching takes place in an architectural setting. Two other drawings in Paris^[5] and Berlin^[6] also depict scenes that can be found in the same manuscript, a Baptism of Christ and a group of onlookers at the flagellation of St Alessandrina. The identification of the scene as St Bartholomew was picked up on by Degenhart and Schmitt, who retained the Pisanello attribution for the Rotterdam sheet,^[7] but placed the Paris drawing on stylistic grounds in Siena.^[8] The relationship between the Venice manuscript and the three drawings was only examined in detail by Heisterberg in 2015, who noted that the Paris drawing shares the same provenance as the Rotterdam sheet, and suggested that stylistically the two sheets, and probably the Berlin sheet too, must be by the same artist.^[9] The distinctive use of horizontal hatched lines across the noses, foreheads and cheeks of the figures in both drawings confirms this supposition.

Heisterberg, moreover, agrees with the general consensus that all three drawings and the scenes in the manuscript share a common prototype, probably a fresco.^[10] Given the rarity of St Bartholomew’s martyrdom as a painted subject, and the existence of the other two copies by the same hand, the scene is most likely to have been part of a now-lost fresco cycle. She speculates that this cycle may have decorated the smaller oratory of the Chiesa dei Battuti Neri in Ferrara.^[11] The lay confraternity of the Battuti Neri (which also owned the Venice manuscript) dedicated itself to the conversion and care of criminals before their execution, and a series of saintly martyrdoms in the oratory may have been intended to provide a final opportunity for prayer and repentance on the way to the city’s gallows. The Paris sheet bears a watermark from Ferrara from around the 1410s-1440s,^[12] and indeed Pisanello was in Ferrara with his workshop in 1433, and on various occasions between 1438 and 1448, where he would have been able to make copies from the cycle. In 2022, Dominique Cordellier and Laura Angelucci returned the Paris drawing from Pisanello’s workshop to the artist’s oeuvre.^[13] If that drawing is attributed to Pisanello then the Rotterdam drawing must go too, so the attribution is tentatively accepted here.