Duomo Milan – the heart thrills

A MAGNOLIA BEHIND THE CATHEDRAL

Milan, 9 March 2020

A virus stalks the land, it goes by the name of Covid-19.

For weeks it has been spreading quietly, behind our backs, skipping from hand to hand, riding on droplets we cough out. Now it is out in the open. The patients are pouring into the hospitals. The hospitals are struggling. The frailest – the old, the weak – are dying. The government has enacted drastic measures. Here in Milan, we are in lock-down. No-one can enter or leave the region without a good and serious reason, no-one can even move around within the region. The government exhorts us to stay home. In fact, if we have even a small temperature it orders us to stay home. If we are infected, we are to go to the hospital only if we can no longer breathe. These are anxious times for us all.

True to the philosophy behind this blog, I have been looking around me for beauty and the peace it can bring the anxious soul. I have found it, in a magnolia tree behind Milan’s cathedral.

As a previous post of mine attests, I love magnolias – who does not? I discovered this particular magnolia tree a few years ago. It grows on a small lawn tucked away between the cathedral’s gothic apse and its southern transept. Last year, I happened to pass by when it was in full bloom. Here, I took the photo with the apse behind.

Here, I took it with the transept behind.

On impulse, I decided to watch the tree cycle through the seasons, finding excuses to walk this way from time to time. The next time I came by it was summer. The flowers had given way to thick foliage.

As a previous post attests, I have a weakness for this shade of green, but I found the contrast between the green of the leaves and the white of the cathedral’s stone particularly stunning. So entranced was I that I snapped several photos of this symphony of green and white.

Shortly after taking this photo, we moved up to Vienna for the rest of the summer, and the autumn took us to Japan once more. So it was only in the dead of winter that I saw the tree again. I saw it at night, its skeleton of branches barely lit by the lights illuminating the cathedral.

The delicate tracery of the cathedral’s gothic windows took pride of place.

And now, in these dark times, I have gone back to see the tree in flower once more, to draw solace from it.

PIAZZA DUOMO, MILAN

Milan, 7 March 2018

My wife and I frequently have to go up to Piazza Duomo, Cathedral Square, in Milan, where we visit a little store in the underground station to do our printing. We can’t be bothered to buy a home printer, and anyway we need excuses to leave the house – one of the early lessons of retirement.

Our usual route takes us through the back streets, coming out at the piazza’s north-east corner. This is the sight that greets us:

I’m very fond of this view, because it encapsulates something like a thousand years of Milan’s architectural history. There are some even older bits of architecture scattered around the centre of the city, but at this point in time they really are just bits – some mosaic-covered arches here and there, from Milan’s early Christian period, tucked away at the back of what were once 3rd-4th century basilicas; short stretches of the city’s Roman streets, preserved in odd corners of underground stations; that sort of thing. Milan’s visible architecture really only starts in the early 1000’s AD.

Which is more or less where I want to start unpicking my photo. I invite my readers to zoom in on the campanile poking up at the back of the photo.

This is the campanile of the church of San Gottardo, built around 1336 by order of Azzone Visconti, then Lord of Milan. Azzone dedicated the church to Saint Gotthard because this saint was invoked by those who suffered from gout and stones, and poor Azzone suffered from both. The campanile shows the typical details of the Gothic-Lombard style: red brick combined with white marble, the latter often used in a series of small columns at the top of the tower, but also used to pick out details. Here is the campanile from behind, where this lovely combination of red brick and white stone is seen clearly.

The campanile is particular in another way, in being octagonal. It is not unknown for campanili to take this shape, but the campanile of San Gottardo, in its slimness and height, is a particularly elegant example of the form. In its current format, the campanile has no clock, which is a pity because at Azzone’s orders it originally carried Milan’s (and probably Italy’s) first public clock. This caused so much excitement at the time that for centuries afterwards the area around the church was known as Quarter of the Hours.

Next in time is the massive white Duomo, the city’s cathedral, to the left in my photo.

Actually, the building took centuries to complete, so it’s a little difficult to know what century to assign it to. Going by overall style, we can say that it belongs to the late 14^th, early 15^th Century. And in fact the decision to build the Duomo was taken in 1386 – so some 50 years after San Gottardo was built – by the-then archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo. It was to take the place of a baptistery and two existing cathedrals – the “winter” cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore and the “summer” cathedral of Santa Tecla (a combination I have never heard of before). Antonio da Saluzzo was thinking big; he wanted a very large church worthy of the great city of Milan. But he was still thinking traditional; he had in mind a brick and marble church along the lines of San Gottardo. But that idea was nixed by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who had just taken over the lordship of Milan (through a treacherous attack on his uncle Barnabò, who died shortly thereafter in prison; poisoned, it was whispered, by his nephew). Milan, ever since the Roman Empire, when it became the capital city for a while, looked north across the Alps towards the Empire’s border on the Rhine as well as south. Gian Galeazzo wanted to use the new cathedral to firmly anchor Milan to northern Europe through the use of its architectural styles, which at this point meant late gothic in the Rhenish-Bohemian style. Not only did that mean a different architectural style to the ones then in vogue in Italy, it meant a stone-faced building. So the Duomo that we see today is at its core Lombard, made essentially out of brick, but northern European in look because it is faced with stone. And what a lovely stone it is! A white marble with pinkish hues from the quarries of Candoglia close to Lake Maggiore.

To get the style he wanted, Gian Galeazzo imported French architects, who already then behaved in that typically French manner, poo-pooing on the building techniques of their Lombard masons and generally pissing them off. Neverthless, things moved along, and by the time Gian Galeazzo died in 1402 (but not before becoming the first duke of Milan by paying Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, King of the Romans, 1,000 florins for the privilege), half the church was complete. At that point, the whole building programme ran out of steam. Things crawled along for another century and a half, until Cardinal Carlo Borromeo took over the archbishopric. There was a spurt of activity for several decades until his death, at which point worked slowed to a crawl again. There were endless arguments about what style the facade should have, and numerous designs were proposed, accepted, then abandoned (something which seems to have been a general problem in Italy, as an earlier post of mine attests). This photo shows what the Duomo looked like in about 1745.

As readers can see, not only was the facade of the Duomo a mess, the cathedral itself didn’t yet have that forest of spires which give the building its distinctive look today. It took Napoleon to get the city to make the final push to get over the finish line. In 1805, he wanted to be crowned King of Italy in the cathedral and he wanted it to look worthy of this solemn ceremony. He made the rash promise that the French State would pay for the final works. This never actually happened, but the promise that someone else would pay galvanized the community and by 1819, when this painting was made, the Duomo looked pretty much how it is today.

Work still continued, and strictly speaking even today it is not finished; there are places where statues are still missing. But when the final door in the facade was installed in 1965, a mere 600 years after work was started, the Duomo was officially declared to be finished. Oof!

Next in time, we have the building standing in front of the campanile of San Gottardo.

Unfortunately, because of the city government’s bizarre idea of planting palm trees in the piazza, one can now hardly see the building in question from where I took my photo, so let me insert here another photo which I lifted from the internet.

This is the so-called Palazzo Reale, the Royal Palace, although it almost never had royalty staying there. Since the earliest times, this was the area where the government buildings of the Comune and then the Duchy stood. As rulers of Milan and the surrounding territories succeeded each other – the Viscontis, the Sforzas, the French, the Spaniards, the Austrians, the French again under Napoleon, back to the Austrians once Napoleon was safely locked away on St. Helena – they or the Governors they sent added, demolished, changed, extended, and remodeled the government buildings and the lodgings they inherited to fit their needs and their egos. You would think that the result would be a hodgepodge, but actually a remodeling carried out in the 1760s gave the building its defining characteristics both inside and out. The facade that we see in my photo, the first example of the neoclassical style in Milan, is the fruit of that remodeling. Its architect, Giuseppe Piermarini, had a really hard time with the work. His purported client was Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Este, a younger son of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (and brother to Marie-Antoinette, who lost her head in the French Revolution). Maria Theresa had packed him off to Milan to marry Beatrice d’Este and to be Vienna’s governor of Lombardy. Ferdinand had dreams of Piermarini building him a residence worthy of his status (at least as he saw it) and a building that would rival the other stately piles going up around Europe (he particularly wanted to compete with his elder brother’s Schönbrunn summer palace in Vienna). But Piermarini’s real client, because she was paying the bills, was Maria Theresa. She was famously cheeseparing and anyway didn’t see her younger son’s position in quite as grand a light as he did. She just wanted him to suitably represent the Austrian Empire in Lombardy and to leave all the decision-making to Vienna. Somehow Piermarini managed to satisfy everyone without getting the sack or having a nervous breakdown and came up with the austerely elegant building that we see today.

The building experienced numerous further vicissitudes. Its moment of greatest glory was under Napoleon, when Milan was the capital of the Kingdom of northern Italy. After the Austrians came back in 1815, Milan went back to being capital of just Lombardy. With Italian unification, the building was handed over to the House of Savoy, but they rarely used it and eventually sold it to the municipality. It got badly damaged during a bombing raid in World War II. It now houses various museums and exhibition spaces.

Then we go to the building on the far right of my photo.

This was part of a rebuilding campaign decided on in 1860 in the wake of Italian unification. In their enthusiasm, the city fathers proclaimed their intention of radically redesigning the piazza in front of the Duomo, making it bigger and grander, and of creating a new major avenue to celebrate King Victor Emmanuel II, first king of the newly-united Italy. I suspect this urban remodeling plan was also seen as a way of cleaning up some embarrassingly leprous zones of the city centre. For instance, putting up the building in my photo, the southern Palazzo dei Portici, allowed the municipality to clear away a whole neigbourhood located there which went by the name of Rebecchino and which was full of petty criminals and other louche types who preyed on the pilgrims and other assorted tourists who visited the Duomo. The remodeling of the piazza in front of the Duomo took from 1865 to 1873. Its most famous element, which you can’t see in my photo, is the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, which runs from Piazza del Duomo to the piazza in front of the Scala theatre.

But more significantly, I think, the whole piazza in front of the Duomo now has a harmony and elegance which it definitely lacked.

For once, a rebuilding programme decided by a municipal government has left us with something better than what it replaced, especially after a much later municipal government decided to ban advertising billboards on the building opposite the Duomo, Palazzo Carmini.

Which brings us to the final building in my photo, the one squeezed in between the Palazzo Reale and the Palazzo dei Portici.

Again, I think readers need another photo from closer by and without those silly palm trees in the way to appreciate the building.

It is a building in the Fascist style, the competition for its design being held in 1937 and construction of the winning design starting in 1938. I don’t know if there is a formal definition of the Fascist style, but these buildings tend to have a “Roman” look to them: the use of white stone facing and of semi-circular arches. They also tend to have little external decoration other than massive, heroic-looking statues and bas reliefs. I don’t know if De Chirico was a Fascist, but many of his paintings have such building in them.

This particular building goes by the name of Arengario, which is an old Italian word first used in the Middle Ages to describe municipal buildings. The root of the word, “aringare”, is the same as the English word “harangue”, and in fact Arengari were buildings from which the municipal authorities addressed (or perhaps harangued) the local citizenry. In later centuries, the term Arengario fell out of use, presumably because municipal authorities couldn’t be bothered any more with the direct democracy of addressing the people. But since the Fascists, Mussolini in the lead, liked to harangue the luckless populace, they brought the word back into use. As a result, a number of Facist-built Arengari, Milan being one of them, are to be found throughout Italy. I presume the idea was that the Fascist cadre would adress Milan’s citizenry drawn up in the piazza below.

The winning design actually had as its overall objective to balance the triumphal arch at the beginning of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele directly across the piazza, which is why there are two more-or-less identical buildings flanking the road which passes through them, rather than just the one you would need if all you were interested in was haranguing the crowds. The idea was that the road between the buildings would lead to another piazza (today Piazza Diaz) where the country’s modern (Fascist) companies would build their headquarters.

In the event, World War II intervened, construction was halted, what had been built was damaged during the bombing raid that damaged the Palazzo Reale next door, and the municipal authorities found themselves after the war with a damaged, unfinished Fascist building on their hands. The balcony from which the Fascist haranguing was meant to have taken place was quietly demolished and the rest of the buildings were completed by 1956. After various uses, the building next to the Palazzo Reale now houses Milan’s museum of 20^th Century art. I highly recommend this museum to any of my readers who happen to be passing though Milan.

Well, that finishes my little tour of Piazza Duomo. Without wanting to sound too much like the local tourism office (which used to be housed in the Arengario), I highly recommend my readers who come to Italy to stop off in Milan before they hasten on to Florence, Rome, and Venice. A stop in Milan can be highly rewarding – in my case, it got me my wife.

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Overview and zoom-in photos: mine
San Gottardo: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiesa_di_San_Gottardo_in_Corte
Duomo 1745 circa: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duomo_di_Milano#Contesto_urbanistico
Duomo 1819: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piazza_del_Duomo_(Milano)
Palazzo Reale: http://ciaomilano.it/e/sights/preale.asp
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_Vittorio_Emanuele_II
Piazza del Duomo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRUXl0wyvLY
Palazzo Carmini, 1970s: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Carminati
Arengario: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/339177415661775996/?lp=true
De Chirico painting: https://www.arteallimite.com/backup_2017/en/2016/07/la-pintura-metafisica-de-giorgio-de-chirico/

THE GOLDEN MEAN IN CHURCH FACADES

Milan, 15 March 2017

Many years ago, when I first visited Italy, one of the things that struck me was the very flat facades which Italian churches had. In the Basilica dei Fieschi, the topic of my last post, we came across a typical example of the genre.

These facades were so different from the much more vertical and more articulated church facades of Northern Europe which I was used to. I throw in here pictures of la Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, Cologne Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey as examples of what I mean.

Much more than these facades, I find that the facades of Italian churches, with all those acres of flatness, can be quite boring, if not downright ugly, to look at unless something is done to liven them up. Consider, for example, the facade of the Florentine Church of Santo Spirito, which my wife and I came across in our recent visit to Florence.

I mean, look at that! It’s just like staring at a blank wall from your office window. Every time we crossed the square in front of it – which, given the location of our rented apartment relative to the locations of the places we were visiting, was quite often – I would comment disapprovingly on the facade’s drabness, its flatness, its total boringness until my wife finally remarked with a touch of asperity that I was repeating myself. But I mean, look at it!

Somewhat less flat but just as drab are the facades of those Italian churches – and there are many – which for some reason never got completed, initially because of lack of money, or quarrels about proposed designs, or the start of wars, or the break-out of pestilence, and thereafter simply through inertia. The facade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, also in Florence, is an excellent example of this type.

Those rough bricks are just crying out for an elegant, visually interesting facing to be added. That, of course, was the plan. A competition was held, which Michelangelo won. His facade that would have looked like this.

He had gone so far as to choose the marble for the facade. But the Medici pope who was paying was short of cash. So Michelangelo had to choose a cheaper stone. Then the Pope died. Then there was a war. Then Michelangelo was called to Rome by another pope, and that was the end of that. There have been at least three attempts since then to complete the facade, the latest no more than a few years ago, but all have come to naught.

Of course, it is not automatically the case that a finished facade will look better than the original bare brick. Personally, I think that Michelangelo’s facade would have been a definite improvement. But that’s because I’m a fan of simplicity in design, and Michelangelo’s has all the looks of a simple design. Take a look at this facade, though, built more or less at the same time that Michelangelo’s wasn’t.

This is the church of the Certosa di Pavia, which my wife and I visited a few days after our visit to the Basilica dei Fieschi. It was a Carthusian monastery whose creation had been ordered by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan. The church was to be his family’s mausoleum, and therefore had to be suitably magnificent. For this purpose, he gave the monks access to large amounts of funds which they could only use to embellish the church. So when the Carthusian monks started on the facade, only the best was acceptable, and the more, the better. To the fundamentally sober facade, a riot of Renaissance statuary and bas-reliefs were added, covering every square centimetre of the facade’s surface. Let me zoom in on just a few of the details.

Luckily, all this hue and cry in stone does not overcome the overall effect, which is really very pleasing on the eye.

Not so in the case of Milan’s cathedral.

Here, the statuary and other embellishments on the facade have gotten completely out of hand. The effect is not helped by the over-the-top statuary and embellishments having invaded every square centimetre of the entire outer envelope. All this gives one the feeling that the cathedral is drowning in white marble froth.

So where does this all leave us? Well, I suppose we have here yet another example of Aristotle’s principle of the golden mean: we should always seek the middle ground between the extremes of excess and of deficiency. So in our case, neither facade-less nor frothy facade.

With this in mind I invite readers to go back to facade-less Basilica of San Lorenzo. What design could we propose to Florence’s city fathers? Let me immediately say that the obvious proposal of simply finally installing Michelangelo’s design won’t fly. This was there the very recent suggestion by the-then mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi (who, fyi, went on to be briefly Prime Minister of Italy). This proposal was shot down, on the grounds that putting up Michelangelo’s facade now would be akin to making fake Louis Vuitton handbags (that precise simile was not used, I hasten to add). So a copy of an old design is out. Which is a pity, because I think that the facade of the Florentine church of San Miniato, for instance

or of Pisa’s cathedral

would both nicely fit the golden mean principle.

Personally, I think we should take our cue from San Miniato’s use of colored lines, although maybe to avoid the criticism of simply copying the past, we could adapt a more modern approach to line-drawing: a Mondrian style, for instance.

A follower of Mondrian’s actually adapted the style to a building facade, although in this case it was a very secular subject, a café in Rotterdam.

Given the ecclesiastical nature of our subject as well as its venerable age, I think we would need to go for more muted colours than Mondrian’s signature blues, reds, and yellows. Perhaps we could adopt the more muted hues of his earlier works.

If I had access to an app which would allow me to make architectural drawings, I would come up with a design to propose to readers. Instead, I will just leave it to their imagination as to what a Mondrian-like facade on the Basilica of San Lorenzo might look like.

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Facade Basilica dei Fieschi: my photo
Facade Notre-Dame cathedral: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathédrale_Notre-Dame_de_Paris
Facade Cologne cathedral: http://www.learn.columbia.edu/ma/htm/related/ma_cologne_cath_01.htm
Facade Westminster Abbey: https://www.colourbox.com/image/london-westminster-abbey-west-facade-image-3357405
Facade Santo Spirito church: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Facciata_di_santo_spirito_01.JPG
Facade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_lorenzo_Facciata.JPG
Facade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo – Michelangelo’s design: http://www.fiorentininelmondo.it/it/home/143-san-lorenzo-e-la-facciata-di-michelangelo.html
Facade Certosa di Pavia: http://www.visual-italy.it/IT/lombardia/pavia/certosa/
Detail facade Certosa di Pavia: https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certosa_di_Pavia
Detail facade Certosa di Pavia: http://www.settemuse.it/viaggi_italia_lombardia/pavia_certosa.htm
Facade Milan cathedral: https://www.pinterest.com/mayavnt/duomo-milan/
Milan cathedral from side: http://topsy.one/hashtag.php?q=DuomodiMilano
Facade San Miniato church, Florence: https://www.gonews.it/2014/09/23/i-monaci-di-san-miniato-al-monte-chiedono-aiuto-per-il-restauro/amp/
Facade Pisa cathedral: https://www.turismo.intoscana.it/site/it/amp/Cattedrale-di-Santa-Maria-Assunta-a-Pisa/
Mondrian: https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/from-the-archive-spruce-apartments-by-architect-amin-taha/
De Stijl café: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/264727284317842292/
Early Mondrian: http://www.pbase.com/bmcmorrow/image/143392523

VIBRAM FIVEFINGER SHOES AND FLAYING

New York, 28 December 2012

My daughter has recently bought herself a pair of Vibram FiveFinger running shoes. For those of you who might not be familiar with this latest cool product, I add here a picture of my daughter’s pair.

I was not aware of the existence of these shoes until my daughter announced their purchase to me and my wife. In our university days, back in the 1970s, we had come across the-then cool new product, socks with toes, when the sister of one our roommates came to visit and turned up at breakfast time sporting them. For those of my readers who are in the Stone Age of coolness and have never even seen this product, I append a picture.

Intrigued by these strange-looking – but utterly cool – shoes, I visited the web site of the company which designed them, which as an Italophile I am proud to say is Italian. Only Italians could possibly have designed such a shoe. The company in question is Vibram, and I quote here part of the blurb on the shoe from the web site:

“Industrial Designer, Robert Fliri, first proposed the idea of FiveFingers footwear to Marco Bramani, grandson of Vibram founder Vitale Bramani, who immediately embraced the concept. Bramani and Fliri developed the first barefoot shoes, then showed the concept to Vibram USA president & CEO, Tony Post. As a former collegiate runner, Post quickly became a firm believer in the benefits of natural running* and fitness training. He discovered that Vibram FiveFingers were the unique solution to the knee pain and soreness he was experiencing when running.

Soon, they collaborated with the full Vibram team to position Vibram FiveFingers® as a performance product for running, fitness and outdoor sports. FiveFingers not only encouraged a more natural forefoot strike during running, but also allowed the foot to move and work in a completely natural way, while providing grip and protection over a variety of surfaces.

*Running in Vibram FiveFingers requires a significant increase in lower leg and foot strength. A gradual transition is critical to avoid overuse injuries. For more information on making a safe transition please refer to our Barefoot Running page.” (1)

The site has this picture, which shows the ample delights awaiting the purchaser of these shoes when running in them:

Yet, in all this wash of coolness and delight, I have to tell you that I find these shoes rather creepy, because they remind me of Saint Bartholomew. For those of my readers who are not well versed in Catholic martyrology, Saint Bartholomew, mentioned as one of the Twelve Apostles in the three Synoptic gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles, is reputed to have been martyred in Armenia by being flayed alive and crucified upside down. Since flaying is not a common practice any more, I should further elucidate that flaying is the act of stripping the skin off a person, preferably when still alive so as to make the experience of dying all that much more excruciatingly painful.

As anyone who has ever walked through the European medieval section of a good art museum will know, Medieval painters – no doubt responding to popular demand – took a morbid delight in showing in clinical detail the varied torments to which the Christian martyrs were subjected; given Saint Bartholomew’s particularly grisly end, he was a popular subject of such paintings. I show here such an example.

Please note the stoicism with which Saint Bartholomew is taking it all. Personally, I would have been screaming and begging and pleading and blubbering and generally carrying on. But then I am not a Christian martyr.

Usually, representations of Saint Bartholomew will show the poor man, stoic to the last, carrying his flayed skin as well as one of the knives used to flay him.

This particular representation I find quite realistic since the – hopefully – corpse at the end of a flaying presumably must be a bloody mess, although in this particular painting the bloodiness looks more like a body stocking. Indeed, as time passed the gory details tended to be dropped in favour of a more romantic representation, such as this one in St. John Lateran in Rome.

I am particularly mystified by the fact that the Saint has recovered his skin in this representation, but presumably when one goes to heaven one becomes whole again.

This trend towards the sucrose was spectacularly bucked by one Marco d’Agrate, who in 1562 created a gruesomely realistic statue of Saint Bartholomew which now resides in the Duomo of Milan. I happen to know the Duomo well since my wife is Milanese and as a patriotic duty we always visit the Duomo every time we go back. As this photo shows, Signor d’Agrate has benefited from the vivisections of human bodies that Renaissance scientists had managed to carry out in the face of the Church’s disapproval and he has created a good representation of the muscles and sinews of a human body after the skin has been stripped off. He has of course maintained the tradition of having the Saint hold his flayed skin but has made more of a fashion statement of it, draping it artistically around the Saint’s shoulders.

And it is now that we come to the connection with the Vibram FiveFingers shoe. This photo, taken from another angle, shows very clearly the feet of the flayed skin. I see an uncanny resemblance in these with the Vibram shoe. Hence my feeling of creepiness.

Happy holidays!

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1. http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/about_vibram_fivefingers/

socks with toes: http://screaminglywonderful.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/26-270d242b-4a17-46e5-af00-642d212561ac1.jpg
St. Bartholomew being flayed-painting: http://tomperna.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/martyrdom-of-st-bartholomew.jpg
St. Bartholomew standing-painting: http://medievalmilanetc.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/1330-0824the-apostle-st-bartholomew-matteo-di-giovanni-about-1480-tempera-on-wood-budapest4.jpg
St. Bartholomew statue Duomo: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-e4KglOQz_YY/TpSZV147dJI/AAAAAAAAFww/NlApP8L0T-I/s1600/Flayed%2Bsaint.jpg
St. Bartholomew statue-the feet: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-DgRk_bNF1uQ/TgTtgrB10RI/AAAAAAAADMI/QxIB4yOl-Dc/s1600/00%2B1520978-The-statue-of-a-flayed-St-Bartholomew-wearing-his-skin-0.jpg