Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew

One of Ribera's favorite subjects was St. Bartholomew, an apostle and missionary who was skinned alive for his Christian faith. The artist depicted Bartholomew's martyrdom in an earlier print, whose composition may have served as a model for this drawing. The distinctive arrangement of figures--from the knife sharpener at far right, to his counterpart binding Bartholomew's legs, to the standing executioner flaying his forearm--lends the drawing an instructional dimension, demonstrating, step by step, how to martyr a saint. The inscription below is not in Ribera's hand but may have been added by a later owner of the sheet. --Exhibition Label, from "Visions and Nightmares: Four Centuries of Spanish Drawings"
On same mat as I, 106a.
See a similarly conceived study for the martyred saint, Teylers Museum, inv. E 021 (van Tuyll, Italian Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Teyler Museum, 2021, no. 719).