Art and Literature
Christian tradition has three stories about Bartholomew's death: "One speaks of his being kidnapped, beaten unconscious, and cast into the sea to drown. Another account states that he was crucified upside down, and another says that he was skinned alive and beheaded in Albac or Albanopolis", near Bashkale, Turkey.
The account of Bartholomew being skinned alive is the most represented in works of art, and consequently Bartholomew is often shown with a large knife, holding his own skin (as in Michelangelo's Last Judgment), or both. Bartholomew is also the patron saint of tanners.
Bartholomew plays a part in Francis Bacon's Utopian tale New Atlantis, about a mythical isolated land Bensalem populated by a people dedicated to reason and natural philosophy. Some twenty years after the ascension of Christ the people of Bensalem found an ark floating off their shore. The ark contained a letter as well as the books of the Old and New Testaments. The letter was from Bartholomew the Apostle and declared that an angel told him to set the ark and its contents afloat. Thus the scientists of Bensalem received the revelation of the Word of God.
Read more about this topic: Bartholomew The Apostle
Famous quotes containing the words art and, art and/or literature:
“The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.”
—William Morris (1834–1896)
“[The] attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)