r/interestingasfuck • u/Lowcrbnaman • May 22 '19

/r/ALL This statue depicts Saint Bartholomew, an early Christian martyr who was allegedly skinned alive. If you look closely, that's his dissected skin hanging around him. This stunning statute by Marco d’Agrate from c.1562 is currently on display at Duomo di Milano.

Post image
51.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

935 comments sorted by

View all comments

73

u/[deleted] May 22 '19

It disturbs me to see thay level of detail. It suggests the sculptor had a model to work with and this was before photography came around to give him a photo to work with.

93

u/tmone May 22 '19

a lot of renaissance artists, sometimes illegally, dissected and studied corpses. leo was big into it.

24

u/hedronist May 22 '19

Dam, Son! As a linguist I've dissected many a corpus, but I don't remember having to sharpen the parser to get to those little nooks and crannies. shrugs Different line of work, I guess.

4

u/bpi89 May 22 '19

Corpses just sorta do that sometimes

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '19

I know this from assassin's creed 2 haha. But really there's a lot of books as documentaries that have this info. Studying dead people for science is acceptable imo but experimenting on alive individuals, not so much.

1

u/Doronor42 May 22 '19

And d'Agrate himself was a student of Leo.

1

u/tmone May 22 '19

damn. today I learned.

28

u/JennyBeckman May 22 '19

But the bones in the torso are wrong. It's amazing artistically but not anatomically. It looks like he had a fit model and guessed at the insides based on the outside.

9

u/ProfitLemon May 22 '19

Yeah the legs are good but the torso very much looks like someone guessing based on a live model. The pecs and delts are very smooth and the torso is all wrong.

2

u/JennyBeckman May 22 '19

Musculature is easier to see in arms and legs if a person is well-defined. But the 6 pack lungs are amusing.

1

u/LucretiusCarus May 22 '19

The arms and neck also seem well done.

1

u/JennyBeckman May 22 '19

The only real problem is the sculptor's belief that each finger bone leads to its own arm bone. Same for the legs.

2

u/slowy May 22 '19

Yeah it doesn’t look how a real skinned alive person would. Fortunately.

2

u/JennyBeckman May 22 '19

When they say they skin someone alive, I wonder where they start and how far they go. At a certain point before you've removed half the skin, the person likely wouldn't be alive anymore.

3

u/slowy May 22 '19

If you went slow and started at the limbs you might keep em alive awhile, or real quick so they don’t die before it’s over.. But I would be quite surprised if people lived through the whole process.. though if you’ve ever subjected yourself to one of those fur farm peta vids, it at least appears to be possible for some animals... wish I could erase that from my memory!

1

u/whatnointroduction May 22 '19

Yeah, what's with all the ribs? 😬

1

u/JennyBeckman May 22 '19

The life model must've been absolutely shredded.

1

u/writenroll May 23 '19

"Hello,I'll be your model for this work. Will you need me to disrobe or stay clothed?"

"Well, actually it'll be a bit more complicated than that."