Saint Bartholomew

Bartolomeo Caporali's 1477 Saint Bartholomew reflects the Perugian painter's work in the decade after the Annunciation of 1462 and shows a consolidation of the central Italian spatial advances he had been absorbing. Bartholomew — one of the twelve apostles, whose martyrdom by flaying made the knife his standard attribute — was a common presence in polyptych altarpieces as a lateral saint, and Caporali's standing figure was almost certainly one element in a larger multi-panel programme. By 1477, Perugia's artistic culture was converging with what Pietro Perugino would synthesise into the definitive Umbrian style in the following decade, and Caporali's work shows the same attention to gentle idealization and atmospheric softness that would characterise the mature Umbrian school.

Caporali gives Bartholomew a dignified frontal stance with the flaying knife held in a slight diagonal that animates the vertical composition. The saint's golden-brown mantle falls in smooth, simplified folds without the angular complexity of Ferrarese or northern Italian contemporaries. The face shows a soft Umbrian idealization — large eyes, clear features — modelled in warm underpaint with fine surface glazes.