30 EDME BOUCHARDON
French (active in Rome
and Paris), 1698-1762
Saint Bartholomew,
circa 1734-1750
Terracotta
57.2 cm (22V 2 in.)
94.SC.23Bouchardon was one of the most significant sculptors in eighteenth-century France
and his works provided a key stylistic link between the grand Baroque classicism of
Louis XIV and the Neoclassicism that flourished from around 1750. One of the earliest
French sculptors to explore a full-blown Neoclassical style, Bouchardon avoided dry
academicism through the naturalistic modeling of surfaces, the elegant attenuation
of figural proportions, and the introduction of simple, graceful poses. This terracotta
Saint Bartholomew is probably a preliminary, rejected model for Bouchardon's
decoration of the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. The commission, which occupied
the sculptor from 1734 until 1750, called for life-size stone statues in front of each
pillar of the nave and choir. The narrow, contained compositions of the figures, as seen
in the Saint Bartholomew, conform to the exigencies of this placement. Although the
final statue of Saint Bartholomew does not resemble the Museum's model, two other
Saint-Sulpice figures, Saint Peter and Saint Andrew, closely follow the terracotta in
pose, drapery, and anatomy.
The subject of the terracotta, Saint Bartholomew, lived in the first century and is
supposed to have preached in India and Armenia before being flayed alive and beheaded.
The saint is commonly portrayed holding a knife, the instrument of his martyrdom,
with his own flayed skin draped over one arm or laid on a tree stump. The saint was a
popular subject in paintings from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but he rarely
appears in sculpture. In Bouchardon's portrayal, the seminude saint stands with his
hands clenched around a book and gazes far off to his right as if absorbed in a divine
vision. The old man's loose flesh and gaunt facial features are treated with exceptional
sensitivity. The flayed skin, which hangs off the back of the tree stump, is rendered in
gruesome detail, with the sagging hands, feet, and genitalia fully articulated. PAF88 EUROPEAN SCULPTURE