Restoration of the statue of St Bartholomew

Milan Cathedral is known all over the world for the splendid variery of its sculptural decorations: thousands of figures, mostly saints but not only, populate this Cathedral, making it unique in the artistic panorama of all times. Among these countless faces, there are very few figures that remain etched in the memory of the faithful and visitors enough to be remembered accurately. One of them is certainly the sculpture by Marco d’Agrate representing Saint Bartholomew.

The apostle, who, according to tradition, was sentenced to martyrdom in Armenia where he was skinned and then beheaded, is depicted with his own skin slung over his shoulders, the knife – the instrument of his martyrdom – in his right hand, and the open Gospel held in his left hand. The statue has always struck the eye of the beholder because of the impressive realism and anatomical precision of its details. Despite what many people may imagine, the statue has been moved numerous times over the centuries like so many of the Duomo’s statues, and we can reconstruct through the documents from Veneranda Fabbrica’s Archives.

The sculpture, realized presumably in the 1660s, was placed outdoors on the southern flank, which we have to imagine, unlike as we know it today, facing a narrow street that separated the Cathedral, then still under construction, from the side of Palazzo Reale, later demolished to make way for the present small square.

The choice of placing that statue in that fairly unlikely place made Veneranda Fabbrica’s Chapter deliberate, about a century after its creation, to remove this and three other statues considered “of great value” from their location and bring them inside. In addition to St. Bartholomew, the statues of St. Mary Magdalene, St. John the Evangelist and St. Michael by other sculptors are removed from the southern windows as well. The minutes recording this decision, dated 21st August 1664, report precisely that they could not be seen by those who would wish to admire them and. For this reason, it was noted the administrators’ desire to place them inside the Cathedral, near the chapel of St. John Bono, that is, in the southern transept.

As we can reconstruct from both archival and bibliographical sources, the statues were placed elsewhere, namely in the retrochoir. In Serviliano Lattuada’s  “Description of Milan” dated back to 1737, the statue of St. Bartholomew is, in fact, shown immediately after the Chrismon, together with the other three statues brought inside in the seventeenth century. Probably even this location did not seem accessible enough to the already many admirers of these extraordinary sculptures. That’s why in 1743 there is evidence of a petition by an anonymous “pious person” who offered to bear the expenses of transporting the statues of St. Bartholomew and St. Michael from the retrochoir to the chapel of St. John Bono. This relocation once again was not realized, as evidenced by the Guidebooks of the first half of the nineteenth century, which still mention St. Bartholomew where Lattuada had seen it.

Only in the early twentieth century do we actually find the celebrated sculpture in a new place. Photographs of the time held in the Archives show it, with certainty from the 1920s, between the altar of the Presentation and the altar of St. Agnes, close to the side entrance of the Cathedral, toward the Archbishopric.

Maddalena Peschiera

Elisa Mantia