Saint Bartholomew holds a flayed skin containing Michelangelo’s face in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment.
Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment on the chapel’s altar wall between 1536 and 1541. The enormous fresco shows Christ judging humanity, surrounded by saints, angels, the saved, and the condemned. Saint Bartholomew appears among the figures near Christ.
Bartholomew is traditionally shown with his own skin because accounts of his martyrdom describe him as having been flayed. In Michelangelo’s unusual visual treatment, the hanging skin bears a distorted self-portrait of the artist. Art historians commonly identify the face as Michelangelo’s, although interpretations of the image’s meaning vary.
The detail is easy to confuse with a conventional portrait because Michelangelo did not sign the fresco in the usual way. The self-portrait may express suffering, humility, or the artist’s identification with the condemned, but the saint’s identity and attribute are firmly established.