From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In this moment of our politics, I find myself seeking out certain images of cruelty in art, as if I need to look straight at it and into it. Cruelty is everywhere in Renaissance painting: in its crucifixions, flagellations, massacres of the innocents, martyrdoms of the saints. Like theologians and philosophers, artists are drawn to these knots of suffering, the conundrum of the deliberate infliction of pain. And here is this astonishing painting by Giovanni Bellini, from around 1505–07, so gravely measured and beautiful with its limpid, equable light. (There’s a more muddled workshop version in the Courtauld.) The painting ought not to feel measured – something horrible is happening, and in any case, quite apart from the murders, the scene is busy with activity; woodsmen, who haven’t noticed yet the drama unfolding on the path, are at their work among the trees. Yet even the violence appears stately, rhythmic. For a moment you might think that there are four murders here rather than two, punctuating the picture across its space like music: Saint Peter fallen to his knees, a woodsman raising his axe to a tree in the wood behind, Saint Peter’s companion attacked, another woodsman about to bring down another axe.
The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr (c. 1505–07), Giovanni Bellini. National Gallery, London
You can almost hear the thud of the axes against the trunks; you can almost hear birdsong. In between the exquisitely crisply painted leaves of the trees, you glimpse blue sky; and in the distance cattle, two figures at a well, and Verona, Saint Peter Martyr’s native city. A shepherd sits with his back to us, his staff crossing the lovely patterning of tree trunks against bright light behind: organic bar code, spelling out something just beyond understanding. The men’s tools and their weapons echo the slanting stumps of branches. The woodsmen are poor, the holes in ragged trousers revealed by the recent three-and-a-half year restoration, which also uncovered the cleaver in Saint Peter’s skull.
And in the foreground an ugly scuffle, an unequal struggle, hardly time to cry out, the work of a few moments. So many years to build the complex material and spiritual life of a man, only a few moments to destroy it. Saint Peter was a 13th-century Italian Dominican friar, dedicated to preaching against the Cathar heresy in the north Italian cities; Milanese Cathars, so the story goes, hired assassins who waylaid him and his companion. His companion escaped but died of his wounds later. As Peter died he recited the first words of the Creed, ‘Credo in Deum’ – or, in some versions, wrote them in his own blood. Nothing so gratuitous in Bellini’s painting: just violent death, suddenly. There’s no insistence on the brutishness of the assassins, as there might have been in the work of a different painter; one face is all but obscured by his helmet, in the other there may be hints of crude appetite. They hardly seem more malevolent than the innocent woodsmen; like them, they get on with their work. The painting reminds me nonetheless of the harrowing, almost unwatchable murder and mutilation of the icon painters, in a wood, in Tarkovsky’s film Andrey Rublev. Trees in their stillness witness what humans can hardly bear to look at. Bellini’s woodsmen crush forest flowers underfoot, the trees bleed where they are cut.
Over time the surface story of a work of art – ‘bad Cathars murder good Catholics’ – falls away in history: its explanatory content, its moralising power. We don’t take sides any longer, we hardly know what those ‘sides’ once signified. Something more opaque and profound is left behind: on a fine morning, in a few chaotic moments, cruelty triumphs over defencelessness – with no redress, nowhere to look for meaning. The dagger blow, the cleaver in the skull, unanswerable. There may be a martyr’s palm to come for Saint Peter but it’s not painted here. There’s only art, which looks at the cruelty unflinchingly, which sees it for us, sees it whole. We need that.
From the March 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.