ABSTRACT
Few people in the sixteenth century would have seen a living, skinned body. The instance of Venetian commander Marcantonio Bragadin being flayed by Turkish troops was an isolated case, which provoked horror2 – but pictures of what such a thing looked like came to be widely disseminated. From the mid-sixteenth century, pictorial art featured more and more representations of flayed bodies. These were usually either the silen Marsyas flayed by Apollo, or St Bartholomew, but many
* Parts of this text were presented at the conference ‘Körpermarken – Bildermarken’ under the auspices of the VW-Nachwuchsgruppe ‘Kulturgeschichte und Theologie des Bildes im Christentum’. The subsequent discussion was very stimulating for which I am thankful, in particular I would like to thank Mechthild Fend for our continuous exchange on the subject of skin. I am also grateful to Marianne Koos and Daniela Hacke for reading earlier versions of the article and their pertinent contribution discussing the question of the historical conception of identity.
