The Martyrdom of St. Eutropius

The painting offers an extraordinarily crude depiction of the brutal beheading of Bishop Eutropius, who was later chosen by popular devotion as the patron saint of people suffering from headaches.

In the scene, the headsman walks away from the place of martyrdom with his axe slung over his shoulder. In the meantime, two men lift Eutropius’s lifeless body while a third gathers up his cope and crosier.

In the left foreground we see the martyr’s body, its bloody neck facing the observer, while his severed head lies on the ground on the right. The artist could have found no cruder or more intense way of conveying the event. For a long time, the painting was mistakenly attributed to Michele Manzoni, a painter of whose life and career we know little, other than that he certainly died in 1666. In 1957 Roberto Longhi correctly assigned the picture to a painter from Faenza named Biagio Manzoni. The little we know about this artist’s career makes it immensely difficult to reconstruct the painting’s history, but it certainly reveals Manzoni’s interest in the painting of Caravaggio. Roberto Longhi called Manzoni “a Caravaggesque painter on the periphery”, adding how in the Martyrdom of St. Eutropius he has achieved a result explicitly “devoid of decorum” in the furrow of Caravaggio’s tradition of “literal realism, which pervades the entire work” (Paragone, 1957, n. 89, p. 43, f. 27).

On that occasion, Longhi also attributed other paintings to Manzoni, including a Martyrdom of St. Sebastian in the Louvre and a Doubting Thomas in the church of the Capuchin friars in Faenza. In the painting in the Pinacoteca di Faenza, Daniele Benati detected clear echoes of Roman painting of the early 17th century, and more particularly of the work of Caravaggio: the hireling in red breeches seen from behind is clearly inspired by a figure in the Martyrdom of St. Peter in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, which is also the source for the angel flying with the palm of martyrdom, a consolidated model in Caravaggio’s output.