The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew

From the Minneapolis Institute of Art record

Saint Andrew is said to have been martyred in Patras, a city on the west coast of Greece. Here we see a prliminary stage in his arrest and torture. several men bind him and prepare to beat him with a bundle of switches. A guardsman pushes back some concerned women and children. A Roman official sits on a throne, observing and approving the action. According to legend, Andrew was subsequently killed on an X-shaped cross. Carlo Maratti's etching is based on a painting made decades earlier by Domenico Zampieri (Domenichino), a fresco completed about 1608 in the Oratory (chapel) of Saint Andrew in the church of San Gregorio Magno in Rome. Domenichino arranged the foreground figures like a classical frieze angainst a backdrop of classical architecture and landscape. Maratti drew what he saw onto his etching plate, and the image became reversed in the printing process. Italy, Europe