Michelangelo's The Last Judgment -
St Bartholomew holding the knife of his martyrdom and his flayed skin; it is conjectured that Michelangelo included a self-portrait depicting himself as St Bartholomew after he had been flayed alive.
Flaying is a method of slow and painful torture and/or execution in which
skin is removed from the
body. Generally, an attempt is made to keep the removed portion of skin intact.[citation needed]
Scope
A dead animal may be flayed when preparing it to be used as human food, or for its hide or
fur. This is more commonly called
skinning.
Flaying of humans is used as a method of
torture or
execution, depending on how much of the skin is removed. This is often referred to as flaying alive. There are also records of people flayed after
death, generally as a means of debasing the corpse of a prominent enemy or
criminal, sometimes related to religious beliefs (e.g. to deny an afterlife); sometimes the skin is used, again for deterrence, esoteric/ritualistic purposes, etc. (e.g.
scalping).[citation needed]
Causes of death
Dermatologist Ernst G. Jung notes that the typical causes of death due to flaying are
shock, critical loss of
blood or other
body fluids,
hypothermia, or
infections, and that the actual death is estimated to occur from a few hours up to a few days after the flaying.[1] Hypothermia is possible, as skin provides natural insulation and is essential for maintaining body temperature.
Ernst G. Jung, in his Kleine Kulturgeschichte der Haut ("A short cultural history of the skin"), provides an essay in which he outlines the
Neo-Assyrian tradition of flaying human beings.[2] Already from the times of
Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BC), the practice is displayed and commemorated in both carvings and official royal edicts. The carvings show that the actual flaying process might begin at various places on the body, such as at the
crus (lower leg), the thighs, or the buttocks.
In their royal edicts, the Neo-Assyrian kings seem to gloat over the terrible fate they imposed upon their captives, and that flaying seems, in particular, to be the fate meted out to rebel leaders. Jung provides some examples of this triumphant rhetoric. From Ashurnasirpal II:
I have made a pillar facing the city gate, and have flayed all the rebel leaders; I have clad the pillar in the flayed skins. I let the leaders of the conquered cities be flayed, and clad the city walls with their skins. The captives I have killed by the sword and flung on the dung heap.[citation needed]
Their corpses they hung on stakes, they took off their skins and covered the city wall with them.[3][better source needed]
Other examples
Searing or cutting the flesh from the body was sometimes used as part of the public execution of
traitors in medieval Europe. A similar mode of execution was used as late as the early 18th century in France; one such episode is graphically recounted in the opening chapter of
Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1979).
In 1303, the treasury of
Westminster Abbey was robbed while holding a large sum of money belonging to
King Edward I. After the arrest and interrogation of 48 monks, three of them, including the
subprior and
sacrist, were found guilty of the robbery and flayed. Their skin was attached to three doors as a warning against robbers of church and state.[4] At St Michael & All Angels' Church in
Copford in Essex, England, it is claimed that human skin was found attached to an old door, though evidence seems elusive.[5]
One of the
plastinated exhibits in
Body Worlds includes an entire posthumously flayed skin, and many of the other exhibits have had their skin removed.
In 202 AD, Saint
Charalambos was reportedly tortured mercilessly aged 113 during the reign of
Septimius Severus. The torturers lacerated his body with iron hooks and scraped all the skin from his body.
In 260 AD, the Roman emperor
Valerian was seized during a parley by
Shapur I, king of Persia, at
Edessa. According to some accounts he was flayed alive.
Vasak Mamikonyan, commander-in-chief of the Armenian army during the reign of
Arshak_II, king of Armenia, was flayed alive on the order of Shapur II, after he, along with Arsaces, was captured and imprisoned by the Persian king. His skin was then
filled with hay and put before Arsaces to further mock and psychologically torture the imprisoned Armenian king. (c. 367).
Totila is said to have ordered the bishop of
Perugia,
Herculanus, to be flayed when he captured that city in 549.
In 991 AD, during a
Viking raid in England, a Danish Viking is said to have been flayed by London locals for ransacking a church. Alleged human skin found on a local church door has, for many years, been considered as proof for this legend, but a deeper analysis made during the production of the 2001 BBC documentary, Blood of the Vikings, came to the conclusion that the preserved skin came from a cow hide and was part of a 19th-century hoax.
In 1314, the brothers Aunay, who were lovers of the daughters-in-law of king
Philip IV of France, were flayed alive, then
castrated and beheaded, and their bodies were exposed on a
gibbet (Tour de Nesle Affair). The extreme severity of their punishment was due to the lèse majesté nature of the crime.
In 1323, the Mexica tribe asked for Yaocihuatl, daughter of Achicometl, ruler of Culhuacan in marriage. Unknown to him, she was sacrificed, with the priest appearing during the festival dinner wearing her skin as part of the ritual.
In 1404 or 1417, the
Hurufi Imad ud-Din
Nesîmî, an
Islamic poet of
Turkic extraction, was flayed alive, apparently on orders of a
Timurid governor, and for
heresy.
In September 1611, Dionysios the Philosopher (or
Dionysios Skylosophos) was flayed alive by the Ottomans after a failed revolt in
Ioannina. His skin was filled with hay and was paraded.
In 1657, the Polish
Jesuit martyr,
Andrew Bobola, was burned, half strangled, partly flayed alive, and killed by a sabre stroke by Eastern Orthodox Cossacks.
In 1771,
Daskalogiannis, a
Cretan rebel against the
Ottoman Empire, was flayed alive, and it is said that he suffered in dignified silence.
In the United States,
Nat Turner, leader of a rebellion against
slavery in
Virginia, was hanged on November 11, 1831. His body was then flayed, his skin being used to make purses as souvenirs.[14]: 218
In the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the skins of flaying victims are visible in the backgrounds of multiple shots, hung up within the Temple of Kali.
In the 2008 French movie
Martyrs, a female character is flayed alive by a secret philosophical society seeking to discover the secrets of the afterlife through the creation of "martyrs".
In the 2012 film Dredd, drug kingpin Ma-Ma orders three rogue dealers to be flayed alive before being tossed off a balcony.
In the 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, one of the main characters, Mark, is flayed off-screen and his executioner is later seen wearing his face as a mask and his legs as a pair of pants.
In the 2020 film Hunter Hunter, Anne, one of the main characters, flays the face and upper body from the man who murdered her husband and daughter.
In the 2021 film Spiral, a character is flayed (partially on screen) as part of the spiral killer's plan.
^Cromwell, John W. (1920). "The Aftermath of Nat Turner's Insurrection". The Journal of Negro History. 5 (2): 208–234.
doi:
10.2307/2713592.
JSTOR2713592.
S2CID150053000. His body was given over to the surgeons for dissection. He was skinned to supply such souvenirs as purses, his flesh made into grease, and his bones divided as trophies to be handed down as heirlooms. It is said that there still lives a Virginian who has a piece of his skin which was tanned, that another Virginian possesses one of his ears and that the skull graces the collection of a physician in the city of Norfolk.
^Gelbin, Cathy (2003). "Metaphors of Genocide". In Duttinger; et al. (eds.). Performance and Performativity in German Cultural Studies.
Peter Lang. p. 233.
Bibliography
Jung, Ernst G. (2007). "Von Ursprung des Schindens in Assyrien", in "Kleine Kulturgeschichte Der Haut". Springer Verlag.
ISBN9783798517578.