The Martyrdoms of the Apostles
Sizes
One object, sold whole: Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main holds it as 821-832. 2 sheets, one edition, $229 — the printed panels hang level within 0.0%.
Twelve apostles, twelve deaths, and one of them survives. In the Städel's panel of Saint John the Evangelist, the apostle is placed in a cauldron of boiling oil before the Emperor Domitian and, as the Golden Legend tells it, remains unharmed.
Everywhere else Lochner, whom the museum calls fifteenth-century Cologne's most important painter, does not shy away from cruelty. The museum singles out the flaying of Bartholomew, worked with knives and grindstones among the soldiers. The wings once stood in Cologne's Church of St Lawrence, and in their row of executions John's cauldron is the one that fails.
The panels hang in a row at one image height; the hung images measure about 32.0 in across, before any gap between frames.
Sources
Printed on demand as one edition. The whole image is printed on every sheet — never cropped to fit — so each panel carries an archival margin.