Michelangelo's Pietà

Before being a masterpiece, the Pietà is a type of image: a codified subject, long meditated by medieval piety, which Michelangelo did not invent but brought to perfection.

An Italian word: "pity", "compassion"

The word pietà is Italian for "pity", in the strong, ancient sense of compassion — "suffering with". In art history it designates a precise devotional image: the Virgin Mary holding on her knees the lifeless body of her Son, taken down from the cross before the entombment. This moment is not narrated as such by the Gospels: it belongs to the meditation of the Passion, to the suspended time between the deposition and the burial, where piety wished to give back to the Mother this last face-to-face with her dead child.^[5]

The German Vesperbild: the devotional origin

The type was born not in Italy but in Germany, around 1300, under the name Vesperbild, the "Vespers image". The name tells its use: these statues were linked to the evening prayer of Good Friday, the moment when the descent from the cross is meditated.^[6][7] They belong to the family of Andachtsbilder, those German "devotional images" conceived as supports for contemplation in side chapels, before which the faithful prayed alone, facing the Virgin's sorrow.

The first Vesperbilder are often rough, angular, expressionistic: the body of Christ is stiffened, covered with wounds, almost reduced to the state of a child whom his mother would take back into her arms. The Rhineland mystics had nourished this intuition: in the excess of her sorrow, Mary sees again the child she rocked.^[8] The devotion spread through Central Europe long before reaching Italy; Michelangelo thus inherited a Germanic and medieval subject, which he would transfigure into the language of the Renaissance.

Pietà and the theology of the image

That the Church authorises, venerates and multiplies such images is anything but self-evident: it is the fruit of a long reflection on the legitimacy of sacred images, founded on the Incarnation. We do not take up that doctrine here, as it is set out elsewhere; it suffices to retain that the Pietà is, in the strict sense, a liturgical and devotional image, made to lead to prayer, not a mere art object. On this foundation, see the theology of the icon.^[9]

The Vatican Pietà has a precise history, documented by contracts and by Michelangelo's first biographers, Giorgio Vasari (1550 and 1568) and Ascanio Condivi (1553), the latter working under the dictation of the artist himself.

The commission of a French cardinal

The work was commissioned by Cardinal Jean de Bilhères de Lagraulas (sometimes called de Villiers), a Benedictine, Abbot of Saint-Denis and ambassador of the King of France Charles VIII to the Holy See. For his funerary monument, in the chapel of Saint Petronilla (the "chapel of the kings of France") adjoining the old St Peter's Basilica, he wanted a group of the Virgin of pity.^[10][11][12] Michelangelo, a young Florentine then in Rome, was just twenty-three years old.

The contract, the 450 ducats and Jacopo Galli's guarantee

The contract was signed in late August 1498 (the documents bear the dates 26-27 August). Michelangelo undertook to deliver within one year a marble Virgin holding the dead Christ, for 450 gold ducats.^[13][14] The most astonishing piece of the dossier is the guarantee added by the Roman banker Jacopo Galli, the artist's protector, who stood surety in terms unheard of for an unknown sculptor: Galli promised the cardinal that the work would be the finest work in marble that Rome could then show, and that no master of the time could do better (paraphrased in English translation; the exact original wording could not be verified to the required standard, so quotation marks have been removed — see note).^[15]

A wager kept: the young man would deliver a work which, more than five centuries later, has still not been surpassed.

The Carrara marble and a sculptor of twenty-four

Michelangelo went himself to choose his block at Carrara, in the Apuan Alps: a statuario marble of exceptional purity, almost without veins, which he would polish until it took on the softness of flesh.^[16][17] Completed in 1499, the work immediately stunned its contemporaries. How could a sculptor of twenty-four have drawn from a single block two entire bodies, draperies of infinite complexity and such softness of surface? It is that very incredulity which would give rise to the single signature of his life (see below).

From the chapel of Saint Petronilla to St Peter's

The cardinal died in 1499, shortly after the completion. The Pietà was placed in his chapel of Saint Petronilla. But the rebuilding of St Peter's Basilica, in the 16th century, led to the demolition of that chapel. The work was then moved several times inside the new building, before finding, in the 18th century, its present location: the first chapel of the right aisle, today called the "chapel of the Pietà".^[18][19]

Of all his immense output — sculptures, frescoes, architecture — Michelangelo signed only one piece: the Vatican Pietà. The fact is unique, and its explanation, handed down by Vasari, has become famous.

The inscription on the sash

On the band of cloth crossing the Virgin's breast runs a Latin inscription carved in capitals:

MICHAEL·ANGELVS·BONAROTVS·FLORENT·FACIEBAT — "Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, was making [this]."^[20][21]

The imperfect tense, faciebat ("was making"), is no mistake: it is an ancient formula, taken from Pliny the Elder, by which the greatest Greek artists signed their works as "always in the making", never finished — a mark of humility as much as of pride.

The legend of Cristoforo Solari

Why this unique signature? Vasari recounts that Michelangelo, lingering one day near his work, heard some Lombard visitors attribute it to a sculptor from Milan, Cristoforo Solari, known as il Gobbo ("the Hunchback"). Indignant that his masterpiece should be taken for another's, he returned by night and carved his name on Mary's sash.^[22][23]

The vow never to sign again

The story does not end there, and it is there that it becomes spiritual. Vasari reports that Michelangelo afterwards regretted this gesture of pride and vowed never to sign a single one of his works again:

"It is said that Michelangelo afterwards repented of having put his name on it, and that he swore never to sign any other of his works again." — after Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, life of Michelangelo^[24]

The only proper name Michelangelo ever inscribed on stone, he placed on the Virgin's heart, then refused to do it again. Tradition has seen a parable in it: the artist who, in the presence of the dead Christ and his Mother, understands that pride has no place there and henceforth chooses the anonymity of humility.

As the icon is a "theology in colours", the Pietà is a theology in marble: every choice of Michelangelo carries meaning.

The pyramidal composition

The whole fits into a stable pyramid: the apex is Mary's inclined head, and the mass widens through the ample cascade of draperies down to the base, the rock of Calvary.^[25] This serene geometry, typical of the High Renaissance, gives a scene of death a monumental stability: sorrow does not burst out, it is contained, recollected. The body of Christ, abandoned across the maternal knees, forms a calmed diagonal resting in this pedestal of draperies.

The youth of the Virgin

The detail that most intrigued is the very young face of Mary: she looks younger than her thirty-three-year-old Son whom she holds dead. Contemporaries marvelled at it; Condivi reports Michelangelo's own answer (English translation; Italian original in the note):

"Do you not know, he answered me, that chaste women keep far fresher than those who are not? How much more a Virgin, in whom never fell the least lascivious desire to alter that body!" — Michelangelo, reported by Ascanio Condivi, Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (Rome, 1553), ch. XX^[26]

Mary's youth is thus neither clumsiness nor a mere convention of beauty: it is a theological statement. The purity of the Immaculate, her perpetual virginity, her preservation from sin are translated into a visible incorruptibility. The youthful face speaks of the stainless soul. Mary is young because she is all pure.^[27]

The body of Christ: realism and peace

The body of Christ is of striking anatomical realism — veins, relaxed muscles, the weight of dead flesh — yet without horror or gore: almost no trace of the wounds, save discreet marks on the hands and the side. Michelangelo does not show a tortured corpse as the Germanic Vesperbilder did; he shows a body asleep in death, beautiful, pacified, already turned towards the Resurrection. Death is real, but it does not have the last word.^[28]

Mary's open left hand

One gesture sums it all up: the Virgin's left hand, open, palm turned towards the beholder. She does not hold the body back; she presents it, she offers it. This gesture of openness transforms the scene of mourning into an oblation: Mary offers to the world — and to the Father — the body of her Son delivered for salvation. The Mother of sorrows is also the partner of the redemptive offering.

The Pietà is no stylistic exercise: it is an icon of Marian compassion, condensing centuries of meditation on the Mother's sorrow.

Stabat Mater: Mary at the foot of the cross

The direct spiritual background of the Pietà is the great medieval hymn of the Stabat Mater, attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (c. 1230-1306), which contemplates Mary standing near the cross:

"Stood the sorrowful Mother, / weeping near the cross, / while her Son hung there." — Stabat Mater dolorosa, 13th-century hymn^[29]

The sculpture prolongs the hymn by one instant: Mary no longer stands beneath the cross, she has received the body. The same silent sorrow inhabits both. On the musical and literary fortune of this hymn, see the Stabat Mater.^[30]

The seven sorrows and Our Lady of Sorrows

Catholic piety has counted seven sorrows of the Virgin, the last of which — the meeting on the way to Calvary, the crucifixion, the descent from the cross, the entombment — culminate exactly in the scene of the Pietà. The feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, on 15 September, and the devotion of the Stabat Mater linked to it, give this image its proper liturgical place.^[31] The Pietà is, in marble, what the memory of the seven sorrows is in prayer: a stop of the heart before Mary's suffering united with that of her Son.

Compassion (compassio): "suffering with"

The very term pietà points to compassio: the Virgin does not suffer beside Christ, she suffers with him. The Second Vatican Council formulated it with measure: Mary "suffered deeply with her only-begotten Son and joined herself with a maternal heart to his sacrifice, lovingly consenting to the immolation of the victim born of her".^[32][33]

"Thus the Blessed Virgin advanced in her pilgrimage of faith, and faithfully kept her union with her Son even unto the cross, near which she stood." — Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, no. 58^[34]

This union in suffering never makes Mary equal to Christ: he alone is the Redeemer. But the Church recognises in the Mother a singular association with the work of salvation, the fruit of her faith and her love, not a co-redemption in the strict sense. The Pietà makes this nuance visible: Mary does not save, she offers and she believes, in the darkest hour of Good Friday.^[35]

A Eucharistic resonance

Finally, the image carries a Eucharistic resonance. The body of Christ reposing, offered, on Mary's knees irresistibly evokes the body delivered which the priest raises at the altar. Many Pietàs, and this one through the peace of its lines, suggest less a corpse than an offering: "This is my body, given for you." Before the Pietà, the Christian is brought back to the Mass, where the same body, dead and risen, is given to him.

The Vatican Pietà fixed forever a universal type, taken up in countless sanctuaries, and Michelangelo himself returned to it until the end of his life.

A type become universal

After 1500, the Pietà of Michelangelo becomes the absolute reference: the whole Catholic West multiplies its replicas, engravings and variations. The image leaves the German chapels to become a central motif of Latin devotion to the Passion and to Mary's sorrows. This is one of the rare cases where a single work redefines an entire genre.

Michelangelo's other Pietàs

Towards the end of his life, Michelangelo returns to the subject, but in a wholly different, stripped and tragic spirit. The Bandini Pietà (or Deposition, c. 1547-1555, today in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence) includes a self-portrait of the old artist in the face of Nicodemus, and was partly broken by Michelangelo himself, dissatisfied with the marble. The Rondanini Pietà (Castello Sforzesco, Milan), left unfinished, was worked on until the last days of his life, in 1564: two emaciated bodies, almost melted into one another, of a gaunt spirituality. Between the luminous serenity of the Vatican and the stripped abyss of the Rondanini can be measured the whole inner journey of a man facing death and Christ.^[36]

Michelangelo and St Peter's

The author of the Pietà would also be the author of the vault of the Sistine Chapel, of the Last Judgment and, as architect, of the dome of St Peter's. The Pietà remains nonetheless the work of his youth in which all his genius was already given. On the great fresco of his maturity, see the fresco of the Last Judgment.

The history of the Pietà includes a dramatic episode which changed its presentation forever.

21 May 1972, Whit Sunday

On Whit Sunday, 21 May 1972, a man, László Tóth, a geologist of Hungarian origin living in Australia, climbed over the balustrade and struck the statue with a geologist's hammer, crying "I am Jesus Christ!". In some fifteen blows, he broke the Virgin's left arm at the elbow, tore off a piece of her nose and gashed an eyelid.^[37][38] Judged irresponsible, Tóth was not convicted but committed to an institution, then expelled.

The restoration

The Vatican restorers recovered more than a hundred fragments. The nose, parts of which were missing, was reconstructed from a block taken from the back of the statue, mixed with Carrara marble powder and an invisible adhesive. After some ten months, the work returned to its place, the restoration being judged practically undetectable.^[39]

Behind bulletproof glass

Since 1972, the Pietà has been protected by bulletproof glass and kept at a distance from visitors. One may regret this barrier, but it also says something: the work has become a sacred and universal treasure that must be defended. The distance imposes what the image already asked: not to touch, but to contemplate.

The Pietà is not only a summit of Western art; it remains a school of prayer. In a time saturated with disposable images, it recalls that an image can be a place of truth and presence: here, the truth of a God who truly suffered death, and the presence of a Mother who does not flee sorrow but bears it in faith.

Saint John Paul II, in his Letter to Artists (1999), recalled that beauty is a way towards God, and that Christian art, by rendering the invisible visible, serves the Gospel.^[40] The Pietà is its proof in marble: before it, the believer does not merely admire a genius, he enters into the mystery — Mary's compassio, the offered body of Christ, and, at the heart of Good Friday, the silent hope of Easter. Such is the whole meaning of that gesture, five centuries old, by which a visitor stops before a block of marble and meets there, not stone, but the love of God pushed as far as death.

Related Ignispedia articles

• The theology of the icon — why the Church venerates sacred images: the foundation of the Incarnation, of which the Pietà is an application in sculpture.
• The Stabat Mater — the medieval hymn of the sorrowful Mother, the direct spiritual background of the Pietà.
• The fresco of the Last Judgment — Michelangelo's other great Roman masterpiece, that of his maturity.
• Raphael's Transfiguration — another summit of Roman Renaissance sacred painting.
• Bernini and Catholic Baroque art — the posterity of great sacred art at St Peter's, a century later.

Principal sources

• Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti (Rome, 1553) — biography written under the artist's dictation; source of the explanation on the youth of the Virgin.
• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, life of Michelangelo (1550, enlarged in 1568) — account of the signature and of the vow never to sign again.
• The Pietà contract (late August 1498) and Jacopo Galli's guarantee — documented by Michelangelo scholarship (Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo).
• Basilica Sancti Petri — official notice of St Peter's Basilica on the Pietà (basilicasanpietro.va).
• Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, no. 58; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 964 — Mary's association with the Passion.
• Stabat Mater dolorosa, attributed to Jacopone da Todi (13th c.) — hymn of Marian compassion.