Can stone be that soft? Contrast defines this sculpture. Mary is sweet but strong, and Christ, real yet ideal.
Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498–1500, marble, 174 x 195 cm (Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
The Pietà was a popular subject among northern European artists. It means “Pity” or “Compassion,” and represents Mary sorrowfully contemplating the dead body of her son which she holds on her lap. This sculpture was commissioned by a French Cardinal living in Rome.
Look closely and see how Michelangelo made marble seem like flesh, and look at those complicated folds of drapery. It is important here to remember how sculpture is made. It was a messy, rather loud process (which is one of the reasons that Leonardo claimed that painting was superior to sculpture!). Just like painters often mixed their own paint, Michelangelo forged many of his own tools, and often participated in the quarrying of his marble—a dangerous job.
When we look at the extraordinary representation of the human body here we remember that Michelangelo, like Leonardo before him, had dissected cadavers to understand how the body worked.
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0:00:05.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’ve just walked into the Basilica of Saint Peter’s in the Vatican in Rome, and we’ve walked towards the first chapel on the right, and there framed is one of the most famous sculptures in the world, Michelangelo’s Pietà.
0:00:16.8 Dr. Beth Harris: And we’re seeing the sculpture very differently than we would have hundreds of years ago when Michelangelo first made it. The church we’re standing in didn’t exist at that point.
0:00:25.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: And that church, the old Saint Peter’s, which was more than a thousand years old at this time, was on this spot, but was rebuilt.
0:00:32.8 Dr. Beth Harris: And the original location was in a circular space just off the transept, one of the side arms of the church, and it would have been lit from above. Today we’re seeing it behind bulletproof glass, placed far back to protect it, and we’re seeing it artificially lit from above. Michelangelo is in his early 20s, he’s come to Rome to make a name for himself, and got this important commission from a French cardinal who was living in Rome.
0:01:02.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: The Pietà subject of Christ laid out across the lap of his mother was especially favored by French and by German sculptors, and so perhaps it’s not a surprise that this was commissioned by a French cardinal.
0:01:14.5 Dr. Beth Harris: So here we are in this period that art historians often refer to as the High Renaissance, this interest in ideal beauty. And so we might look at earlier examples of the Pietà, where Christ is clearly suffering, where Mary is emoting this very real moment emotionally. But Michelangelo is giving us forms that are ideally beautiful. The Virgin Mary is perfectly young, even though she would have been an old woman at the time when Christ died.
0:01:46.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And this is an issue that troubled critics soon after the sculpture was unveiled. The Virgin Mary looks younger than her son here. We’re told that Michelangelo explained this as an expression of her purity. And so as we look at this sculpture, we’re immediately confronted by the emphasis on the ideal. Michelangelo was able to polish the surface of this Carrara marble to a high sheen, and it creates this beautiful, luminous surface.
0:02:12.3 Dr. Beth Harris: Christ is draped across his mother’s lap. Christ’s torso is being raised by Mary’s arm. You can see her arm supporting his chest underneath his right shoulder. And we get a sense of the limpness, the lifelessness of his body. And we see that flesh being pressed up by the support of her hand. And we remember as we look at that, that Michelangelo, even here in his early 20s, could make marble appear like flesh.
0:02:42.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: And look at the correspondences between the Virgin Mary and Christ’s body that create a unity between the two figures. Together, they form a pyramid, this extraordinarily stable form that was so important to Renaissance artists that emphasized a sense of the eternal. But there are other correspondences here as well. The Virgin Mary’s finger seems to echo the angle of Christ’s foot. And look at the way in which Christ’s right arm sweeps down with this beautiful curve that is echoed by the drapery on that side of the Virgin Mary’s mantle.
0:03:15.0 Dr. Beth Harris: And Mary tilts her head gently down toward Christ. And that gesture of her left arm seems to be suggesting that this figure on her lap, God made flesh, is the pathway to salvation, the pathway to eternal life.
0:03:32.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: She is holding him. She is mourning him. But she’s also presenting him to us.
0:03:38.8 Dr. Beth Harris: The drapery here is such a tour de force. It supports Christ. It helps to shape the Virgin Mary’s body and creates this contrast of light and dark that draws into the body of Christ.
0:03:53.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: Michelangelo is able to achieve this by carving deeply into that stone to create these deep shadows that contrast against the brilliance of the surfaces that are more available to the light.
0:04:04.9 Dr. Beth Harris: The subject of the Pietà often presents artists with a problem because Christ lying across the Virgin’s body in this way could look oversized. But Michelangelo solved that problem by enlarging her thighs, her lap with all of that drapery so that the figure of Christ can be encompassed within that so the figures become unified, as you said, in the shape of this pyramid. We also notice that Christ’s body is tipped forward slightly so that we can see his torso, his rib cage, the incredible attention to human anatomy and knowledge of human anatomy that Michelangelo has at this young age. His body almost does seem to slip away from her. There is this sense of this tension that we often see in images of Mary and Christ where we flip between her memory of him as a child and the present reality of his tragic death.
0:04:59.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: Which makes a sculpture like this even more emotionally powerful. This is the only sculpture that we know of that Michelangelo signed. This is a famous story which is probably apocryphal, that is, it probably has no basis in fact, that Michelangelo overheard someone admiring the sculpture and crediting it to another artist. Michelangelo came in and rectified that by engraving his name prominently in the sash that Mary wears.
0:05:24.9 Dr. Beth Harris: On the other hand, I imagine that signature the way that we often see patrons in works of art. In other words, placing themselves within a divine space in order to make a bid in a way for their place in heaven.
0:05:39.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: And even at this young age, Michelangelo was anything if not ambitious. But I think the part of the sculpture that always leaves the deepest impression on me is the sweetness and beauty of the face of the Virgin Mary. She is, for me, one of the great exemplars of the ideal that we’ve come to associate with this historical moment in Italy.
