Perhaps not even Michelangelo Buonarroti, when he began working on his best-known Pietà, knew that from that block of marble he would extract one of the world's most admired masterpieces of art.
The history of the Pietà began in 1498, when the French Cardinal of San Dionigi Jean de Bilhères de Lagraulas, French Ambassador to the Papal See, wanted to have a sculpture sculpted for his burial depicting “Our Lady with the dead Christ in her arms”. The Cardinal commissioned the statue of the Pity, una “Pietà” to be placed in the chapel of Santa Petronilla, also in the Vatican. As the celebrations for the jubilee of 1500 were approaching, many French pilgrims would visit the chapel.
The commission was entrusted to Michelangelo, who was twenty-two years old at the time. The agreement established that the sculpture "will be the most beautiful work of marble today in Rome, and that no master will make it better".
Michelangelo, a demanding sculptor and lover of high-quality raw materials, took nine months just to choose the right block of marble and transport it from the quarries of Carrara to Rome, where he sculpted it. The sculpture, 1.74m x 1.95m (with larger than real figures), was carved in a single block of white and blue marble that was extracted by making a deep cut in the quarry, in which metal chisels were then inserted.
It was an unusual theme. The episode is not reported in the Gospels but is narrated by Simeon Metaphrastes, a Byzantine scholar of the 10th century. The Pietà was a subject dating back to the Middle Ages, traditionally depicted in small wooden statues, with seated with the dead body of Christ in her lap. But in all these precedents, the two figures always remain substantially separate: Mary hardly holds the lifeless body of Christ, so much so that, in some cases, it is supported by other characters.
Michelangelo chose to subvert classical iconography and, with a flame composition with its apex in the head of the Madonna, portrayed a very young woman holding the body of a lifeless young man in her arms.
Not wanting to submit to any dictates, Michelangelo sculpted a Christ gently lying on the Virgin's legs with a naturalness never seen before. In addition, the two characters seem to merge in an intimacy that appears alive and real. The composition seems united by the large robe that falls on Mary's legs through jagged and numerous folds that generate a play of “chiaroscuro” to make the statue seem animated. Mother and son merge into one: Mary holds Christ in her arms, welcoming his body between her powerful legs spread apart. With her left hand, Mary seems to show her son to humanity, asking at the same time: "What have you done to him?"
Mary has a serene and idealized face. And the son is also peaceful, despite the painful torture of the crucifixion. Both appear very young, an aspect that aroused numerous controversies: it was not possible for the mother of Christ to look like a girl if, at the death of her son, she should have been about fifty years old...
Michelangelo defended himself from criticism by explaining that virginity and incorruptibility of the soul keep women young. On the other hand, Buonarroti was well acquainted with Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was indeed a profound admirer of it. In the 33rd Canto of Paradise, Dante had St. Bernard say "Virgin Mother, daughter of your son" and the sculptor transferred these words to the Pietà. For Michelangelo, therefore, Mary, as Dante writes in Paradise, is the daughter of her son because Christ is also God, thus her Father. The uncorrupted Virgin symbolises a crystallized youth, which cannot wither.
The statue of the Pietà has another peculiarity, a little more difficult to notice: Christ has an extra tooth, a fifth incisor. This tooth is nicknamed "the tooth of sin", and in the works of other Renaissance artists, it is the prerogative of negative characters. The Christ of Piety, on the other hand, should have been endowed with it because, by his death, he takes upon himself all the sins of the world.
One of the reasons for the greatness of Michelangelo's Pietà is represented precisely by the humanity that the artist has been able to instil in the characters of the sculpture. Jesus does not appear marked by the sufferings of the cross and, in the precision with which Michelangelo finishes his perfect body supported by his mother on marble, his divine nature seems to manifest itself, as if to emphasize that not even death can scratch that body.
The result is so perfect that Giorgio Vasari, the great Renaissance art historian contemporary of Michelangelo, wrote: "certainly it is a miracle that a stone from the beginning without any form, has ever been reduced to that perfection that nature hardly forms in the flesh ....".
Such beauty, however, led some contemporaries to attribute the work to a Lombard artist, not believing that such a young sculptor could conceive of such a work. Vasari narrates that the artist hurried to carve his name on the work at night when rumours began to circulate, attributing its paternity to the Lombard sculptor Cristoforo Solari, known as the Hunchback. In response, Michelangelo engraved the words: MICHAEL. ANGELVS. BONAROTVS. FLORENT. FACIEBAT (i.e. "made by the Florentine Michelangelo Buonarroti") on the band crossing Madonna's chest. The Vatican Pietà is the only work that Michelangelo ever signed.
The sculpture was placed in the Chapel of Santa Petronilla on the eve of the jubilee year of 1500, under the pontificate of Pope Alexander VI Borgia. The chapel was dimly lit by natural light and the flickering light of candles. Michelangelo probably worked for weeks on its polishing to make the surface as reflective as possible and prevent the perfect shapes from getting lost in the darkness, losing the play of shadows and lights that he had devised.
In 1517, with the demolition of the early Christian church for the construction of the new St. Peter's Basilica, the sculpture was moved to other adjacent chapels. It will return to the interior of St. Peter's only in 1749 in the first chapel on the right, where it can still be admired today.
The Pietà attracted popular attention worldwide, particularly in the U.S. again in 1964 when, on the occasion of the Universal Exhibition in New York, the work sailed the ocean to be exhibited in the pavilion of the Vatican State. It will be the first and last time the Pietà left Italy. The work was packed on April 2 and transported to Naples, where it embarked on the transatlantic liner Cristoforo Colombo. Here, it travelled on the ship's deck, guarded by sight and closed inside a floating box so that the work would not be lost in the event of the ship's sinking.
In New York, the Pietà was placed on a stage and admired by over 27 million visitors. Such a thing would no longer be possible today: on returning from America, the Vatican declared the sculpture immovable, decreeing a ban on any loan or movement.
No one would have ever imagined that, centuries later, that perfect work would be the subject of a furious attack by a madman. On May 21, 1972, Pentecost Sunday, while Pope Paul VI was preparing to celebrate midday Mass and the basilica was already crowded, to the cry of "I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead", a Hungarian geologist, Lazlo Tòth, delivered twelve hammer blows on the work, detaching fifty fragments between large and small, with the intention of detaching her head. He would later tell those who questioned him after those excited moments that he intended to destroy the work because he did not recognize the figure of his mother in the appearance of the Virgin, thinking that he was the son. The Pope himself came to the site in dismay, asking ”Was it an act of foolness?”
There was a long debate in the Vatican about the type of restoration: many suggested leaving the face of the Madonna disfigured as a testimony of an era dominated by violence; others preferred a critical restoration, in which the missing or redone parts would be highlighted. In the end, the Vatican Authorities concluded that even the slightest imperfection in the perfect sculpture of Michelangelo would be intolerable, and the statue underwent a delicate and complicated restoration operation with glue and marble powder, bringing it back to its original splendour. Since then, the faithful can only see it through a safety glass, placed seven meters away from the work.
Happy Jubilee 2025