The Palestrina Pietà
Attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 to 1564) · about 1555
The dead Christ sags between two figures who can barely hold him. His mother stands behind, her face pressed close to his, and a young Mary Magdalene supports him from the side. The body is massive, far heavier than the slender figures behind it, and the legs fold beneath it in a way that emphasises pure weight. This is a Pietà as an image of exhaustion rather than beauty, the opposite of the polished, youthful group Michelangelo carved for Saint Peter's more than half a century earlier.
Look at the mixture of finish. Christ's torso and left arm are smoothed almost to completion, while the Virgin's face and the Magdalene are left in rough chisel strokes, and the back of the block was cut from an ancient Roman fragment, as the carved decoration still visible on the rear shows. The proportions are strange: the chest is enormous, the head small, the legs short, as if the sculptor had run out of marble or of interest. Some scholars see in this the hand of the aged Michelangelo, who in his last years abandoned classical proportion for raw expression; others believe the group was carved by a follower using his drawings. The museum presents it as attributed to him, and the debate has never closed.
The group takes its name from the town of Palestrina near Rome, where it stood in the chapel of the Barberini family until the Italian state bought it in nineteen thirty nine and brought it here to join the other Michelangelo sculptures. It is the only large work associated with him that is not mentioned in any contemporary document. Standing between the Prisoners and the David, it makes a sombre counterpoint: youth and confidence at one end of the hall, age and grief at the other.
Did You Know? The back of the block still carries traces of ancient Roman carving, because the sculptor reused a piece of a classical building.
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