Timeless body arts5/26/2023 ![]() The only indications of death were in the carefully wrought details of the body: a shoulder bunched up under the ear, sagging muscles in the flesh of the thigh, and blood pooled in the dangling hand, all to suggest the heaviness of death. He made the wounds barely visible and the sleeping face peaceful. He rendered Jesus’s body with the perfect articulation and proportions of a Greek god, elegant limbs draped across Mary’s lap. With jagged, gaping holes in Christ’s hands, feet and side, a body stiff with rigor mortis, and the crown of thorns still bound around his brow, the earlier versions were meant to make the viewer recoil.īut the Florentine sculptor had other ideas. The composition, showing Mary holding the dead Christ before burial, had no scriptural basis, and northern artists sought to evoke pity by emphasizing Jesus’s wounds and Mary’s grief. Young Michelangelo was the first Italian to sculpt the subject of the “Pietà,” a theme developed by German artists in the 14th century and later adopted by the French who gave it its name, meaning “to feel sorry for.” ![]() (Public Domain) The Theme in a New Medium ![]() The welts and breaks were repaired, but the protective shield dulls the artistic voice of this powerful statue. Modern viewers have to peer at the sculpture from behind a wall of glass, where it was housed after it was attacked with a hammer in 1972. The Year of Jubilee was celebrated every 50 years, following the seven cycles of sabbatical years, and was celebrated as a year of liberation and rest. Michelangelo spent a year sourcing and transporting the single block of marble from Carrara and unveiled the completed work to universal astonishment during the Jubilee Year of 1500. It would be placed above an altar where future generations might pray for the cardinal’s soul. ![]() It was destined for the cardinal’s burial chapel in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, then a much smaller building than the massive modern church. In 1497, Cardinal Bilhères de Lagraulas commissioned a then unknown 23-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti to produce the over-life-size sculpture group, the young Florentine’s first public work. Yet when Michelangelo unveiled his Pietà-the image of the Virgin Mary mourning the lifeless Christ-he revealed how sorrow can be conquered by hope. Witnessing such a thing, most shrink from the searing sense of loss, the emptiness of bereavement. The most tragic sight imaginable is a mother who has lost a child. ![]()
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