Michelangelo's Path to the Mystery: His Three Pietás

Jul 13, 2011
John Willingham

Pieta, St. Peter's Basilica - Dreamstime

For the greatest sculptor of all time, defining faith in marble gave way to expressing the indefinable mystery of God. An essay on evolving belief.

To say that Michelangelo was a Renaissance man seems to require no explanation. During a long life spanning the first two-thirds of the 15th Century, the Italian genius produced works—painting, sculpture, and drawings— which captured as no others did the humanistic tilt in God’s relationship with the world.

Now, when people think of Michelangelo, they might first bring to mind his dramatic frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, begun in 1508 and completed, singlehandedly, four years later. In a section of the frescoes, the “Creation of Adam,” one can see the white-bearded God literally extending himself to a languid and recumbent Adam.

No bolts of lightning, no echoing commands; more of a reach toward a near-physical connection, the tip of God’s finger just close enough to Adam’s to set off the spark of human existence.

The First Pietá

Ten years before he began his fresco at the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo completed the first of three Pietás that are definitely attributed to him. These statues depict the Virgin Mary as she holds the body of her crucified son. Each work differs dramatically from the others.

While all express Michelangelo’s artistic power and contribute to his enduring fame, they also trace the arc of a great artist’s life and reveal what he found at the end—not clarity, not classical beauty, not perfect representation—but mystery. The man who was the embodiment of the Renaissance transcended that singular age, anticipating a future that was far less certain about either man or God.

In 1499, Michelangelo, then only twenty-four, completed his first Pietá, now in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where it has been since 1500. When most people speak of the Pietá, the Rome statue is usually the one they are referencing.

Commissioned by the French Cardinal Jean de Billheres for his tomb in St. Peter’s, the first Pietá came about after its sponsors issued a daunting artistic challenge, eagerly accepted by the young Michelangelo. The agreement specifying the requirements for the statue boldly stated that the Pietá was to be "the most beautiful work of marble in Rome, one that no living artist could better."

A Perception too Clear?

Michelangelo’s perception of the first Pietá might have been especially clear in 1499, for the young master exhibited few doubts about his ability or his traditional faith. So instead of seeing the face of Jesus distorted by his agony on the cross, we see a youthful Jesus in the Pietá, whose face is that of an innocent taken from his human existence too soon, but now already peaceful in the arms of the Mother of God.

Mary too seems at peace, her broad shoulders strong and capable. Her right arm is holding the weight of her son’s torso, and we see most of her right hand beneath his right shoulder, but not directly touching his body, now destined for a different realm.

Her left hand is open and palm up; her fingers are pointing away from her and slightly downward, on a line with her son’s legs, as if she knows he will be taken from her at any moment. Her face, incongruously young (she would actually have been in her mid-forties, at least), is perhaps pensive, or sad, but exhibits no pain.

The work was acclaimed as a masterpiece that met fully the high standard of being “the most beautiful work of art in Rome.” Some doubted that the statue, which integrated perfectly the teachings of the Church and the emerging aesthetic of classical expression, could have been the work of such a young man.

Michelangelo, young and proud, carved his name on Mary’s sash so that the world could know whose work they were beholding.

Yet within this great work of art there is a tension that later drove Michelangelo’s work. The seeming integration was not truly naturalistic, with the softened features and altered proportions of Mary and her son sacrificing agony for the spiritual acceptance of God’s will. The first Pietá served the Church more than it expressed the deepest visions of the artist.

Broken, by Man

In Michelangelo’s second Pietá--the Florentine or Deposition Pietá--begun when the artist was in his early seventies, the tensions left unexpressed in the statue in St. Peter’s have erupted.

No longer do we see a youthful Jesus waiting in his mother’s strong arms for his imminent deliverance from this world. Instead, it is Jesus whose arms are outsized, but lifeless, of no avail against the brutal crucifixion. His body is twisted, his right leg bent, while not only the Virgin Mary but two others try to hold the body away from the ground after it has been pulled down from the cross.

This is a depiction of struggle and anguish, involving all humankind—men and women—with the crucified Jesus in order to support him, for a desperate moment, in this world. Behind Jesus is a tall man, Joseph of Arimathea, whose cowled face is actually a self-portrait of Michelangelo.

To the left of Joseph is the Virgin Mary, this time on her knees as she holds her son, again under the shoulder, but now with her left hand. Also on her knees, to the right of Joseph, is Mary Magdalene; her right hand holds the thin, sinewy thigh of Jesus. His right arm is draped across her back, as if, in this most extreme moment, it is she rather than the Virgin Mary who has the greater burden.

An Artist too Present

The face of Joseph of Arimathea—the face of Michelangelo—peers down on Jesus. The expression is peaceful and loving; yet the impression is that this man, this artist, is somehow overseeing the entire scene, as much in control as in sympathy.

Considering that this sculpture was to have been Michelangelo’s tomb, we are left with the possibilities that the artist, having depicted the agonizing humanity of Jesus on the Cross, was impelled to identify himself personally with that agony; or that Michelangelo sought to express that the real meaning of the Crucifixion could not be revealed or experienced in ritual but only through the work of great artists.

In any event, he finally abandoned the work in his late seventies or early eighties. According to some contemporaries, he was either dissatisfied with the quality of the marble or with the shape of the work itself, and in an angry mood, he broke off the now missing left leg of Jesus. The sculpture was later worked on by others, and the face of Mary Magdalene, especially, shows a more traditionally classical, less human style.

It is intriguing to wonder whether it was in fact the marble that caused the fit of anger, or whether the real cause was Michelangelo's ultimate awareness that his self-portrait in the sculpture seemed to be presiding over the anguish of Jesus and Mary.

The statue, still in its broken form, now resides in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, in Florence.

The Rondanini Pietá

“I have reached the twenty-fourth hour of my day, and…no project arises in my brain which has not the figure of death graven upon it.”

In this frame of mind, Michelangelo began work on his final sculpture when he was in his late seventies, the troubles of the Florentine Pietá surely on his mind. This last of the three Pietás, called the Rondanini, though close to the Florentine sculpture in time, is so dramatically different that it reinforces the idea that Michelangelo’s abandonment of the earlier work was the result of deep dissatisfaction rather than a rejection of the marble stone for alleged imperfections.

Looking at the unfinished Rondanini, one can see why the famous modernist sculptor Henry Moore said, “This is the kind of quality you get in the work of old men who are really great. They can simplify; they can leave out . . . in the Rondanini Pietá there’s a whole of Michelangelo’s 89 years’ life somewhere.”

The perfect integration of classical style with the Church’s teachings is present in the first Pietá, achieved by sacrificing naturalism and humanity. In the Florentine Pietá, we see the eruption of the human, and then the rejection of the work for its human excesses.

The Rondanini Pietá, now in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, completes the arc of Michelangelo’s lifelong artistic inquiry into the meaning of man’s relation with God. The two principal figures in the dark marble of the third Pietá are shadowy yet indissoluble. The unfinished figures of Mary and Jesus are prominent; a small, headless, childlike figure is also present, its slender arms offering tentative support to the right side of the standing Jesus.

The End of a Great Artist's Path

Both Mary and the smaller Jesus seem almost forlorn. His unfinished eyes could be open or closed; hers are staring at the earth. He is standing on bent and slender legs, and she, along with the childlike figure, are holding him up.

Yet there is a sense that they could be helping him to rise, perhaps to take him slowly along a perilous, uncertain path, in contrast to the traditional deposition of his body from the cross, in which his corpse is taken down and made ready for burial and resurrection.

We will never know what Michelangelo intended with his final work. But we do know that it expresses what he felt in the last days of his life, when he and the mystery were about to be joined.

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