The Pietà of Saint Peter’s

Written and read by Pietro Zander

“… not made of marble by a mortal hand, but divinely descended from Paradise!

With these words, Benedetto Varchi defined the Pietà of Saint Peter’s in the funerary oration for Michelangelo in San Lorenzo in Florence, and Giorgio Vasari, when he saw it, cried: “Certainly it is a miracle”, he wrote, “that a stone, ‘from the beginning’ without any form, has ever been reduced to that perfection, which nature with difficulty is able to shape in the flesh”.

A sculpture of superhuman beauty and perfection, sculpted in 1498 by a very young Michelangelo – he was just twenty-three years old – commissioned by the French Cardinal Jean de Bilhères Lagraulas for his tomb in the Chapel of the King of France in Saint Peter’s, a no longer existing chapel that was located on the southern flank of the ancient Basilica.

“A robed Virgin Mary with the dead Christ in her arms, as large as a good-sized man” – as it is defined in the contract – a statue rendered from a single block of Carrara marble in just nine months. A masterpiece on which Michelangelo wished to inscribe his name (something he did for no other work) because, as Vasari reports – “he was pleased and satisfied with himself” and “because one can see in it all the value and power of art”.

The words “michael āgelvs bonarotvs florent facieba” (“by Michelangelo Bonarroti, Florentine”) are indeed engraved above the belt that crosses the Madonna's breast: as Giovanni Papini writes, “the inscription rests above the very heart of the Mother”. A Mother who appears younger than her Son, because she is Immaculate and without sin, and because of Our Lord, the Virgin Mary is at the same time Mother, Daughter and Bride, as Nanni di Baccio Bigio wrote in 1549 and as Dante recalls in the last canto of Paradise:

Virgin mother, daughter of your Son,

Humbler and higher than all other creatures,

Fixed aim and goal of the eternal plan,

You are the one who lifted human nature

To such nobility that its own Maker

Did not disdain to be made of its making.

The Virgin Mary, “humbler and higher than all other creatures”, shows the world the body of Jesus, that she almost dares not touch, because the Son, “generated, not created”, is now reunited with the Father. The right hand of Mary – who became the Mother of all by the will of Our Lord on the Cross – is, so to speak, “veiled” by a fold of fabric, while the left invites the faithful to contemplation and adoration, performing an eloquent and very evident gesture. That body, apparently motionless, pitifully lying on the shroud stretched over his mother's lap, is already divine: the marks of the scourging, the crown of thorns, the martyrdom and the falls on the way to Calvary have vanished. The nail holes on his hands and feet, as well as the wound on his side, have only symbolic value and not post-mortem descriptive completeness.

A “dead” Christ who nonetheless already has in himself the “Life” of the Risen One: lifeblood runs through him and death does not have the definitive victory in that wonderfully sculpted body.

Cf. Pietro Zander, La Pietà di San Pietro. Oltre l’umano, emozioni e devozione nel tempo, in Le Pietà di Michelangelo. Tre calchi storici per la Sala delle Cariatidi”, edited by Giovanna Mori, Domenico Piraina, and Claudio Salzi, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Royal Palace, Hall of the Caryatids, 22 October 2022–8 January 2023), Milan 2022, pp. 49-55