The theme of Christ's death followed Michelangelo through his whole life.
Jill Carrington | posted 7/01/2006 12:00AM
Beauty and goodness, and grief and pity, alive in the dead marble," began a poem by one spectator awestruck by Michelangelo's earliest masterpiece: the marble Pietà that now stands in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
The term pietà (meaning both "pity" and "piety") is used to describe works of art picturing the dead Christ held by his mother after he has been taken down from the cross. In Michelangelo's sculpture (c. 1497-1500), Mary cradles the body of her son in her lap. The work shows a breathtaking level of skill for a 25-year-old artist and emulates the delicate beauty and utter calm of ancient Greek and Roman statues. Influenced in his youth by the humanist circle around Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo came to believe that art should not merely copy reality but strive for the ideal.
The quiet beauty of the Pietà has Christian significance as well. When contemporaries described the Pietà as "perfect," they were making a theological statement, which Michelangelo shared: Christ's outward ...
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