PIETÀ (art). — It seems that the figurative model of the P., conceived as the Madonna’s lament over the Body of dead Christ, crowned with thorns and resting on her lap, became established earlier than elsewhere in German Gothic art. This is confirmed by certain wooden sculptures from southern Germany, dating from shortly after 1300. This concise conception of P., which was subsequently used frequently in Northern art in the 14th century, is rare in medieval Italian art, where the earliest representations of the lament over dead Christ appear in scenes with many figures, evoking the moment following the Deposition from the Cross and preceding the burial of Our Lord, and are often seen inserted into the Passion cycle.
Thus in Giotto’s fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel (Padua), and in the so-called P. of S. Remigio, an anonymous masterpiece (Uffizi in Florence), which Vasari attributed to the imaginary Giottino.
In Italian art, a very early representation of the lament over dead Christ, conceived more as a subject of sacred meditation than as an image of the Deposition, is found in the panel dated 1365 and signed by Giovanni da Milano. It is already a rare Italian example of a true P., differing in conception from the scene of lamentation over Christ’s body, laid beneath the Cross. In the Quattrocento, Italian representations of the lament over the body of dead Christ tended to become simplified into a condensed drama, with the number of figures witnessing the scene continually reduced: namely, the pious women, the various saints, the disciples, and the donors often represented in fourteenth-century paintings. At the final point of this iconographic development, besides the Madonna, s. Giovanni Ev. and the Magdalene sometimes appear, and more rarely s. Nicodemus and the angels. Thus it was only during the second half of the Quattrocento that the true iconographic model of the P. took shape. This concise scene of sorrow was often treated by the Paduan-Ferrarese painters of the Quattrocento, being particularly suited to the late Gothic spirit of their art. Thus one may recall the numerous tragic P. by Carlo Crivelli (Galleries of Boston and Detroit, Metropolitan Museum of New York, Brera collection in Milan, Vatican Pinacoteca). In his P. in the Louvre, Cosimo Tura likewise follows Carlo Crivelli’s conception, as does the panel in the Correr Museum (Venice), where, for the first time in Italy, the gentle lament of Mary alone is presented in the form it had in German sculptures of the fourteenth century. The following are also connected with this schema: the P. of Ercole de’ Roberti (Walker Gallery, Liverpool) and that of Francesco del Cossa (Jacquemart André Museum, Paris), in which s. Francesco, rather than taking part in Mary’s lament, contemplates her weeping from afar. The P. of Mantegna is presented in a highly characteristic form, a masterpiece of foreshortening (Brera, Milan). To illustrate the conception of the P. adopted during the same period in the art of central Italy, one may cite the altarpiece by Perugino (Uffizi), as well as the other by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Berlin Museum. In the earliest years of the sixteenth century, both Fr. Francia (lunette of the National Gallery, London) and fra’ Bartolomeo della Porta, in his celebrated canvas (Palazzo Pitti, Florence), presented the drama of the P. in a form of its own, fully detached from the Deposition. It was within such an iconographic climate that Michelangelo’s P. (Vatican Basilica), commissioned on 27 August 1497, was conceived. The Buonarroti later returned to the subject of this youthful masterpiece throughout the course of his long life, leaving us three further marble sculptures of it, all differently conceived: the P. of Palestrina, generally considered to have been executed around 1540; the P. of the Florentine cathedral, of 1550; and the P. Rondanini, found unfinished in 1564 in the house where the master died. Among the various P. inspired by those of Michelangelo (Marcello Venusti, Baccio Bandinelli, etc.), the most noteworthy is that of Sebastiano del Piombo (Civic Museum, Viterbo). Also connected with them is that of Sodoma (Borghese Gallery, Rome). Tiziano too produced a P. (Accademia, Venice).
In its markedly different stylistic language, the Baroque depicted the lament over dead Christ very frequently, according to the pathos-filled conception of the P. Thus, first of all, it should be recalled that in Rome the Caravaggesque movement produced three P. by Orazio Borganni (Spada Gallery, Museum of the Palazzo Venezia, and convent of the Crociferi), inspired by Mantegna’s formal model. A P. by Rubens is found in the Borghese Gallery. The various P. by Annibale Carracci belong to the classicist current of the early Baroque (Rome, Galleria Doria; Paris, Louvre; Naples, National Museum), as does the Madonna della P. with the patron saints of Bologna, a masterpiece by Guido Reni (Bologna, Pinacoteca), and the P. by Bernardo Strozzi, owned by the Accademia Ligustica of Genoa. The flourishing Baroque produced the P. by Antonio Montauti, a very well-known marble sculpture adorning the Corsini crypt in the Lateran Basilica in Rome; nineteenth-century art produced that of P. Tenerani in the Torlonia Chapel of the same basilica, and that of Dupré in the cemetery of Siena. The art of this century, too, has represented the P., both in the doors of Milan Cathedral, cast in bronze by Ludovico Vogliagli, and in numerous marble sculptures, among them that of Ermenegildo Luppi, formerly in the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and now in Dublin, and the other by L. Andreotti in the Sacrario di S. Croce in Florence. — Vedi tavv. XCII-XCIII.