PIETÀ (Art). - It seems that the figurative model of the P., conceived as the mourning of the Madonna over the body of the dead Christ, crowned with thorns and laid upon her lap, established itself earlier than elsewhere in German Gothic art. This is confirmed by some wooden sculptures from southern Germany, dating a little after 1300. This concise concept of the P., which was further used frequently in Nordic art in the 14th century, is rare in medieval Italian art, where the first depictions of the mourning over the dead Christ appear in scenes with many figures, which recall the moment following the Deposition from the Cross and preceding the burial of Our Lord and are often seen inserted into the cycle of the Passion.
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) that was attributed by Vasari to the imaginary Giottino.
In Italian art a very early depiction of the mourning over the 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., different in concept from the scene of lamentation over the body of Christ deposed beneath the Cross. In the Quattrocento Italian depictions of the mourning over the body of the dead Christ tend to simplify into a synthetic drama, increasingly reducing the number of figures assisting at the scene: that is, of the holy women, the various saints, the disciples and the donors often depicted in fourteenth-century paintings. At the final point of this iconographic development, besides the Madonna, St. John the Evangelist and the Magdalene sometimes appear, and rarely St. Nicodemus and the angels. Thus only in the second half of the Quattrocento does the true iconographic model of the P. take shape. This concise scene of sorrow was often treated by the Paduan-Ferrarese painters of the Quattrocento, it adapting itself in a particular way to the late-Gothic spirit of their art. Thus one recalls the numerous tragic P.s of Carlo Crivelli (Galleries of Boston and Detroit, Metropolitan Museum of New York, Brera collection in Milan, Vatican Pinacoteca). Also in his P. of the Louvre, Cosimo Tura follows the concept of Carlo Crivelli, and so in the panel of the Museo Correr (Venice) where there appears, for the first time in Italy, the gentle lament of Mary alone expressed in the form it had in the German sculptures of the fourteenth century. To this scheme are also linked: the P. of Ercole de' Roberti (Walker Gallery, Liverpool) and that of Francesco del Cossa (Musée Jacquemart André, Paris), in which St. Francis, rather than taking part in Mary's lament, contemplates her weeping from afar. In a very typical form the P. of Mantegna is presented, a masterpiece of foreshortening (Brera, Milan). To illustrate the concept of the P. adopted in the same period in the art of central Italy, the altarpiece of Perugino (Uffizi) may serve, as may the other by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Berlin Museum. In the very first years of the Cinquecento, the drama of the P. was presented in its own form fully detached from the Deposition both by Fr. Francia (lunette of the National Gallery, London) and by Fra Bartolomeo della Porta in his celebrated canvas (Palazzo Pitti, Florence). In such an iconographic climate was conceived Michelangelo's P. (Vatican Basilica), commissioned from him on 27 Aug. 1497. To the subject of this youthful masterpiece Buonarroti returned later, throughout the whole course of his long life, leaving us three other marble sculptures of it, all three differently conceived, namely: the P. of Palestrina, which is held to have been executed around 1540, the P. of the Florentine cathedral of 1550, and the Rondanini P., a work found unfinished in 1564 in the house where the master died. Among the various P.s inspired by those of Michelangelo (Marcello Venusti, Baccio Bandinelli, etc.), the most notable is that of Sebastiano del Piombo (Museo civico, Viterbo). To these is also linked that of Sodoma (Galleria Borghese, Rome). A P. is also owed to Titian (Accademia, Venice).
In its stylistic language, very different, the Baroque depicted very many times the mourning of the dead Christ according to the pathetic concept of the P. Thus one recalls, first of all, that from the Caravaggesque current there are in Rome three P.s by Orazio Borgianni (Galleria Spada, Museo del Palazzo Venezia and convent of the Crocigeri), inspired by the formal model of Mantegna. A P. by Rubens is found in the Galleria Borghese. To the classicistic current of the early Baroque are owed the various P.s of Annibale Carracci (Rome, Galleria Doria; Paris, Louvre; Naples, Museo nazionale), the Madonna of the P. with the patron saints of Bologna, a masterpiece of Guido Reni (Bologna, Pinacoteca), and the P. of Bernardo Strozzi, owned by the Accademia Ligustica of Genoa. The full-blown Baroque produced the P. of Antonio Montauti, a very well-known marble sculpture, which adorns the Corsini crypt in the Lateran Basilica in Rome; nineteenth-century art, 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 depicted the P., both in the doors of the cathedral of Milan, cast in bronze by Ludovico Vogliagli, and in numerous marble sculptures, among which that of Ermenegildo Luppi, formerly in the Galleria d'arte moderna of Rome and now in Dublin, and the other by L. Andreotti in the Sacrario of S. Croce in Florence. - See plates XCII-XCIII.
Bibliography2 works
Witold Wehr