Michelangelo’s Pieta
A story about art and motherhood…
It was summer 2018, after taking a semester in Renaissance art and writing a passionate essay on the famous Renaissance master Tintoretto, I convinced my husband to take our 2-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter to Italy. I never had the opportunity to travel there before so I was beyond excited to discover Florence and Rome and see for myself the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance.
I carefully planned our itinerary and made sure that we wouldn’t miss anything from the Uffizi museum, the Accademia, the Vatican, the Santa Maria de Novella, the Villa Borghese, and more… I was engrossed by the art revolution the Renaissance represented in history. It seemed to me that all fundamental art concepts and techniques such as three dimensionality, shading techniques like Chiaroscuro, Sfumato and ground breaking impossible architectural achievements were all originating from this era. The Renaissance was to me the time where being a scientist, a mathematician and an artist was colliding at its epitome! The names of Brunelleschi, Da Vinci, Titian, Botticelli were all spinning in my head, I was going to see them all and was going to be the perfect guide to introduce all this beauty to my family.
Well, my 2-year-old got very patient (survived over three hours at the Uffizi) but at one point in our artistic journey fully lost it. While San Franciscans were always looking at his little blond head with beloved eyes, Italians were demanding silence in the churches and could not stand him running or talking. I also wasn’t warned that visiting the Sistine Chapel in the middle of July was never a good idea until it was too late, we were trapped in endless corridors like in a flock of cows, walking with hundreds of other visitors with no exit possible for hours. I was realizing that while I was indulging in all this splendor, I probably scared my children for life of museums.
It is in this state of despair that I entered the St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and saw the Pieta for the first time. She was behind a glass (which I learned later was the result of a previous attack by some fanatic) and a large human crowd stood between us. However, she rose above the distance and the heads, and I was immediately taken. I made my way towards her and as I’m writing these words, the emotion I felt then are crushing me again… I spent my fair share of time in front of art pieces in my life and I have been moved by many but this was different. I was overwhelmed at first sight, moved beyond words by the fragility of this mother carrying her dead son on her lap.
Michelangelo carved from the heavy marble the most fragile piece I ever seen, how this heavy material could give birth to such a delicate woman? The Madonna seemed so young to the extent that her son and her could be the same age; however, there is no mistake that the pain the viewer is witnessing is the one of a mother who lost a child. The Madonna, from early motherhood lived through an impossible predicament, she knew that her baby will one day be taken from her and suffer greatly and the Pieta is representing the moment where all this lifetime of fears and turmoil have become reality and it is beyond moving. The plasticity of the piece makes the scene realistic, the right hand of the young Marie is supporting her son under his armpit and one can see her delicate fingers pressing against his flesh.
It seems that Michelangelo purposefully made the Madonna larger than her son and by so not only highlighted her immense pain but also making her the tip of the pyramidal composition. The triangular composition was a famous technique introduced during the Renaissance (by artists like Da Vinci) and created a stability effect. In the Pieta (the only work Michelangelo ever signed), the triangle seems to seal mother and son and to ground them, the Madonna and her son become one and it is incredibly beautiful.
What also retained my attention was that she is not holding on to the young corpse tightly, he is more resting on her lap, her left hand is not holding on to him, it is turned towards the ceiling (heaven) so as to say: “here is my son”. There is a sense that the Madonna is letting go. Her face is also tilted down towards her son but her eyes seem closed and resigned. The artist masterfully rendered her garment (dress and headpiece) with intricated folds contrasting with the smoothness of her face. This contrast seems to echo the dichotomy between the turmoil of her pain and the peace she is experiencing. There is a strong sense of push and pull between these two emotions that simply got to me and that I will never forget.
I will simply quote here my dear professor Leslie Simon “the mother-child bond, that knowledge that ultimately what mothers do is give their children up to the world and their own destinies, and despite one’s tension, one’s anxiety, there is peacefulness in that knowledge.”
