Palestrina Pietà

Of all the large sculptures credited to Michelangelo, this Pietà is the only one that no early writer and no archive document ever mentions. It turned up in the church of Santa Rosalia at Palestrina, a hill town near Rome, in the Barberini family chapel, and nobody knows how or when it got there. The museum dates it to around the 1550s and gives it to Michelangelo, an attribution widely accepted though not unanimous. Some scholars have seen a pupil or follower in its uneven proportions, its unusually soft modelling and its rather flat relief. That flatness may come from the stone itself. The block had once been part of an ancient building. Its back still carries carved leaves and an egg-and-dart moulding. On the front, Mary and John hold up the dead Christ, his legs folding under the weight of his body.