Pietà

Bramantino was really Bartolomeo Suardi, a Milanese painter who took his nickname from Bramante, the great architect then reshaping the city. That double life shows here. He sets this Pietà almost like a stage, placing the mourners over the dead Christ just outside a town whose walls and rooftops you can pick out behind them. He was working in the years around 1510, when Milan kept passing between French armies and its old Sforza rulers, and painting in the city was turning cool, geometric, and still. Mary holds her son with that same restraint. Bramantino built as well as painted. He designed the Trivulzio chapel in Milan for a general who had fought on the French side, and the clean, measured architecture of that world stands quietly behind these grieving figures.