Pietà

This is not painted on canvas or panel. It is painted on a slab of slate about three centimetres thick that weighs 103 kilos. From around 1530 Sebastiano was the painter pushing oil on stone, and Vasari explains why people liked the idea: it seemed pictures could be made everlasting this way, safe from fire and from worms. The commission suited that exactly. In 1533 Ferrante Gonzaga asked him for a picture to give to Francisco de los Cobos, secretary to the emperor Charles V, who wanted it for the funeral chapel he was building at Úbeda in Andalusia. Cobos saw the work in Rome during Holy Week in 1536 and asked for things Italian painters did not usually include: the nails of the cross, and the veil of Veronica. So the Virgin holds the veil out in one hand and looks at the face on the cloth rather than at the body of her son across her knees. The date is still unsettled. Sebastiano's patron and his agent in Rome wrote to each other about the picture from June 1533 to the end of 1539, mostly about how slow he was being, and it reached Spain in 1540. The panel is owned by the Medinaceli family foundation and is in the Prado on deposit.