Pietà

Around 1500, when this panel is dated, Michelangelo had just finished his marble Pietà in Rome, carved for a French cardinal's chapel at Saint Peter's and completed in 1499. The anonymous painter of this picture took that famous group as his model and then changed it. Michelangelo laid the dead Christ across his mother's lap. Here the body is turned to face us, closer to the older devotional image of the mourning Virgin that German-speaking lands called the Vesperbild. The whole panel is painted in grisaille, shades of grey that imitate carved stone, so what hangs on the wall is a painting pretending to be a marble. The museum reads that choice as a bow to an idea Michelangelo held, that sculpture was the higher art. The picture came to the Italian state in 1895 from the Monte di Pietà, Rome's charitable pawn bank.