Pietà

This lunette once crowned a tall altarpiece by Cosmè Tura in the church of San Giorgio, just outside the walls of Ferrara, made for the chapel of the Roverella family. Its centre, the Virgin enthroned with the Child asleep on her lap, is now in the National Gallery in London. Up here, above that sleeping baby, Mary holds her son again, grown and dead, his body laid across her knees.

Mourners crowd in on both sides. The scene has been compared with the sculpted groups of mourners around the dead Christ that were popular in northern Italy, and in 2020 the Louvre hung this painting in its own exhibition of Italian Renaissance sculpture, from Donatello to Michelangelo.

The altarpiece was damaged by an explosion in 1709 and taken out of the church in pieces. The lunette went through collections in Ferrara, Brescia and Milan before the Marquis Campana in Rome bought it, and the Louvre acquired it with his collection in 1861.