The Pietà

For most of the time this picture has been studied, it was taken for a copy. Van Dyck painted a large Lamentation for the church of the beguinage in Antwerp, his home city, and this smaller canvas repeats that composition. The repetition was long read as another hand's work. Matías Díaz Padrón, the Prado's specialist in Flemish painting, argued exactly that in 1975, then changed his mind in 1999 and placed the canvas among Van Dyck's own, a repetition at reduced size made by the painter himself. The museum dates it around 1629. The arrangement is not the familiar one. Christ does not lie across his mother's knees, as in Michelangelo's marble. He rests on a white cloth spread over stone, his head held up in her right hand, while the Magdalene kisses his other hand and John watches from behind. The Virgin looks up, and the museum reads that look as close to a reproach against the Father who had once spared Isaac.