피에타

Between the winter of 1843 and the summer of 1844 Delacroix painted a Pieta nearly five metres wide on the wall of Saint-Denys-du-Saint-Sacrement, a new parish church in the Marais quarter of Paris. Around 1850 he came back to the same subject at the size of a sheet of writing paper, 27 by 36 centimetres. That was the year the state gave him the ceiling of the Galerie d'Apollon at the Louvre, a hall that had been left unfinished since Charles Le Brun's time in the 17th century. He unveiled it in October 1851. Between public commissions on that scale he kept making small religious pictures like this one. It reached Oslo in 1918 as a gift from the Friends of the National Gallery.