피에타

In the 1430s the pope was living not in Rome but in Florence. Eugenius the Fourth had been driven out of his own city and taken refuge in the Tuscan republic, and Vasari later wrote that Cosimo de' Medici had a small devotional panel by Filippo Lippi made as a gift for him. This Pietà, painted around 1437, may be that very picture. It is barely two feet high, meant for private prayer rather than an altar. Lippi gives the dead Christ the grey of his own shroud, held up between his mother and John the Evangelist, only the face beginning to warm back toward life. The stillness owes something to Donatello, whose shallow carved reliefs Lippi was studying in those same years in Florence.