Pietà

Around 1600 Annibale Carracci was in Rome working for the Farnese family, the same years he was covering their palace ceiling with gods and lovers. This small, dark picture was another Farnese commission, from Cardinal Odoardo, and it could not be more different in mood. Annibale builds the dead Christ and his mother into a steady pyramid, her open hand and the two grieving angels quietly steering your eye to the wounded palm and the crown of thorns lying on the ground. He clearly had Michelangelo's marble Pietà in Saint Peter's in mind, the same slow, sculptural weight. So many later painters copied and adapted this arrangement that it became one of the standard ways the Baroque imagined the scene.