Pietà

By the 1530s Rosso Fiorentino was no longer working in Florence at all. He had fled Italy after the Sack of Rome in 1527, when imperial troops overran the city, and had found a court post in France decorating the great gallery of Francis I at Fontainebleau. This dark, crowded Pietà came out of that second life. The king's constable, Anne de Montmorency, ordered it for the chapel of his château at Écouen, north of Paris, and his coat of arms is still worked into the pillow beneath the dead Christ. The bodies press close in a shallow, lamplit space, more sculpted than painted. An X-ray has since found a different arrangement of Christ and Saint John underneath, a first idea Rosso painted over before he was done.