A Pietà is an image of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ across her lap, after he has been taken down from the cross. It can be a sculpture or a painting. The best known is Michelangelo's marble in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, carved in 1498 and 1499.
The word is Italian for pity, from the Latin pietas. No Gospel describes this moment, however. The evangelists tell how Christ's body was taken down from the cross and laid in a tomb, but none of them says that Mary held it on her knees. The scene was imagined by artists and believers, and it first took shape in Germany in the early fourteenth century, long before Michelangelo.
A Pietà is also narrower than the scenes of mourning painted around the dead Christ, which gather many followers around the body. The great majority of Pietàs keep only the mother and her son. Some add Saint John or Mary Magdalene, but the subject remains the bond between those two figures.
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The most famous Pietà in the world is carved in Italian marble, but the idea behind it came from the north, and so did the man who paid for it. Michelangelo made it for a French cardinal, the ambassador of King Charles VIII to the pope, and he was 23 years old when he signed the contract.
He then made two choices that visitors to St. Peter's still ask about. He gave the Virgin the face of a young woman, who looks no older than the grown son lying across her knees. And he carved his own name across her chest, something he would never do again.
Michelangelo had to account for the first choice in his own lifetime, and his two earliest biographers, Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi, recorded the reasons behind both.
What You'll Discover
Where the image began, long before Michelangelo.
Who paid for the marble in Rome.
Why Mary looks younger than her son.
Why Michelangelo signed this work and no other.
What happened inside St. Peter's in 1972.
Who took up the Pietà after him.