Written by Clara Kernodle
“God Abroad” is a travel column by sophomore Clara Kernodle. Each week, she writes about the different ways she sees God during her HUE study abroad trip. This week, she visited La Pietà in Italy.
We leave Italy today, but I’m tempted to walk the hour across Rome to see La Pietà once more. After yesterday’s hectic visit to the Vatican Museum and a few minutes staring up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I walked with some friends down the street to St. Peter’s Basilica. We arrived at the perfect hour, for the sun was set in golden layers across the pillared façade, and we walked inside during a musical celebration of mass. Inside, we looked up forever, drinking in 10 stories’ worth of nave and dome, and then to the left — there it was, the famous Pietà. Mary, downcast, holding the small and completely unexalted body of Christ, the marble bathed in gentle light behind protective glass. A handful of people gathered to look at the curves of the fabric, the lines of Jesus’s ribs, the sorrow in Mary’s eyes, and to read the following inscription: “Marble sculpture representing the Pietà dates 1499. The work was assigned to Michelangelo Buonarroti, who was then 23 years old … One should observe the silent dialogue between the two faces: it betrays suffering, hope, a longing …”
The Florentine Pietà, Michelangelo’s last, is given a quieter exaltation. The unfinished, unpolished and unprotected sculpture, dated around 1555, stands in a small, plain room in the Opera del Duomo Museum in Florence and is cast in a light that outlines the grief in the four figures presented. Michelangelo intended the Florentine Pietà for his own tomb and sculpted the figures of Mary, Christ, Mary Magdalene and Nicodemus to highlight the grief of an old man. The hooded Nicodemus, not Mary, is the focal point of this sculpture and was chosen by Michelangelo as a self-portrait. When you enter the dark gray room in the Duomo Museum, you can’t help but gasp — the yellow light on a rough-hewn, humbly beautiful sculpture will do that to you. And you are disappointed, since the Florentine Pietà is not nearly as masterful as the one in St. Peter’s, even though Michelangelo was older and more practiced when he did the former. You have to stand somberly in the gray room, looking at the lines in the twisted shoulder and the chisel scars on Mary’s face, and read the words of Michelangelo’s prayer-poem printed on the opposite wall, before you begin to see the passion and beauty of this sadder, less perfect sculpture. Its solitary placement reflects how its sculptor abandoned it, even tried to damage it after eight years of work.
Both pietàs — Michelangelo’s first and last pietà sculptures — tell a similar story, one which connects the biblical story of mother and son to Michelangelo’s own. In both, the composition of the figures and the expressions on the faces of Mary and her son represent the sculptor’s relationship with his mother, whose love he did not experience and, despite his efforts, could not return. Ricardo, our guide through the Duomo Museum, told us that a pietà, whether in painting or sculpture, represents Christ’s sacrifice and the corresponding pain of his mother. He also pointed out a significant insight into the genius of Michelangelo, saying that the suffering of Christ’s and Mary’s faces may show Michelangelo’s and his mother’s desire to have (and inability to attain) a loving, thriving connection.
The two Pietàs grieve in their own ways. In seeing both, I saw Isaiah 53:5, which is written on the plaques of each Pietà: “He was wounded for our transgressions … by his stripes we are healed.”
