Pietà

The unfinished state brings into greater evidence the essential pathetic expression that Michelangelo fixes in the idealised form of classical faces: first of all, he seems to carve the concise sign that characterises the state of mind: the cut of the eyes, the fold of the brows and of the mouths. It was like the key to which the whole invention of the "pyramidal, serpentine figure, multiplied by one, by two and by three" had to respond, the emotional key of the formal symphony. The sculptor worked on this group for years, humble and choleric, at times inflamed with enthusiasm, at times with a heart of ice, dull; in the end, "he had come to hate it - Vasari relates - and, losing patience, he broke it"; to the friend who restored it we probably owe the definition of the woman on the left, which is formally unresolved.