Rondanini Pietà

Having abandoned the Florence “Pietà”, Michelangelo immediately began work on another version, shortly after 1553. But, “whether it was that the judgement of that man”, as Vasari says, “was so great that he was never satisfied with anything he did”, he left that one unfinished too. Only in the last year of his life did he take it up again, destroying almost all that he had carved (see what remains of the right arm and the legs of the “first” Christ), and set about drawing from that marble a totally new “concept”, working on it until his death. The marvels of the spiral composition, over which the intellectualism of the Mannerists was racking itself, are surpassed in this simple ascending wave that brings together the mystical linearism of the Gothic and the refined classical melody.