One says: “The celebrated Pietà now adorns the first right-hand chapel on entering the great door of St. Peter’s. It consists of two figures, the Virgin Mother, seated in a dignified attitude, and supporting on her knees a dead Christ, Whom she regards with inexpressible reverence, tenderness, and grief.... Its touching pathos, its dignified conception, and its masterly execution, are incontestable.”
A French critic writes: “Cette Pietà fut la première œuvre de Michel Ange qui l’éleva au premier rang et apprit son nom à tous les échos du monde civilisé;” and the same author further speaks of the group as having been “the conception” of the artist, and “a creation” of his imagination.
Another writes: “When this group was finished it was universally admired,” and goes on to state that “one of the great sculptors of the present day, our fellow-countryman Gibson, expressed himself in terms of high admiration.”
Once more; a writer upon the Tuscan school: “In this admirable group the dead body of our Lord lies upon the lap of the Madonna, while her left hand is half opened and slightly turned back, with a gesture which carries out the pitying expression of her face. The Christ shows a purity of style and deep feeling, combined with a grandeur which Michel Angelo drew from himself alone.” The same writer tells us a few pages before: “Michael Angelo, who was an enemy to tradition in art, as well as to a positive imitation of nature, took a path diametrically opposed to that followed by the conventionalists, the realists, and the worshippers of the antique.”
We entirely dissent from the unmeasured laudation here given to the famous statue at St. Peter’s. Let the praise of originality of conception, as well as of merit of execution (so far as the size of his material would permit) be given where it is due, to the sculptor of the fourteenth century, who died a hundred years before Michael Angelo was born. Nay, more than this; an unprejudiced comparison will show that where the work of the great Italian differs from the earlier Pietà, it differs for the worse. In the ivory the position of the head and the cold stiffness of the limbs are more death-like and more solemn than in the marble. In the ivory also the Mother seems to be thinking more of the past pains and sufferings of her Divine Son than of her own sorrows: tenderly she supports the Saviour’s head with her right hand, and, as it were, still clings to Him and draws Him to her with the other; not, as in the marble at Rome, stretching out and opening her hand as if to show her misery and the terrible extent of her bereavement. The mediæval artist remembered that the sad cry of the prophet in the book of Lamentations referred not to His mother but to Christ: “Was there ever any sorrow like unto my sorrow?”
It was a common practice in the middle ages to colour statuettes and, indeed, also other things, such as triptychs, diptychs, and the covers of writing-tablets. Traces of this colouring are still visible on many examples. The robes and vestments were painted red or blue, with borders of a different colour and often diapered with patterns in gold. The interesting illustration (opposite) of a painter at work upon a statuette, an illumination in a French manuscript of the fifteenth century, is copied from M. Labarte’s work on the industrial arts.
