Michelangelo had begun work on the “Pietá,” sculpted in Carrara marble, while in his twenties.
The first of a number of works of the same theme by the artist, the statue had been commissioned for the French Cardinal Jean de Bilhères, who was a representative in Rome.
The sculpture is made for the cardinal's funeral monument in the Chapel of Santa Petronilla, a Roman mausoleum near the south transept of St. Peter's, which the Cardinal had chosen as his funerary chapel.
Completed in 1499, it is the only piece Michelangelo ever signs.
This famous work of art depicts the body of Jesus on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion.
The theme is of Northern origin, popular by this time in France but not yet in Italy.
Michelangelo's interpretation of the Pietà is unprecedented in Italian sculpture.
It is an important work as it balances the Renaissance ideals of classical beauty with naturalism.
The structure is pyramidal, and the vertex coincides with Mary's head.
The statue widens progressively down the drapery of Mary's dress, to the base, the rock of Golgotha.
The figures are quite out of proportion, owing to the difficulty of depicting a fully grown man cradled full-length in a woman's lap.
Much of Mary's body is concealed by her monumental drapery, and the relationship of the figures appears quite natural.
Michelangelo's interpretation of the Pietà was far different from those previously created by other artists, as he sculpted a young and beautiful Mary rather than an older woman around fifty years of age.
The marks of the Crucifixion are limited to very small nail marks and an indication of the wound in Jesus' side.
Christ's face does not reveal signs of The Passion.
Michelangelo did not want his version of the Pietà to represent death, but rather to show the "religious vision of abandonment and a serene face of the Son",thus the representation of the communion between man and God by the sanctification through Christ.
The Madonna is represented as being very young for the mother of a thirty-three-year-old son, which is not uncommon in depictions of her at the time of the Passion of Christ.
Various explanations have been suggested for this.
One is that her youth symbolizes her incorruptible purity, as Michelangelo himself will say to his biographer and fellow sculptor Ascanio Condivi.
