April 6, 2023 / 11:50 a.m.
The Vatican Museums will open to the public an exhibition on the three plaster casts of the Pieta, sculpted by the master Michelangelo throughout his life.
In the context of Holy Week, the Vatican Museums announced the inauguration of the exhibition, “installed at the entrance of the Vatican Pinacoteca that will allow visitors to admire the plaster casts made between the 19th and 20th centuries of the Pietà: the Vatican, Bandini and Rondanini”.
“The exhibition was born with the intention of offering the museum public elements for reflection through the three moving Pietàs by the great Florentine master made in the service of the Faith,” said Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, in a statement.
“Thanks to the loan from the Artistic Lyceum of Porta Romana in Florence, the three tracings of Michelangelo come together in this third and last edition of the exhibition which, during 2022, was presented first at the Museo Dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence and then at the Palazzo Reale in Milan”.
Visible until January 6, 2024 and placed side by side, the three plaster works will offer the opportunity to study the evolution of Michelangelo’s artas well as their spiritual maturation.
“Pilgrims or visitors will be able to admire the art of the Italian Renaissance painter and poet from his early youth, when in Rome he sculpted the work that today is in the north aisle of St. Peter’s Basilica,” said Jatta.
Likewise, it will be possible to know “his full maturity expressed in the Bandini Pietà in Florence, up to his last stage, when, already an old man, he put his hand in the Rondanini Pietà of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan”.
More than 70 years separate the first Pieta, that of the Vatican, from the last, that of the Rondaninis, which represents the pain of the Virgin Mary who has Christ in her arms after the crucifixion.