Pietà
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Authors
Unknown artists
Date
Type
Image
Language
Keyword
Lamentation , Virgin , Mary , mourning , tears , Christ
Alternative Title
Abstract
This painted terracotta sculpture of the Virgin Mary weeping over the body of the dead Christ was made in the fifteenth century for the Church of San Domenico in Rieti and is currently housed in the Museo Civico in the same city. It is one of many similar under life-sized sculptures of the Pietà that survive from the fifteenth century in central Italy (especially in Umbria). Scholars often assume that the images that show terrible suffering, both through the abundant tears of Mary and through the emaciated and bloody body of Christ, were made by foreigners, German sculptors traveling through Italy, rather than made by Italians, who are assumed to make more elevated images. Certainly, German itinerant sculptors, especially specialists in crucifixes, had been active in Italy since the fourteenth century, though these were generally woodcarvers, not working in terracotta. Regardless of the origins of the maker, which is unknowable, there was certainly a taste for this kind of imagery of violent suffering in Italy in the fifteenth century. This example is well-preserved, except for losses to Christ's right arm and the Virgin's left arm. Mary, who is heavily draped, her face cast into shadow, has great sculpted tears running down her face. Compared to her round-faced beauty and the grand abundance of her flowing robes, which pool by her feet, decorated with blue and gold stars, Christ's body is pathetically thin and vulnerable, his bones and sinews painfully protruding, the skin on his hands and feet still hooding over where the nails had been. The remains of delicate patterns edging her clothes and an elaborately sculpted and gilded belt, like that a fashionable woman would have worn at the time, also elevate Mary, even as her very human sorrow evokes the texts of dramas performed in the period, in which Mary remembers holding Christ as an infant and bewails that she must now hold him dead, railing against the cross for taking her son from her and even at Gabriel for lying to her and telling her she was blessed among women. Photograph(s) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Description
Museo Civico, Rieti; San Domenico, Rieti
Citation
https://catalogo.beniculturali.it/detail/HistoricOrArtisticProperty/1200009987