Eight stories of Michelangelo’s Pietà
Twenty-something Michelangelo Buonarroti spent two long years of sacrifice to transform a single block of marble into work that ‘no artist could better.’
In 1499, a young sculptor from Florence completed a statue he referred to as ‘the heart’s image.’ Two years previous, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni had accepted a commission from a French cardinal to create “the most beautiful work of marble in Rome, one that no living artist could better.”
Young Michelangelo was confident in his ability to fulfill such a presumptuous task. The work was to become the Cardinal’s tombstone inside a chapel in Saint Peter’s in Rome. Michelangelo was instructed to carve. “a clothed Virgin Mary with a dead Christ naked in her arms.”
The Pietà was quickly accepted and eventually recognized as one of the world’s greatest masterpieces of sculpture.
In my new time slip novel, Michael Angelo & the Stone Mistress, the creation of the Pietà is an integral part of the plot. New York fashion photographer Michael Angelo Thomas travels to Florence after being deported from the USA. While in Italy, he discovers the truth about the memories that live within him.
