The only piece Michelangelo ever signed

On a sash across The Holy Virgin's chest

After years of studying Michelangelo’s work, I’m struck by how often art historians feel the need to mention how young Mary looks in Michelangelo’s first Pietà, and how Jesus “looks his age.” To me, Mary looks like a hulking mountain of stone holding a grown man on her lap in a moment of pure grief. The Carrara marble from which the statue was carved is over 190,000 million years old. I see timelessness when I look at her face — not just the age, but the emotion.

Mary was a young girl trying to read a book when the Angel Gabriel appeared to tell her not to be afraid because she had found favor with God. The youth in her face is reminiscent of the moment when her path was set in stone.

Michelangelo finished his first Pietà at 24 years old. It’s the only piece he ever signed.

The sculpture captures the moment when Jesus, taken down from the cross, is given to his mother Mary. Some art historians believe Michelangelo was inspired by a passage in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: "O virgin mother, daughter of your Son …your merit so ennobled human nature that its divine Creator did not hesitate to become its creature.”

Part of the intensity of the bond between Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna is that he was a motherless son and she was a childless mother. This first Pietà was carved long before they met. But it serves as a counterpoint to another Pietà that he started carving the night Vittoria died. I was alone in a room in Milan with this Pietà. I will write more about that soon, but wanted to share a picture of it here, so you can see the difference in Michelangelo’s first Pietà, expressing the grief of a mother who has lost her part human, part divine child, and the Rondanini Pietà below, depicting his own grief at the loss of his part human, part divine Vittoria. Grief tempered with support and equality. The arms of Jesus Christ, once nailed to the cross, and in the future at used to judge every last human who ever lived, now blend into the raw stone of one human being’s body.