Pieta with the four figures

The Pietà with the four figures is a sculpture of Michel-Angel currently being with the Musée dell' Opera del Duomo with Florence.

Started at the 75 years age with Michel-Angel, this sculpture does not make following an order. It probably carries it out for its clean tomb, which it would have liked to place at Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. This work remains unfinished and Michel-Angel started even by destroying it, either because of a defect in the marble, or thinking that work was not satisfactory. It did not completely destroy it thanks to its Antonio servant who asked him to give him the sculpture. It was then restored by the sculptor Florentin Tiberio Calcagni, raises and friend of Michel-Angel, who finishes of them also a few pieces. In spite of that, Jesus does not have a leg left, remained unfinished or destroyed.

The Pietà represents Nicodème on the right carrying the body of Jesus in his arms, helped by the Virgin Mary and Marie-madeleine on the left.

With Nicodème, Michel-Angel carries out a self-portrait, representing itself as a encapuchonné old man. According to the legend, Nicodème was sculptor, him also, and was regarded as the author of the Volta Santo di Lucca dome of Lucques.

Quotations

“Its genius and its force could not occur to create… It attacked a block of marble to cut there four figures larger than natural, among which was Christ dead; it did that to distract and spend time, and, as it said, because the physical exercise that the work of the chisel got to him maintained it in good health. ” Sleeping very little, in order to be able to work even during the night, “it had manufactured a helmet out of paperboard; and it carried in the medium, on its head, a lit candle which, in this way, without him to embarrass the hands, lit what it made. ” It still cut at this age the marble “with such a fury that one believed that all had to break of pieces; it broke of a blow of large fragments thickness of three or four inches, and it cut the line so clear that, if it had been more far from the width of a hair, it had run the danger all to lose.” (Giorgio Vasari)

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