LE TRE PIETÀ DI MICHELANGELO. Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa

Where and when

From

24February 2022

3October 2022

Altre sedi

Museo dell'Opera del Duomo

Given the great success of the exhibition LE TRE PIETÀ DI MICHELANGELO. No one thinks of how much blood it costs at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, it was decided to extend it until 3 October 2022, instead of closing it to the public on 1 August as planned. The exhibition, inaugurated on 24 February on the occasion of the “Mediterranean frontier of peace 2022” meeting held in Florence, has been seen by 222,000 visitors to date.

For the first time an exhibition compares in the room of the Tribuna of Michelangelo, close to each other, the original of the Bandini Pietà, whose restoration has just been completed, and the plaster casts of the Vatican Pietà and the Pietà Rondanini from the Vatican Museums.

Exhibition Hours

Museo dell’Opera del Duomo

Monday – Sunday

10:15 am

–

4:45 pm

On the occasion of the meeting “Mediterranean frontier of peace 2022”, which will bring together the Bishops and Mayors of the Mediterranean in Florence and which will also be attended by Pope Francis, the exhibition, curated by Barbara Jatta, Sergio Risaliti, Claudio Salsi and Timothy Verdon, is a project that exceptionally involves the Vatican Museums, the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, the Museo Novecento in Florence, the Castello Sforzesco in Milan and the institutions of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the Municipality of Florence, the Municipality of Milan and Fabbrica of San Pietro.

Next autumn the three plaster casts of the original Pietà will be exhibited in Milan in the Sala delle Cariatidi of Palazzo Reale in a new specially designed setting.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, “Pietà Bandini”, Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. After the restoriation. Photo by Alena Fialova

Plaster of the Pietà Rondanini, Courtesy Musei Vaticani.

Plaster of the Pietà Vaticana. Courtesy Musei Vaticani.

Placed next to each other, the three Pietas will offer the opportunity to study the evolution of Michelangelo’s art as well as his spiritual maturation, from his early youth – when in Rome he sculpted the work now in the nave for the ancient St. Peter’s. north side of the Basilica – in its last season, when, now old, he put his hand to the Pietà today in Florence and then to the Pietà Rondanini preserved in Milan.

It is a journey of more than fifty years, which leads from the ambition of the young man who carved his name on the chest of the Madonna in the Vatican version, to the personal identification of the elderly artist, who in that of the Opera Museum depicts himself in the likeness of Nicodemus.

Close to his own death, Michelangelo meditated deeply on the Passion of Christ, as he himself made it clear in a contemporary drawing of the Pietà, donated to the Marquis of Pescara Vittoria Colonna, where he wrote the Dante sentence: You don’t think how much blood costs (Paradiso XXIX, 91). The sublime result of this spiritual meditation was the execution of the Rondanini Pietà, whose extreme beauty shines in the sunset of the figure.

On the occasion of the exhibition, a catalog will be published by Silvana Editoriale with essays and files by the curators Barbara Jatta (director of the Vatican Museums), Sergio Risaliti (director of the Museo Novecento Firenze), Claudio Salsi (director of the Superintendence Castello, Archaeological Museums and Historical Museums), Timothy Verdon (director of the Opera del Duomo Museum in Florence) and other scholars.