Vatican Museums

As food for thought for the time of Lent and Easter, the Pope’s Museums are dedicating an exhibition to Michelangelo’s three Pietà. Entitled “L’amor di Michelagnolo e la fatica insieme (Michelangelo placed so much love and labour). The Casts of the three Pietà”, the exhibition which, in a new setting at the entrance of the Pinacoteca, is intended to illustrate Michelangelo’s extraordinary sculptural art via three plaster casts produced between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of his renowned Pietà: Vaticana, Bandini and Rondanini.

Thanks to the loan from the Gallery of Plaster Casts of the Artistic Lyceum of Porta Romana, Florence, and the two works from the Vatican Museums collections, the three plaster casts of Michelangelo's Pietà are thus brought together in this third and final Vatican edition of the exhibition that was first presented at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, and then at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in 2022.

Visible until 6 January, the precious plaster "works" will offer the opportunity to study the evolution of Michelangelo's art, as well as his spiritual journey, from his early youth - when in Rome, at just 24 years of age, he sculpted for the ancient Saint Peter's the work now in the north aisle of the Basilica - to his full maturity expressed in the Pietà Bandini in Florence, up to his later years, when, by then an old man, he turned his hand to the Rondanini Pietà in the Castello Sforzesco.