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Friday, July 03 2015 14: 59

For Michelangelo, death is mother Featured

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Observing the three "Pietàs" of the great artist

by Mario Carrera

 

Faith not only inspires the artist's imagination, but works and shapes his very life. This consideration is evident in Michelangelo's artistic works and, in particular, in the three "Pietàs" that he sculpted. At the age of twenty-four he sculpted the "Pietà", the best known one, the "Pietà" par excellence that we admire in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. It is a hymn to the love of a young mother who loses a child in a dramatic way. A hymn to faith and resignation. As the years pass, the drama of dying knocks on the artistic vein of the Florentine artist and death takes its face in the "Pietà". The sculptures of the three "Pietàs" have an almost private itinerary in the artist's life. At twenty-four he sculpted a sumptuous beauty, even in the drama of the death of the Son of God. The last two "pietas", that of the Museum of the Cathedral of Florence and that of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, are the mirror of his state of mind as a facing death. “The unfinished”, in Florence, in the physiognomy of Nicodemus holding Christ, gives us his self-portrait, his face. The “Pietà” in Milan, usually referred to as the “Pietà Rondanini”, is Michelangelo's last work. The Master dedicated his last thoughts and even the last hours of his life to it.

The testimony is from 11 February 1564, written by Daniele da Volterra, who was close to him until his death and who left this written: «He worked all Saturday, preceding the Sunday of Carnival, on Monday he fell ill; he worked standing up, studying over that body of the Pietà." The director of the Vatican Museums, Antonio Paolucci, commenting on this testimony, pointed out: «"Standing" and "studying": the two expressions are not chosen by chance. "Standing", because the confrontation with art is, in fact, a duel, an indomitable confrontation. "Studying", meaning that for Michelangelo figurative expression was always, until the last day, research, mental torment, strenuous experimentalism". Almost ninety years old "on his feet", on the eve of his death, Michelangelo was still "studying" the ultimate theme of life, the meaning of living, the nostalgia for perfection and also the relationship with his mother. This sculpture symbolizes the bond of each person with the source of their life: the maternal womb. Christ is dead, but he will have to be resurrected: it seems that his body wants to recompose that unity between mother and child to begin a new life with his human flesh, starting again from that womb that hosted him. «The Christ who is one with the Mother, the two figures attached to each other» seem, through the resurrection, to draw on the ultimate perfection to which redeemed humanity is destined. «The relationship of the Mother with her son - wrote Paolucci - is a constant topic in the sculptor's poetics. He had addressed it for the first time in the "Pietà" of St. Peter, signed and dated 1499, when he was twenty-four years old. He returns to it in his later years, dominated by fury and "unsatisfaction", in the Pietà now in the Florentine Museo dell'Opera del Duomo». Exactly a few hours before his death, Michelangelo returns for the last time to the topic that marks the pace of the existence of every human creature. "It is said that when a man is about to die he miraculously returns to being a child." In the dip of our memory at the moment in which life is dying out, suddenly the last images belong to remote childhood, the last thoughts and the last invocations are for the mother. «The simple and ancient thought of death as a return to the origins and therefore to the mother, occupied the imagination of the almost ninety-year-old Michelangelo: close to dying and alone, in the winter of 1564, in front of the two figures "stuck together". More than showing sacrifice, Michelangelo's latest sculpture shows the spiritual state that derives from Christ's sacrifice. The human sensation, consoling and pitiful, of death as a return to the mother. For the sake of information we must testify that Don Guanella also calls death "mother", a mother who teaches life. In the Rosary chapel of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, ​​a bas-relief shows the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus on her left arm and holding the hand of a dying man with her right hand. Mary looks at Jesus and seems to beg him for compassion and mercy. In the bas-relief we can also see Giuseppe looking pleased at the scene.

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