Pietà

When you finally push through the crowds of tourists and reach the first chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica, standing separated from it by bulletproof glass, you’ll suddenly feel like a voyeur—peering in on a mother cradling her dead child. This is the work of a 24-year-old Michelangelo, and the only work in human history to make cold marble weep warm tears.

What drives both critics and admirers mad is the Virgin’s age. She should look older than her dead son—but she doesn’t. She looks younger. Michelangelo’s explanation was: “Chaste women do not age.” That’s not an excuse; it’s his version of theological aesthetics—a woman consecrated to the divine, rescued from the ravages of time itself, frozen forever in her grief.

Move your eyes downward to Christ’s limp right arm—the veins at the wrist are sharply defined, the skin’s laxness rendered in stunning contrast to the silk-like polish of the marble surface. Death’s weight and beauty’s apex occupy the same stone simultaneously. Lean closer to the Virgin’s chest and you’ll catch faint Latin letters on a thin sash: MICHAEL . A[N]GELVS BONAROTVS FLORENT[INVS] FACIEBAT (Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this). This is the only work he ever signed in his life. Legend claims a visitor pointed at his masterpiece and attributed it to someone else, whereupon the young artist crept back into the church that night and chiseled his name into the Virgin’s sash—and then, supposedly embarrassed by the undignified act, never signed another work again.

On May 21, 1972, a 33-year-old Hungarian geologist named Laszlo Toth leaped over the barriers and struck the sculpture 15 times with a hammer, destroying the Virgin’s nose, eyelid, and left hand. He shouted, “I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead!” The bulletproof glass you see today was installed after that attack—a reluctant compromise humanity made after learning that extreme beauty can sometimes trigger extreme urges to destroy it.

In the late 15th-century Rome of papal schemes and aristocratic calculations, this breathtakingly serene double figure was like a pocket of silence in a roaring carnival. It doesn’t preach suffering; it speaks of love. The French Cardinal Jean de Bilhères commissioned it but died before its completion. The work was originally meant for his tomb before being moved into St. Peter’s Basilica. The 24-year-old who made it sealed his eternal legacy before most men have figured out what they want to do with their lives.

ArtBuddy Interactive Challenge: Since you’re so close, can you find the signature of that 24-year-old genius on the sash crossing the Virgin’s chest? (Hint: It’s written in Latin).