After Florence and Milan, Vatican Museums welcome casts of Michelangelo's three Pieta

On the occasion of Easter, the Vatican Museums are opening to the public until Jan. 6, 2024, the exhibition Michelagnolo’s Love and Effort Together. The casts of the three Pieta, dedicated to the three Pieta by Michelangelo Buonarroti. Set up at the entrance to the Vatican Pinacoteca, the exhibition will allow visitors to admire Buonarroti’s plastic art through the three plaster casts made between the 19th and 20th centuries of his famous Pietà: the Vatican, Bandini and Rondanini.

“The exhibition was created with the intention of offering museum audiences food for thought through the three moving Pietà by the great Florentine master made in the service of Faith,” commented Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums.

Thanks to a loan from the Gipsoteca of the Liceo Artistico di Porta Romana in Florence, and two artifacts from the Vatican collections, the three Michelangelo casts are presented together in this third and final edition of the exhibition, which, during 2022, was presented first at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence and then at the Palazzo Reale in Milan.

Placed close to each other, the three plaster works will provide an opportunity to study the evolution of Michelangelo’s art as well as his spiritual maturation, from his early youth, when in Rome he sculpted for theancient St. Peter’s the work now in the north aisle of the Basilica, to the full maturity expressed in the Bandini Pietà in Florence, to his final season, when, now an old man, he set his hand to the Rondanini Pietà in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco.

The cast of the Vatican City’s Pietà of St. Peter ’s was made in 1975 within the Casts and Plaster Casts Laboratory of the Vatican Museums by Ulderico Grispigni; the occasion for its creation came at a dramatic moment for the Pietà namely the 1972 vandalism of the sculpture, which necessitated the preparation of a new cast. The cast of the Pieta of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, the Bandini Pieta, preserved in the collection of the Florentine Gipsoteca of the Istituto d’Arte di Porta Romana, dates from around 1882 and is the work of Florentine moulder Oronzo Lelli. Lastly, the cast of the Rondanini Pietà was commissioned in 1953 from Milanese moulder Cesare Gariboldi, with the intention of determining the ideal location for the sculpture, preserved since 1952 in the Castello Sforzesco, as best as possible and in total safety during the marble statue’s fitting tests.

The exhibition is part of the Vatican Museums’ exhibition itinerary.

After Florence and Milan, Vatican Museums welcome casts of Michelangelo's three Pieta

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