Pieta (Michelangelo)

The Virgin holds the dead Christ across her lap, her vast marble drapery cradling his weight, her face young and composed in a grief turned inward. Michelangelo carved it at about twenty-four, and it made his name - for the impossible softness he drew out of stone, for the serene pyramid of the design, and for the youthfulness he gave the mother, which he defended as the sign of her purity. It is the only work he ever signed, cutting his name into the sash across her breast, the story goes, after hearing the marvel credited to someone else. It is the northern image of Mary mourning, raised to Roman grandeur.