This book offers a fresh perspective on Michelangelo’s well-known masterpiece, the Vatican Pietà, by tracing the shifting meaning of the work of art over time.
Lisa M. Rafanelli chronicles the object history of the Vatican Pietà and the active role played by its many reproductions. The sculpture has been on continuous view for over 500 years, during which time its cultural, theological, and artistic significance has shifted. Equally important is the fact that over its long life it has been relocated numerous times and has also been reproduced in images and objects produced both during Michelangelo’s lifetime and long after, described here as artistic progeny: large-scale, unique sculpted variants, smaller-scale statuettes, plaster and bronze casts, and engraved prints.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, early modern studies, religion, Christianity, and theology.
Author(s): Lisa M. Rafanelli
Series: Routledge Research in Art History
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 198
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Opening Act: Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà
Cardinal Jean de Bilhères Lagraulas and the Commission
Envisioning the Pietà
The Finished Sculpture (and Some Lingering Questions)
Encountering the Pietà
Experiencing the Pietà
The Madonna della Febbre
The Peripatetic Pietà: From Santa Petronilla to the Secretarium
2 Canonicity and Its Discontents: Artistic Progeny of the Pietà during the Sixteenth Century
A Pietà for Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome
Intermezzo: Florentine Rebellion
A Pietà for Santo Spirito in Florence
An Anonymous Critic and a Madrigal
A Pietà for the King of France
A Pietà for Everyone: Reproductive Prints
Canonicity and its Discontents
3 Restaging the Pietà in the Late Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
Marian Devotion and Imagery in Tridentine Rome
The Pietà and the Canons’ Choir (1568–1609)
On the Road Again (1609–1625)
Early Seventeenth Century Posthumous Bronze Copies of the Pietà in Italy and Spain
The New Canons’ Choir (1625–1750)
Coronation
4 Shifting Perspectives: Michelangelo and the Pietà from the Mid-Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
The Pietà and the Grand Tour
Robert Samber’s Roma Illustrata (1722)
Mid-Century: The Pietà takes Center Stage
The Late Eighteenth-Early Nineteenth Centuries: Revolution, Romanticism, and Michelangelo
Entre’acte: Napoleon and the Looting of Rome
The Mid-Nineteenth Century: Nationalism and the Art of Michelangelo
The Great Exhibition of 1851
Michelangelo’s Florentine Birthday Bash of 1875
5 The Pietà on the American Stage: The Twentieth Century
A Question of Authenticity
Marble Pietàs in Early Twentieth Century America: Icons of Faith, Beauty, and Identity
The Pietà and Popular Devotion: Our Lady of Sorrows
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis: The Pietà at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale
Lost-Wax Bronze Casts of the Pietà: Icons of Faith, Beauty, and Commerce
The Pietà and American Consumer Capitalism
Only the Original Would Do: The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair
Staging the Pietà at the Vatican Pavilion
Critical Reception
Souvenirs, Body Doubles, and Effigies
Plot Twist: An Iconoclastic Attack (1972)
6 Coda: The Pietà on the Global Stage
Something Borrowed: Recasting Casts
Fragmentation, Proselytization, and Commodification
Something New: Contemporary Artists and the Vatican Pietà
Artistic Appropriation: The Sacred and the Profane
The Vatican Pietà as a Symbol of Social Justice
Performance, Empathy, and Memory: Seeing the Pietà Afresh
Bibliography
Index
