Michelangelo on his Pieta

This photo of Michelangelo’s Pieta was posted by my nephew from St. Peter’s Basilica.  Will Durant wrote in his The Renaissance (Vol. V of the Story of Civilization).

“The greatest product of this first stay in Rome was the Pieta that is now one of the glories of St. Peter’s. . . . There are some blemishes in this glorious group of the Virgin Mother holding her dead Son in her lap:  the drapery seems excessive, the Virgin’s head is small for her body, her left hand is extended n an inappropriate gesture; her  face is that of a young woman clearly younger than her Son. To this last complaint Michelangelo, as reported by Condivi, made answer:

‘Do you not know that chaste women maintain their freshness far longer than the unchaste?  How much more would this be the case with a virgin into whose breast there never crept the least lascivious desire which would affect the body! Nay, I will go further, and hazard the belief that this unsullied bloom of youth, besides being maintained in her by natural cause, may have been miraculously maintained to convince the world of the virginity and perpetual purity of the Mother.’

It is a pleasant and forgivable fancy.  The spectator is soon reconciled to that gentle face, untorn by agony, calm in her grief and love, the bereaved mother resigned to the will of God, and consoled by holding for some final moments the dear body here cleansed of its wounds, freed from its indignities, resting in the lap of the woman that bore it, and beautiful even in death. . . .”