Pietà
Mid-XVIcentury. Wash, Pencil, Grey-brown ink, Pencil ground on yellow paper.Not on display
Since this drawing was believed in the past to be a work of Michelangelo (1475-1564), it was clearly much revered by at least two of its previous owners, Céan Bermudez adn Brun (?), in spite of its ruinous condition. Although the composition is clearly based on Michelangelo´s famous early marble statue of the Pietà in St. Peter´s Rome, the style of drawing is self evidently not Michelangelo´s. On the other hand, elements of the group are varied to such an extent that the Prado drawing cannot be said to be slavish copy after the marble statue.
A comparision with a drawing by Taddeo Zuccari in the Ambrosiana, Milan, for a nearly identical group of figures of the dead Christ supported on his mother´s lap points to a solution to the problem of both the attribution and purpose of the Prado sheet. As Acidini Luchinat has argued eloquently, the Milan drawing is connected with a lost fresco of the Pietà painted by Taddeo on an exterior wall over the entrance to he Hospital of the Pietà dei Pazzarelli, Rome, which was run by a charitable confraternity who dedicated themselves to the care of poor foreigners and the mad ("pazzi)". While the Milan drawing shows the figure of Christ in a slightly different pose to that of its counterpart in the Madrid drawing, only the waist and left shoulder of the Madonna is indicated. The newly-identified Prado drawing therefore provides fuller documentation of the original appearance of Taddeo´s lost fresco.
