Michelangelo was working on the Pietà Rondanini six days before his death on February 18, 1564, at the age of eighty-eight. The sculpture is unfinished - intentionally unfinished, or perhaps abandoned because death arrived before completion, or perhaps reached a state of incompleteness that Michelangelo recognized as its proper form. This ambiguity is part of the work's meaning.
The Pietà Rondanini (now in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan) is the third and most radical of Michelangelo's three treatments of the Pietà theme. The Vatican Pietà, carved when he was twenty-four, is the work of a young man who had mastered all the technical achievements of ancient and Renaissance sculpture: the marble surfaces polished to a luminosity that suggests soft skin, the figures arranged in a pyramidal composition of perfect classical balance, the dead Christ's body idealized into a noble beauty that transforms suffering into serenity. The Palestrina Pietà (of disputed attribution) suggests a middle phase. The Rondanini is the work of a man at the end of his life, for whom the technical mastery of the first Pietà had become irrelevant.
In the Rondanini, Mary and Christ are fused into a single upright column of stone. Their bodies interpenetrate: Mary does not cradle Christ from below but stands beside and behind him, her arms supporting his torso from behind while his head inclines forward and his feet stand on the ground in a posture that is simultaneously dead and standing. The boundary between supporting and supported, between living and dead, between the mother who grieves and the son who died, has been dissolved. The two figures are becoming one.
Isaiah 53:4 - 'Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering' - is the theological text that the Rondanini enacts in three dimensions. But the enactment is inverse to what the text describes: it is not Christ bearing human suffering but Mary bearing Christ in death, and the bearing is not separation between sufferer and the one who bears but complete mutual interpenetration. Isaiah's Suffering Servant bears the pain of others; the Rondanini presents the complete identification of Mary's grief with the body that bore the world's pain.
The most striking formal decision is the abandonment of classical proportion and finish for a raw, almost primitive fragmentation. The arms of Christ are visible only as faint traces in the stone - Michelangelo had carved them and then broken them away in a decision to take the work in a completely different direction. The surfaces are rough, the proportions elongated, the faces barely individuated. Where the Vatican Pietà overwhelms with technical brilliance, the Rondanini arrests with technical regression - the old man at the end of his life throwing away everything he had learned in order to get to something he had not yet reached.
Contemporaries noted that in his last years Michelangelo had become increasingly absorbed by the devotional movement known as the Spirituali, who emphasized personal faith in Christ's atoning work as the sole ground of salvation - a position that was under pressure from the Catholic Counter-Reformation's insistence on the role of works and sacraments. The Pietà Rondanini can be read as the visual statement of this theology: stripped of all the apparatus of Renaissance artistic achievement, of all the accumulated beauty that the classical tradition had taught him to produce, the 88-year-old artist worked with his chisel at the single rock face, trying to get at the thing beneath the surface, the interpenetration of divine suffering and human grief that no amount of technical mastery could fully reach.