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In the late 1540s, an aging Michelangelo embarked on what he intended to be his culminating sculptural work, commonly known as the Florentine Pieta. Still heavily tasked with official commissions-foremost among them the rebuilding of St. Peter's-and sometimes incapacitated by kidney stones, he worked on the Pieta at night, wearing a cap of thick paper with a candle. His idea that the sculpture would decorate a church altar in front of which he would be interred was never realized. This Pieta, which reposes in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, is far from complete. In fact, it had to be partially reassembled by another sculptor after Michelangelo himself mutilated it, for reasons that cannot be known with certainty.
The centerpiece of this larger-than-life-size sculpture, carved from a single block of Carrara marble, is Christ's dead body. Just lowered from the cross, it is supported by his mother on one side and the Magdalen on the other. The hooded Pharisee Nicodemus, who is modeled on Michelangelo, stands behind them, stooping gently over the almost totally nude Christ. The Christ is conceived in the monumental terms of classical sculpture. His twisting body is limp, yet the musculature remains animated. Michelangelo's lifelong obsession with the male torso has not waned. And yet it's difficult to attribute an erotic intention to this torso or to the figure as a whole. Indeed, to compare it with the young male ignudi arrayed on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1512) is to realize that Michelangelo's art changed along with his spiritual life as he grew older.
The chapel ceiling's twenty ignudi-whose main formal inspirations were two masterpieces of Hellenistic sculpture, the Belvedere Torso and the Laocoön-manifest the heightened sensuality of Michelangelo's youth. Just as importantly, they reflect Plato's interpretation of eros in his Symposium, which Michelangelo must have encountered after entering the household of Lorenzo de Medici at age fifteen, when he was already recognized as a prodigy. Another member of Lorenzo's household was the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, a renowned scholar and priest who, as one of the principal thinkers of Renaissance humanism, endeavored to harmonize Platonism with Christian belief. The young Michelangelo...