Michelangelo Buonarroti
Pietà Rondanini

One of the most interesting reflections by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) about his art, and sculpture in particular, concerned the relationship between matter and individual creation: according to the Florentine artist, it was not man who created the work of art from nothing, based on a creative impulse or more or less supervised inspiration, but it was the work itself that emerged from the matter, in which it was already contained, by the action of the individual. The most skilled artist, Michelangelo meant, was ultimately only a demiurge, a craftsman who acted as a mediator between a higher dimension and a terrestrial one, unveiling the beauty and goodness hiding in the stone, themselves molds of a Supreme Beauty and Goodness, crafted by a Supreme Maker in turn.

This is a Neoplatonic reminiscence, as it is easy to understand, tinged in my opinion with an ironic form of false modesty which probably implied a celebration of himself as a subject in mediation with Beauty and Goodness, or, if you will, as an artist in mediation with the Maker. Such reminiscence fits well with Buonarroti's greatest works, such as the Florentine David or Moses, where sculptural titanism reveals perfect, unreachable forms, out of time, of figures between myth and history, whose symbolic force is emphasized, a fetish of earthly power directly in contact, again, with a legitimizing divine dimension.

Almost as if Michelangelo mirrored himself in Moses or David, merging sculptor and sculpted into them.

If this is the context in which our Michelangelo moved for a large part of his life, the anti-classical language of the Rondanini Pietà (1560-1564?), currently housed in the Castello Sforzesco of Milan, with an exhibition that emphasizes its stylistic purity, dramatic tone, expressive essentiality, may almost surprise.

A marble sculpture, the Pietà depicts the Virgin and Christ in the final act of the Passion, as the woman supports, just taken down from the cross, the corpse of her son.

Contrary to the classic iconography, followed by Michelangelo also in his previous Vatican Pietà (1499), the Virgin is not sitting, holding her son in the traditional parallelism between the birth and death of the Savior, but is caught in a moment of physical and spiritual suffering together, wherein the weight of the God-made-Man's tortured body reveals the physicality of death itself, and the anguish of loss. Anguish of a mother, certainly, but also anguish of every believer, mute in front of the cessation of what seemed to never cease.

The woman's pain is captured in a dynamic moment, and the entire sculpture, set up to walk around it, is rendered through curved lines that highlight the mobility of the scene, making the matter almost alive in the paradoxical moment it indicates the fixity and immutability of death.

The dynamism of the work is enhanced by Michelangelo's sculptural technique, the "non finito" that he practiced in the last years of his existential and creative arc. By "non finito", we mean a technique that only sketches the figures on the stone, without a true discontinuity solution with respect to the matter, which still retains its appearance, its natural composition, and without detailed work, for example on features like cheekbones, hair, eyes, and hands that determine the definitive manipulation of the stone in the sculpted opus. As one can easily understand, this is a technique, and a language, strongly anti-classical, or at least contrary to the idealized version of classicism widespread in the Renaissance era, which downsizes, in contrast to the premises mentioned, the same demiurgic function of the sculptor.

It almost seems that he renounces extracting the Beauty and Goodness inherent in the matter, renounces to act as an interpreter of the Ideal imprinted in the stone by the supreme Maker, acting by subtraction, only hinting at the forms it contains, only presaging the possible perfection of the "finished", which, however, is no longer desired to be reached.

All this emphasizes the dramatic content of the works, considering that the message of the Pietà merges with the nature of the stone, universally extending beyond the mere creative dimension of the artist; but, at the same time, it poses interesting questions about how the late Michelangelo understood his work, reflected on it. He, perhaps, in the last years of his life renounced being a demiurge, letting emotion, not technique for its own sake, filter from the bare sketches of his sculpture, embracing the idea that, ultimately, divinity continuously changed its face, and could not be seized, understood, lived, only in the realization of forms, lines, images, molded on the ideal of perfection.

Perfection, perhaps, was unknowable, the path to approach it an endless road,  participating in a dimension of infinity that, not coincidentally, finds a counterpart in the "non finito" of his sculptural technique.

Michelangelo knew how to exalt, in his long life, everything that was classical, nevertheless surpassing its limits and consciously reaching the negation of his own model, his style, and perhaps even of himself and his conception of the Divine: in all this, he was, more than anyone else, a true genius of his time, able to transcend the era in which he lived to deliver an eternally alive and touching message to eternity.