A comparison of The Florentine Pietà (Michelangelo, c.1547 - 1555) and Jenny Saville's Pietà I (2019 - 2021)

Jenny Saville's current retrospective at the UKs National Portrait Gallery (NPG) includes a piece titled Pietà I which, according to the accompanying description, was a response to Michelangelo's marble sculpture The Deposition (c. 1547 - 1555; also called the Bandini Pietà, The Florentine Pietà, and The Lamentation over the Dead Christ). I discuss the inspirational work as well as the genesis and execution of Ms. Saville's response. Both pieces are depicted below.

The sculpting of The Deposition was initiated after Michelangelo's 75th birthday with the finished product destined for his family tomb as "a memorial for himself and his family." It is carved from a single block of marble and depicts four individuals: (i) the dead body of Jesus (lowered from the Cross but prior to embalming); (ii) Nicodemus (or, possibly Joseph of Arimethia; assumed to be carved as a self-portrait of Michelangelo himself); (iii) the Virgin Mary; and (iv) Mary Magdalene (staring out at the viewer). In order to fit four figures into this single block of marble, Michelangelo had to compress the figures and resorted to techniques such as the effects of distortion and foreshortening -- practices common in painting but not in sculpture.

For reasons unknown, Michelangelo took a hammer to the sculpture prior to its completion, damaging Christ's left arm and leg and "removing several parts ..." He gave the damaged sculpture to a to a wealthy businessman named Francesco Bandini (origin of the name Bandini Pietà). Knowing of the working and professional relationship between Michelangelo and one Tiberio Calcagno, Bandini hired the latter to complete the sculpture. Calcagno repaired the hammer damage by reattaching the broken parts (with the exception of the left leg) and completed the sculpting of Mary Magdalene (note the textural difference between the Magdalene and the other figures).

The Bandini family sold the sculpture to Cosimo III in 1680. It currently resides in Il Grande Museo del Duomo in Florence (origin of the name The Florentine Pietà).

Jenny Saville, according to exhibition literature,

... is one of the world's foremost contemporary painters who rose to prominence in the early 1990s following her acclaimed degree show at the Glasgow School of Art.

In subsequent years, she has played a leading role in the reinvigoration of figurative painting ... Her ability to create visceral portraits from various layers of paint reveals an artist with a deep passion for the painting process itself.

In a 2021 exhibition curated by Sergio Risaliti, director of Florence's Museo Novocento, Seville's works (prior as well as purpose-built) were paired with works from Italian Renaissance artists and displayed at the Museo Novocento, Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Museo degli Innocente, and the Museo di Casa Buonarroti. Seville created Pietà I to accompany the Bandini Pietà at the Museo dell'Opera di Duomo. 

Seville was able to study the Bandini Pietà onsite and, during one of her visits, spoke with the conservationists who were cleaning the marble. She was able to gain new insights from those conversations which informed and inspired her efforts on the project.

Pietà I was displayed alongside the Bandini Pietà during the exhibition. The paining -- charcoal and pastel on a 9-foot-high raw canvas -- displays one fleshy, contemporarily garbed individual supine in the lap of one or more of a set of undefined bodies attached to a fan of five heads. The painting is titled Pietà I but a Pietà is defined as a picture or sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of the Christ either on her lap or in her arms. It is not clear if the supine body is a modern interpretation of Jesus Christ nor is it clear as to whose lap it occupies. The arms that are embracing the body, with the fingers of the right hand digging into same, appears masculine. According to gagosian.com, this painting offers "a revelatory encounter between the contemporary and the historical."

When viewed side-by-side, Saville's departures from the original are clearly visible:

• The Michelangelo sculpture is pyramidal with Nicodemus' headpiece almost functioning as a capstone. Saville's piece is more fulsome with a protractor shape at its top end. The protractor shape comes into play in the Michelangelo piece at level 2 of the sculpture.
• The Michelangelo piece clearly is telling a biblical story. It is unclear as to whether there is an underlying story in the Saville piece
• Jesus is at the center of the Michelangelo sculpture and his body fits totally within the frame of the piece. The supine body in the Saville piece extends outside the framing provided by the other subjects
• Jesus is emaciated and distorted in the Michelangelo piece. The supine in Saville's pice had not missed many meals
• Clothing in the Michelangelo piece is period-relevant while clothing in the Saville is contemporary to non-existent.
• Only one leg of Jesus is visible in the Bandini Pietà with the other lower-body extremities hidden behind draped clothing. There is a veritable forest of unassociated, tree-trunk-like legs in the Saville piece
• With the exception of Mary Magdalene, who is staring out at the viewer, all eyes in the Michelangelo piece are focused on Jesus. In the Saville piece some eyes are open, some are closed; some heads are turned downwards while other support stares into the great beyond.

As I view these two pieces side by side I get an overarching sense of sadness from the Bandini Pietà but I also get a sense of solidity, firmness, and order. The Saville piece, on the other hand, conjures up words such as ephemeral, confusion, disorder, disarray, lack of control, and search for meaning. I was not very familiar with Ms. Saville's works prior to my visit to the retrospective at the NPG but my interest has now been fully piqued.

Caravaggio 2025 at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini

According to the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition literature, it was 74 years to the day (April 20, 1951) from the initial Caravaggio exhibition to the beginning of the one currently being held at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome.

Palazzo Barberini

The current exhibition was slated to conclude on July 7 but, due to its great success, has been extended for an additional two weeks. I had resisted the temptation to make the trip but once it was extended, I could resist no longer. I visited the exhibition on July 18.

The exhibition included 24 (of approximately 73 undisputed) Caravaggio’s paintings drawn from all corners of the earth. The extended exhibition did not include the Metropolitan Museum’s Concert as it had been previously committed for that period.

The exhibition was spread over four rooms in the museum and was designed to trace the painter’s evolution over the 15-year period covering his arrival in Rome in 1595 and his death in Porto Ercole in 1610.

Each of the works is noteworthy but a few merited especial attention:

• Portrait of Maffeo Barberini (1598 - 1599) — This painting was published by Longhi in 1963 but has never been displayed to the public
• Ecce Homo — this painting was recently rediscovered and, with this exhibition, has returned to Italy after many centuries (patrons were not allowed to take pictures of this painting)
• The first version of the Conversion of Saul for the Cerasi chapel. This painting is not readily accessible to the public as it is privately owned.

Caravaggio, Portrait of Maffeo Barberini,
1598 - 1599 c.

Caravaggio, Conversion of Saul, 1600 - 1601

It was a pleasure to see these works; especially after having seen three of Caravaggio's paintings at the National Gallery 6 months earlier. None of the National Gallery paintings that I had seen were included in the exhibition.

As impressive as the lineup was, there were a few display issues which, in my opinion. somewhat tainted the show. First, the lighting was not up to the standards of a museum exhibiting a blockbuster show. In many cases the viewer had to be positioned “just right” in order to prevent viewing distortions. Second, some paintings were placed at odd angles while other were placed too close together causing interference between groups viewing separate paintings. I brought these two things to them attention of one of the attendants and she said they were aware of these issues.

With my rant out of the way I can get back to the beauty of the worms at hand and how much I enjoyed viewing them. I will be writing more about individual pieces going forward.

A Framework for viewing the works of Frida Kahlo

I have visited a number of Frida Kahlo exhibits over the years: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Frida: Beyond the Myth), Frist Art Museum (Mexican Modernism), Brooklyn Museum (Frida Kahlo: Appearances can be Deceiving); Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Frida: The Making of an Icon); MOMA (Collection); and National Museum of Women in the Arts (Collection). 

Kahlo exhibitions sourced (clockwise from top left):
Frist, Brooklyn Museum, Virginia MFA, and
MFA Houston

The largest of the Kahlo exhibitions I have viewed was the one at the Brooklyn Museum; unfortunately, no photography was allowed. The most recent exhibition viewed -- Museum Fine Arts Houston -- restricted photography around a subset of the artist's work but all others were fair game. The Virginia Museum exhibition was the most fruitful in that it was rich in Frida's works and also provided the "backbone" for the framework.

I was able to use this backbone to develop trees of the artist's work by period, using images captured during visits to said exhibitions. Those trees are displayed below.

It is impossible to separate the Frida Kahlo story from Frida Kahlo's art. Caravaggio led a fairly tempestuous life, and painted between bouts of "criming," but his experiences were not reflected in his art. Art was on one plane and his lived experience on another. Not so Frida. Her experiences framed her art, serving as source material and impacting how she produced her works.

Frida Kahlo had an intimate relationship with pain throughout her life; and many of her paintings reported on this pain or reflected on its effects. Frida had polio at an early age, resulting in one leg being shorter than the other. She had a catastrophic accident when she was 18 and suffered chronic, debilitating pain for the rest of her life. She married Diego Rivera in 1929 and suffered through multiple episodes of his unfaithfulness, including with her sister. Frida suffered a miscarriage, probably a result of internal damage suffered during the accident.

Frida's paintings are raw and emotion-filled but they are also steeped in Mexicanidad, a key ingredient of Mexican Modernism. Mexican Modernism arose as a result of the post-revolution Mexican regime seeking to use culture as a means to unite the nation and visual artists efforts to use their craft in furtherance of this goal. The chart below graphically illustrates the road to this new Mexican art school.

"Frida Kahlo's art is a tapestry of symbolism, weaving together themes of physical pain (The Broken Column), emotional suffering (Memory, the Heart), and cultural identity (Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird) ... Her use of vibrant color, traditional, attire, and native flora and fauna reaffirm her cultural roots."

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944
(Source: fridakahlo.org)

Kahlo's paintings often adopt a surreal quality (The Two Fridas) while gender and identity also surface as central themes (Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair).

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1939
(Source: wikipedia.org)

The Surrealist establishment sought to claim Frida as their own but she was resistant. André Breton, one of the leading lights of the movement, visited Mexico in 1938 and described her work as a "ribbon wrapped around a bomb." He invited her to exhibit in Paris, which she eventually did, but the scene was not convincing to her. She resisted the Surrealist categorization famously stating "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

Frida had first taken up painting during her recovery from the accident and had spent many a day in the courtyard garden of the family home (now called La Casa Azul) in Coyocán, a Mexico City borough. "The courtyard garden became her sanctuary and an important source of artistic inspiration. She embraced representations of foliage, fruit, and flowers, often using them to represent fertility and to celebrate the natural beauty of Mexico."

Below are the period trees of which I spoke earlier, wherein Frida's works are distributed between six periods, beginning with her early life and ending with her death in 1954. The dates and storyboards that form the trunks of these trees are photographs of the Frida Kahlo Timeline presented at the exhibition.

Frida's first painting in this collection was done in 1925. It is markedly different from anything else in this or any other period. The earth tones and focus on structures was not vintage Frida. Her skill as a portrait painter is evident even in this early stage with Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress giving off a Mannerist whiff.

Frida married Diego in 1929 and they traveled to San Francisco in 1930 for him to fulfill some mural commissions. Frida exhibited some of her work for the first time in 1931 and, in the same year, completed the two works shown above.

This period shows a greater number of drawings than any of the other periods. This may be a function of the data that I have access to rather than an actual fact. It will become clearer as I build my data base up with future sightings. The couple were in Detroit and then New York during this time.

This was a period of marital turmoil capped by Diego's affair with Frida's sister.The couple separated but reconciled upon Frida's return from New York. The turmoil seemed to energize Frida. This was her most productive period to date. Her heart was broken, captured in The Heart (1937) and Survivor (1938). She began her embrace of cultural attire as shown in the two self-portraits in the top left.

I saw Fulani-Chang and I (1939) during a November 2025 visit to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The current manifestation is in two parts with an oil-on-board painting on the left and a mirror in a painted frame on the right. The mirror -- added to the original (1937) composition after 1939 -- was a tool she "often used to extend her field of vision while painting."

The portraits in the 1940+ period begin to show the growing strain on Frida's face. This period also evidences a greater incidence of surrealist-adjacent works. She remarries Diego and affirms their bond by painting him onto her forehead in a few of the works. This was another very productive period.

I also saw Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) during that November 2025 visit to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Kerry Downey describes the painting thusly:

She’s wearing this oversized gray suit and crimson shirt. That’s a reference to Diego Rivera, the Mexican mural painter. She was married to him, but then they divorced a few months before she made this painting. If you look up at the top, you can see words and musical notes she included from a popular Mexican folk song. It’s about a man who loved a woman for her hair. But now that she’s cut it off, he doesn’t love her anymore.

The final period of her life showed a number of still lifes and bright red colors; and these paintings seem to almost jump out of the canvas. The remaining works include one of her most surrealist efforts, The Love Embrace of the Universe.

Some observations:

• A significant percentage of the paintings are portraits
• There are many more drawings in the early portion of her career than later
• There is great consistency in depiction of her facial features in the portraits
• The first still life observed was Magnolias in 1945. She followed with a number of substantive works in that genre in later years
• The 1930s and 40s were her most productive years
• Surrealists wanted to claim her as their own and The Love Embrace of the Universe ..., provides ample evidence as to why.

This is by no means the totality of Frida's works. As I come into contact with more of her paintings, I will update the trees accordingly.