The 15th-century limestone sculpture representing the Pietà with Christ lying dead on the Virgin’s lap, produced at the Coimbra workshops, was also originally placed in a niche. Curiously, it is not associated with a church, but instead with one of Viseu’s mediaeval city gates, the now demolished Porta do Postigo (Wicket Gate). In fact, in the late Middle Ages, the already-mentioned increase in the cult of the Virgin Mary led to a multiplication in the number of shrines, chapels and representations of the Virgin, as well as in the number of invocations, particularly the gates of cities that were placed under her protection.
Despite its formal naivety and fairly rudimentary realism, the inclinations of both the Virgin’s face and Christ’s body seem, in this Pietà, to take into account the elevated position of the figuration and the spectator’s disfiguring angle of vision.
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