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Pietà
Lucio Fontana1955
Museo Diocesano Milano
Milano, Italy
Details
- Title: Pietà
- Creator Lifespan: 1899 - 1968
- Creator Nationality: Italian
- Creator Gender: Male
- Creator Death Place: Comabbio, Varese
- Creator Birth Place: Rosario di Santa Fé, Argentina
- Date: 1955
- Provenance: Milan, Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo
- Physical Dimensions: w180 x h85 x d20 cm
- Painter, sculptor: Lucio Fontana
- Description: This work is the predella of the maquette for the Assumption executed by Fontana in 1955 on the occasion of a competition held in 1950 by the Venerable Fabbrica del Duomo for the realization of an altarpiece destined for a side aisle of the Milanese cathedral. The intense Pietà depicts Christ, who appears in the act of slipping from his Mother's knees towards the ground, as if to highlight the extreme frailty of his body and therefore the meaning of his death. The figures of Christ and his Mother, almost indistinguishable from the movement of the background, express, in their simplicity, a remarkable expressive and dramatic incisiveness. The joined composition of the Assumption and the Pietà, which was planned by Fontana from the beginning, leads to a marked contrast between the disruptive “extraversion” of the top part and the gathering together of the bottom. The work, in fact, is composed of three distinct plaster sheets, assembled for the first time in one frame after the restoration of 1999. The Assumption occupies the top two sections while the Pietà the bottom section.
- Type: sculpture
- Rights: © Archivio fotografico Museo Diocesano, Milano
- Medium: plaster
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