Pietà is a sculptural or painted depiction of the virgin mary holding the body of the dead christ.
The Pietà (Italian: 'pity', 'compassion') is a devotional subject depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Christ after his removal from the cross. The image emerged in 14th-century German religious sculpture as the 'Vesperbild' and migrated south into Italian Renaissance art. Michelangelo's marble Pietà (1498–1499), carved when he was 24 and now in St Peter's Basilica in Rome, is the most celebrated example: an idealised Mary, younger than her son, holds the body across her lap with extraordinary tenderness. Michelangelo signed it across the strap on Mary's chest — the only work he ever signed — after hearing the sculpture credited to another artist. He returned to the subject obsessively at the end of his life: the Florentine Pietà (c. 1547–1555), the Palestrina Pietà (c. 1555), and the unfinished Rondanini Pietà (c. 1564), worked on until days before his death, abandon classical beauty for raw spiritual urgency. The subject has been continuously reinterpreted from medieval times through Käthe Kollwitz's 20th-century anti-war Pietàs.