Day 6- Michelangelo's Pieta

Today, we visited Michelangelo's Pietà.  This marble sculpture was built in 1497, originally to be placed on an altar in St. Peter's basilica.  Unfortunately, in the early 1970s, a crazed man entered the basilica and, taking a hammer to the Pietà, greatly damaged the piece and removed at least 50 fragments.  When we visited the sculpture, it was encased in glass, in order to avoid any further damage.
I found this piece incredibly interesting because it presented Mary and Jesus in what was a revolutionary manner at the time.  Michelangelo created a scene in which Mary holds a recently crucified Christ in her lap.  Jesus, still bearing the wounds of his torture on his hands and feet, looks utterly vulnerable in his mother's arms.  Michelangelo, in fact, sculpted the pair disproportionately, in order to emphasize Mary's strength in the face of this ordeal and her continuing maternal love for her son.
In this scene, Mary is depicted as a young woman, despite the fact that, at the time of Jesus' passion, Mary would have been nearing fifty years of age.  This girlish youth reflects the virgin mother's innocence and contrasts greatly to the representations of this mother-son duo of years before. 
In the preceding centuries to the Pietà, Mary was often depicted with great, sorrowful looks of anguish on her face.  Now, however, Michelangelo creates a piece with an entirely different message:  acceptance and faith.  Mary does not wear her suffering on her face, rather she reflects in what appears to be silent prayer.  She sits with hand wrapped around Jesus, holding him to her and keeping him upright.  Her other hand lies, palm facing upward, in a gesture of prayer.  While the viewer certainly understands Mary's mourning and loss in this sculpture, her face projects a sort of serenity and we can see that she understands why her son was taken from her and she accepts this fact.  This acceptance is a true testament to Mary's faith.
Though Mary was not put to death, her disposition reminds me of that of many of the martyrs we have studied in class.  John and Paul, specifically, seem to have followed Mary in their faithful acceptance of God's will.  The two martyrs, killed in their homes for their faith, understood the reasons for their death and expressed such great faith in God to gracefully, and without protest, accept their suffering.  Mary, like John and Paul, does not question the reason for her loss or for Jesus' suffering.  She mourns, but does not question.  Michelangelo captured this perfectly in the Pietà.