Michelangelo is said to have designed the Pieta for his own monument.  In the person of Nicodemus, it is he who sustains his dead Lord in the gloom of the sombre Duomo.  His old sad face, surrounded by the heavy cowl, looks down for ever with a tenderness beyond expression, repeating mutely through the years how much of anguish and of blood divine the redemption of man’s soul hath cost.

The history of this great poem in marble, abandoned by its maker in some mood of deep dejection, is not without interest.  We are told that the stone selected was a capital from one of the eight huge columns of the Temple of Peace.  Besides being hard and difficult to handle, the material betrayed flaws in working.  This circumstance annoyed the master; also, as he informed Vasari, Urbino kept continually urging him to finish it.  One of his reasons for attacking the block had been to keep himself in health by exercise.  Accordingly he hewed away with fury, and bit so deep into the marble that he injured one of the Madonna’s elbows.  When this happened, it was his invariable practice to abandon the piece he had begun upon, feeling that an incomplete performance was preferable to a lame conclusion.  In his old age he suffered from sleeplessness; and it was his habit to rise from bed and work upon the Pieta, wearing a thick paper cap, in which he placed a lighted candle made of goat’s tallow.  This method of chiselling by the light of one candle must have complicated the technical difficulties of his labour.  But what we may perhaps surmise to have been his final motive for the rejection of the work, was a sense of his inability, with diminished powers of execution, and a still more vivid sense of the importance of the motive, to accomplish what the brain conceived.  The hand failed.  The imagination of the subject grew more intimate and energetic.  Losing patience then at last, he took a hammer and began to break the group up.  Indeed, the right arm of the Mary shows a fracture.  The left arm of the Christ is mutilated in several places.  One of the nipples has been repaired, and the hand of the Madonna resting on the breast above it is cracked across.  It would have been difficult to reduce the whole huge block to fragments; and when the work of destruction had advanced so far, Michelangelo’s servant Antonio, the successor to Urbino, begged the remnants from his master.  Tiberio Calcagni was a good friend of Buonarroti’s at this time.  He heard that Francesco Bandini, a Florentine settled in exile at Rome, earnestly desired some relic of the master’s work.  Accordingly, Calgagni, with Michelangelo’s consent, bought the broken marble from Antonio for 200 crowns, pieced it together, and began to mend it.  Fortunately, he does not seem to have elaborated the surface in any important particular; for both the finished and unfinished parts bear indubitable marks of Michelangelo’s own handling.  After the death of Calcagni and Bandini, the Pieta remained for some time in the garden of Antonio, Bandini’s heir, at Montecavallo.  It was transferred to Florence, and placed among the marbles used in erecting the new Medicean Chapel, until at last, in 1722, the Grand Duke Cosimo III. finally set it up behind the altar of the Duomo.