Press Backgrounder: Art Historian & IBM Scientists Embark On Most Extensive Study Ever Done On A Single Work of Art
A Journey to Unravel The Mysteries Surrounding Michelangelo’s (second) Pietá for More Than Four Centuries
Florence, Italy (July 01, 1998) – In 1553, Asconio Condivi, author of “The Life of Michelangelo,” wrote of the artist’s second Pietá, “It is impossible to speak of its beauty and its sorrow, of the grieving and sad faces of them all, especially of the afflicted Mother. Let it suffice: I tell you it is a rare thing, and one of the most laborious works that he has yet done… He intends to give the Deposition from the Cross to some church, and to be buried at the foot of the altar where it is placed.” Two years later, Michelangelo took a hammer to his own work, now known as the Florentine Pietá, and tried to destroy it. Stopped by his servant, the artist gave the unfinished statue away. It was later repaired and finished by Tiberio Calcagni, an otherwise undistinguished sculptor.
Today Michelangelo’s Pietá, found in the Museum of the Opera del Duomo in the Cathedral of Florence, is the subject of a remarkable collaboration between a team of computer scientists at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York and eminent Renaissance art historian Jack Wasserman. By the end of 1998, Wasserman and the IBM researchers will have compiled nearly two billion bits of data to build a near-perfect 3-D digital replica of the Florentine Pietá.
The brainchild of Jack Wasserman, a distinguished historian of Italian art and Temple University professor emeritus, the study will shed new light on the mystery surrounding the Florentine Pietá, and lead to new technologies and applications for three-dimensional computer
representations of real life items. The final result of this study, says Wasserman, “will be a single visual virtual model of the Pietá that will be set up in a computer and enable me to carefully study this work of Michelangelo and draw some long-awaited conclusions.
The Mystery Behind The Florentine Pietá
The Florentine Pietá is a group of four larger-than-life figures carved from a single block of marble: the broken body of Christ is held up by Mary Magdelan, aided by Nicodemus above her, and the Virgin Mary to the right. Only the figure of Christ is finished, although the left arm has been broken and repaired and the left leg is missing. Mary Magdelan’s face is only roughly blocked out. Nicodemus displays the unfinished features of the artist himself.
Michelangelo took up work on the stone when he was already in his 70s, without commissions and, as Condivi put it at the time, “for pleasure, as one who, full of ideas and powers, must produce something every day.” It would be the second of three Pietás. The first,
now in the Vatican, is the only one of the three ever completed. Michelangelo was working on the third, now in Milan, when he died in February, 1564.
From depositions at the time, it was suggested that Michelangelo had intended the second Pietá to be his tomb monument. Why he chose to mutilate the statue is unknown, although several theories have been argued. After Michelangelo gave the statue up, Calcagni worked on it intermittently until his death a decade later.
The result, as Wasserman explains, is a statue by two artists, Michelangelo and Calcagni. This fired Wasserman’s interest to learn how the statue was repaired, as well, he says, to answer some critical questions about what Michelangelo intended when he set out to destroy the work. According to Wasserman, “One of the many advantages of building this kind of computerized digital image is that one can turn it in a computer, inch by inch by inch, and study the statue from all possible vantage points.”
Source: IBM