Before I knew otherwise, if anyone had told me this was a slightly subversive, mid twentieth century sculpture I’d have believed them. Christ’s thin, delicately bowed, polished legs; then by contrast the rough scarring on his torso where marks of the chisel are left visible; the implausible detached right arm, out of proportion with the rest of Christ’s body; the remnants of the block from which the whole, clearly unfinished, was carved and then apparently abandoned – all these things, the lack of coherence, the implied critique of classical idealisation and the evidence of process are characteristic of much modern art.
It is actually Michelangelo’s last work. He worked on it at various points in the last decade and a half of his life. It was not a commission but something he made, or was making, for himself, possibly for his own tomb. Anecdotal evidence claims he spent a whole day working on it a week before he died. After that the work’s whereabouts are unknown, but it reappeared in an aristocratic collection in Rome in the early nineteenth century: the Palazzo Rondanini, whence its name. Even then its authorship was disputed and it wasn’t until the following century that it entered the Michelangelo canon. In the early 1950s its owners offered it for sale and it was bought, brilliantly, by the city of Milan.
At some point in its gestation Michelangelo had a radical change of mind. Christ’s anatomy was reduced from the more heroic proportions we glimpse in the detached right arm; Mary’s head was reorientated to nuzzle her son’s more closely; it’s even possible that in the original version she was a male figure, Nicodemus, but altered subsequently into the mother of Christ. There is a lot we simply don’t know for sure. But there is an extraordinary grace to this troubled piece. Above all this is expressed in the beautiful gentle curve which unites mother and son. From the side you can see that Michelangelo sensed this curve within the grain of the marble block and we realise that it’s not so much Mary who’s supporting him as he her. In the end, although Christ’s legs are giving way, it seems to me he’s almost beginning to ascend; that gravity is losing its grip, that marble is becoming immaterial, that spirit will overcome frail flesh.
