The only work of art Michelangelo ever signed
When Michelangelo created La Pietà, he said the Carrara marble he used for the sculpture was the most perfect block he’d ever laid his hands on. The depiction of Jesus of Mary is considered one of the most important works to emerge from the Italian Renaissance, signalling the start of the High Renaissance and striking a perfect balance between classic aesthetic beauty and realism. Not only was it his most prolific creation, but the only one he ever designed to sign.
Michelangelo carved a lot of other works during his time in Florence, but his move to Rome in the 1490s and the resulting work launched his career. In 1497, he came across Jean de Bilhères, a cardinal who commissioned him to create a sculpture to sit in Old St. Peter’s Basilica, which wound up being La Pietà. The scene Michelangelo chose was known as the “Seven Sorrows of Mary”. The subject of Catholic prayer, he captured the Virgin Mary clutching Christ as he lay limp and dead after his crucifixion.
This choice was unique for two reasons. Firstly, while the imagery was very familiar to a lot of people at the time, in the 15th century, it was far more common in Germany and France than it was in Italy. But secondly, sculptures depicting multiple people were quite a rarity in the Renaissance period. Michelangelo also elected to depict Mary as strikingly young and beautiful, whereas other artists preferred to age her around 45 years old, given her son was 33 at the time.
His response to criticism of his youthful Mary was that “chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste”, a sentiment he relayed to his biographer, Ascanio Condivi. “How much more in the case of the Virgin,” he argued, “Who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?”
Although her age was controversial, the sculpture was universally admired. Mary’s billowing dress draped like silk, an expression of acceptance somehow etched into her marble eyes. It was a masterwork. But when another artist got credit for it, Michaelangelo did something he had never done in his career, and singed Mary’s sash in Latin with: “MICHÆLANGELVS BONAROTVS FLORENTINVS FACIEBAT,” meaning “Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Florentine, made this”.
According to Giorgio Vasari, whose seminal book The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects is largely considered the first piece of written art history, Michelangelo found a massive cluster of onlookers surrounding La Pietà, emphatically praising it.
Before he could revel in the compliments, one of them asked another who had made the sculpture, and he replied that it was Cristoforo Solari. “Michelangelo kept his counsel though it seemed rather strange to him that his painstaking work should be attributed to someone else,” wrote Vasari in 1550. “One night, bringing his chisels along, he locked himself in with a little light and carved his name there.”
While it was the first and last him he’d ever signed an artwork, it made perfect sense that his most beautiful creation should bear his name.
