The Pietà

This Pietà from around 1440 in the Prado is one of Rogier's most emotionally powerful works, depicting the dead Christ on the Virgin's lap in a format derived from German devotional sculpture. The painting entered the Spanish royal collection and profoundly influenced Iberian religious art Rogier van der Weyden combined exquisite emotional intensity with compositional clarity, making him the most influential Flemish painter of the mid-fifteenth century.

The stark, spare composition strips the scene to its emotional essentials—the dead Christ, the grieving mother. Rogier's precise drawing of Christ's emaciated body and the Virgin's anguished face creates an image of devastating emotional directness.