Pietà

Hippolyte Flandrin's Pietà (1842) belongs to the deeply Catholic dimension of this Lyon-born artist's work — Flandrin was among the most significant religious painters of nineteenth-century France, responsible for extensive mural cycles in Paris churches including Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Pietà, depicting the Virgin holding the body of the dead Christ, is one of the most venerated subjects in Christian art, and Flandrin approached it with the gravity and compositional austerity he brought to all his religious work. Trained by Ingres, he brought classical clarity to devotional subjects while suffusing them with genuine feeling. The work is now in the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon.

Flandrin structures the Pietà with Ingres's linear discipline — precise contours, smooth surface, monumental forms — while the colours are unusually sombre: deep blues and muted earth tones punctuated by the pale flesh of Christ's body. The composition reduces the scene to its emotional essentials, two figures in close embrace, set against a darkening sky.