Pietà

Feuerbach's 1863 'Pietà', held in the Schack Collection, Munich, represents his engagement with Christian narrative during his Roman years, when he was surrounded by the greatest examples of this subject in Western art — Michelangelo's marble at St. Peter's, Bellini's paintings in Venice, Perugino's altarpieces in Umbria. Feuerbach's approach to the Pietà differed from both his German Romantic predecessors and from the religious fervor of the Nazarene painters who had also worked in Rome earlier in the century. His Pietà is characterized by classical restraint and humanist grief rather than Christian theology: the sorrow of a mother holding a dead son, rendered with the same melancholy dignity he brought to his secular subjects. The Schack Collection context is significant — Schack was not collecting religious art for devotional purposes but for aesthetic pleasure, and Feuerbach's Pietà served his collection as an example of the highest classical and figure painting regardless of its.

The Pietà's horizontal Christ against the vertical or diagonal Virgin creates a clear compositional armature that Feuerbach develops through careful tonal organization. His Italian period palette — warm amber tones, Venetian in origin — inflects even the grief-laden subject with a kind of beautiful.