After a very long restoration that prevented visitors from using it, Michelangelo’s masterpiece, known as the “Pietà Bandini”, has finally been completed. The sculpture has been in the hands of restorers from 2019 until today, when the team of the Opera del Duomo in Florence unveiled its face. The work will now be at the center of a construction site exceptionally open to the public, which will last for six months.
It is one of the most tormented masterpieces in the history of art, which in the span of over 470 years of life has undergone numerous changes of ownership and as many maintenance interventions which, however, are not documented because they are considered simple routine operations.
Michelangelo’s work during the final stages of the restoration
The current restoration was preceded by an extensive diagnostic campaign that provided fundamental information for the knowledge of the work and for the intervention, freeing the marble from surface deposits that altered the legibility of its exceptional plasticity and color. The aim of the intervention was to achieve a uniform and balanced reading of the work, re-proposing the image of the Pietà, carved in a single block, as probably originally thought by Michelangelo.
The restoration was commissioned and directed by the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore thanks to the donation of the non-profit Foundation Friends of Florence, under the high supervision of the ABAP Superintendency for the Metropolitan City of Florence and the Provinces of Pistoia and Prato. The operations were led by Paola Rosa with the collaboration of Emanuela Peiretti, together with a team of professionals both internal and external to the Opera.
The four figures that make up the work, including the elderly Nicodemus to whom the artist gave his face, are carved in a block of marble, 2 meters and 25 centimeters high, weighing about 2,700 kg. The analyzes carried out made it possible to trace the origin of that marble that Michelangelo himself criticized several times. Coming from the Seravezza quarries, in the province of Lucca – and not from Carrara as previously thought – it was immediately very fragile and not very malleable: this probably lies in the reason that convinced Michelangelo not to finish the work.