Quest for Joy-7. Pieta

Michaelangelo, Pieta

I saw an absolutely flawless piece of art today, Michaelangelo’s Pieta (Italian for Pity) now behind plexiglass at St Peter’s.

His contemporary, Vasari, wrote of it, “It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh.”

The rest of St. Peter’s was overwhelming–lots of eye-candy, beautiful marble everywhere, lots of ornate little side chapels, all too much in keeping with the central shrine of Catholicism, and the second largest church in the world (in area).

I enjoyed my exhausting wander through it, of course, but it didn’t have the same sense of awe and holiness for me, as Gothic cathedrals do.