Season 28, Day 6 - "My Signature Quiz"

It's Sculpture week, and today's quiz is inspired by Michelangelo's Pietà.

Pietà

"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 Pietà is a marble sculpture by Michelangelo housed in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Michelangelo was only 24 years old and relatively unknown when he completed the Pietà, which was hailed as a masterpiece and made the young artist famous. It was displayed in the Vatican pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In 1972, a hammer-wielding man substantially damaged the sculpture (it was painstakingly restored and now sits behind bulletproof glass). The Pietà was Michelangelo’s only signed work. Italian for “compassion,” the word “Pietà” applies to any artistic representation of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus Christ. Michelangelo also had two unfinished Pietàs: the Rondanini Pietà and the Florentine Pietà, which he originally intended for his own tomb.