Pietà (van der Weyden)

Pietà is a painting by the Flemish artist

Campbell & van der Stock describe the painting as evincing a technical and aesthetic mastery in no way inferior to that of The Descent from the Cross, of comparable emotional force and controlled by an equally strongly balanced composition. Christ's dead body is conceived in a similarly natural way as in the Descent, the dangling arms and limp fingers typical of van der Weyden's acute observation. The conspicuous elongation of Christ's wrists has been explained away as the ineptness of an assistant, but equally it might be a consequence of Christ's hanging on the Cross, the kind of realistic detail characteristic of van der Weyden.^[4]

Although a fair number of imitations were made of the Brussels version, only a few were based directly on it. A direct connection can be seen only in the versions belonging to the Rademakers collection in The Hague, the

• 
  Pietà, National Gallery, London
• 
  Pietà, Prado, Madrid
• 
  Vrancke van der Stockt, Bewening van Christus, circa 1455–1460

See also

• List of works by Rogier van der Weyden

References

Bibliography

• Campbell, Lorne. The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Schools. London: National Gallery Publications, 1998.
  ISBN 1-85709-171-X
• Campbell, Lorne & Van der Stock, Jan. Rogier van der Weyden: 1400–1464. Master of Passions. Davidsfonds, Leuven, 2009.
  ISBN 978-90-8526-105-6
• Dijkstra, Jeltje, Originele en kopie. Een onderzoek naar de navolging van de Meester van Flémalle en Rogier van der Weyden, dissertation, Amsterdam, 1990