Trinity Pietà

Title: Trinity Pietà
Artist: Master of Sankt Laurenz
Medium: Oil on oak panel
Size: 23 x 16 cm
Date: 1415-30
Location: Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

Trinity Sunday, a moveable feast also known as Holy Trinity Sunday, is celebrated a week after Pentecost Sunday in honor of the most fundamental of Catholic beliefs - belief in the Holy Trinity. As expressed in the Athanasian creed (ascribed to Saint Athanasius, c. 296-373), “There is, therefore, one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits; and in this Trinity there is nothing first or later, nothing greater or less, but all three Persons are coeternal and coequal with one another, so that in every respect, as has already been said above, both unity in Trinity, and Trinity in unity must be venerated.”

The Man of Sorrows in the arms of God the Father with the Holy Ghost between them both is often termed a Trinity Pietà. The depiction is more common in French and Burgundian court painting from the end of the fourteenth century onwards. In this example, the Man of Sorrows is flanked by four angels, with two of them holding the Flagellation column, the scourge, the stick with the sponge and the lance. The panel is attributed to the Master of Sankt Laurenz (St Lawrence), the pupil of the Cologne Master of St Veronica. It is also assumed that this small panel was the left wing of a diptych having, on the right, a Mater Dolorosa.

Pietà

Title: Pietà

Artist: Luis de Morales

Medium: Oil on panel

Size: 98 x 126 cm

Date: 1560

Location: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.

The Pietà (Italian for pity) is a subject in Christian art depicting the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus. As discussed previously, it would have been highly unorthodox for women to assist in the burial of Jesus immediately after his death, but his mother, grief stricken, may have been overcome. Morales conveys the emotion of the scene like few others: mother and son, faces pressed close together, her eyes red and swollen from crying, while his are white and lifeless. He is limp as she cradles him.

Most of Morales's clientele preferred simplified compositions comprising a few figures, dramatically illuminated and posed against a dark or neutral background, the purpose of which was to arouse feelings of tragedy in the viewers and even move them to tears. This Pietà, which came from the Jesuit church in Córdoba, is a masterful example of this type of composition.

Luis de Morales (c. 1520, Badajoz - 1586, Badajoz) was a Spanish painter. He worked for most of his life in Badajoz, a town on the Portuguese border, and his style, formed away from the influence of the court or great religious and artistic centres such as Seville, is highly distinctive. His pictures are usually fairly small and he concentrated on devotional images. He painted numerous versions of the Virgin and Child, and touching visions inspired by the theme of the Pieta, which are among his most popular works. The piety of his work has earned him the nickname 'El Divino'.

The Avignon Pietà

Title: The Avignon Pietà

Artist: Enguerrand Charonton

Medium: Tempera on wood

Size: 162 x 218 cm

Date: c. 1460

Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Pietà (Italian for pity), where the dead Christ is supported by his grieving mother, is one of the most common themes of late-medieval religious art. This example is one of the most striking depictions, and has been acclaimed as perhaps the greatest masterpiece produced in France in the 15th century.

The curved back form of Christ's body is highly original, and the stark, motionless dignity of the other figures might have been taken from Gothic sculpture. The suffering figure of the Virgin dominates the painting while Christ, a white cloth wrapped across his loins, appears to be floating on her lap. A young St John bends in loving tenderness above him while the clerical donor, portrayed with Netherlandish realism, kneels to the left. On the right the mourning, pitiful figure of St Mary Magdalene completes the diagonal line arching over the Virgin and St John to the donor. The bare background landscape falls away to a horizon broken by the buildings of Jerusalem, with a sky of gold leaf with stamped and incised haloes, borders and inscriptions.

Its concentrated emotion, dramatic force and religious content make this the supreme manifestation in mediaeval painting of the tragedy of Christ. The Virgin's sorrow is profound and austere, almost unbending; Magdalene's is softer, more womanly. With this work the master enriched French and European painting with one of the finest representations of the Pietà in existence.

Enguerrand Charonton or Quarton (c. 1410, Laon – c. 1466, Avignon) was a French painter and manuscript illuminator whose few surviving works are among the first masterpieces of a distinctively French style, very different from either Italian or Early Netherlandish painting.