When he was about 75 years old, Michelangelo set out to carve a difficult sculptural group. Difficult in composition and subject matter, in technique, and most of all, for its personal implications. For the Bandini Pietà, today housed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, was what Michelangelo intended for his own tomb (more correctly, for the altar of the chapel in a Roman church where the artist wanted to be buried). No wonder he was unable to finish it – think of the implications! As Will Wallace writes, “To finish the sculpture was to bring the marble to life but also to resign oneself to death” (in an article in Artibus et Historiae, 2000).
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