In the late 1540s, an aging Michelangelo embarked on what he intended to be his culminating sculptural work, commonly known as the Florentine Pietà. Still heavily tasked with official commissions—foremost among them the rebuilding of St. Peter’s—and sometimes incapacitated by kidney stones, he worked on the Pietà at night, wearing a cap of thick paper with a candle. His idea that the sculpture would decorate a church altar in front of which he would be interred was never realized. This Pietà, which reposes in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, is far from complete. In fact, it had to be partially reassembled by another sculptor after Michelangelo himself mutilated it, for reasons that cannot be known with certainty.

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