The Pietá.

The first time I saw The Pietá I was struck by the realism Michelangelo allowed to emerge from the stone.  I think of marble as cold and hard, yet his technique was so meticulous as

to bring skin to life, the robes draping beneath the mother and her son’s still body.  The Virgin Mary gazes down on her beloved Jesus, and cradles him ever so gently, as I am sure she did many times to bring him comfort as a child.  I am told that Michelangelo took just over two years to chisel this scene from a single block of marble and that it was the first and only work he ever signed— “Michelangelo Buonarroti made this.”   Gazing at this act of towering genius I am filled with hope, for if a single man could make The Pietá, then what greatness, even in the smallest things, may be within us, each and all?