Beautiful and revealing: The Three Pietàs of Michelangelo, at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, reviewed

The room is immersed in semi-darkness. Light filters down from above, glistening on polished marble as if it were flesh. This is the installation for Le Tre Pietà, a remarkable micro-exhibition that has just opened at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence. It is low in quantity, containing just three works. But stratospherically high in quality, since it comprises Michelangelo’s three versions of the Pietà – that is, the Madonna mourning the dead Christ. He carved these over almost 70 years: one in his early twenties, the next in his seventies, the last in his eighties.

Admittedly, the first and the last are present only in a rather old-fashioned virtual form: high-quality plaster casts. And obviously, it would have been even more sensational if the original marbles of those works had been moved from Rome and Milan (something which is never, ever going to happen). But nonetheless, this display is both memorably beautiful and highly revealing.

None of these works is in the place for which Michelangelo intended it. But we know from various scraps of evidence that (just as you would expect of a great sculptor) he was highly sensitive to questions of placement and lighting. And this installation in Florence definitely comes much closer to the way his first Pietà would have originally been seen.

Nowadays, in St Peter’s, it is high up on an altar, behind protective glass, surrounded by baroque splendour. All of those factors are the opposite of what the artist anticipated. This Pietà was commissioned by a senior French clergyman for the Chapel of St Petronilla, a domed late Roman building that had become an annex of old St Peter’s (both structures were demolished within years of Michelangelo’s masterpiece being put in place).

There it would have been placed low-down so the extreme precision and finish of Christ’s body could have been contemplated from a few feet away, light seeping down on it from the rotunda above.