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.