Pietà

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Carpeaux here demonstrates an enduring admiration for the plangent heroism of Michelangelo, evinced earlier in the famous Ugolino and his Sons, conceived during his study years in Rome, of which the Metropolitan owns the marble finished in 1867. The government of Napoleon III kept Carpeaux busy with official projects, involving decorative sculpture and portraiture, but it is clear from the evidence of the private moments that he occasionally seized to sketch sacred subjects, as here, that he would have been one of the most powerful of all religious artists had he been freer to exercise this repertory. Mounding the clay pellets and pressing them into shape in mere seconds, his entire attention is on the Virgin Mary's maternal embrace, to the virtual exclusion of Christ's legs. A related drawing in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes, is dated 1864.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art