Michelangelo's Pieta - The Agony and Ecstasy

He was a sick old man when he started the monumental project, unable to climb stairs without pain. Often, he could not work. But at some point in the middle of the 1540's Michelangelo began carving what many art historians regard as his most mature and provocative sculpture, the piece now known as the Florentine Pieta.

The sculpture was enormous -- nearly eight feet tall -- and Michelangelo's friend and best-known biographer, Georgio Vasari, wrote that the artist worked on it only at night. It was an intensely personal effort. The largest of the four figures, Nicodemus, is a heartbreaking self portrait of a suffering old man. To see what he was doing, the artist fashioned for himself a sort of 16th-century miner's lamp -- a paper hat with a notch cut into it to hold a burning candle.

"It is impossible to speak of its beauty and sorrow," wrote the contemporary biographer Ascanio Condivi, upon seeing the work at the time, "of the grieving and sad faces of them all, especially of the grieving Mother. Let it suffice: I tell you it is a rare thing."

Nobody who saw it had any other opinion.

Michelangelo intended the statue for the top of his own tomb. But one day, without a word of explanation and after a decade of brutal labor and emotional pain, the artist took a sledgehammer to it. He broke away hands and arms and legs and nearly destroyed the work before one of his most devoted servants dragged him away. Eventually it was patched together by one of his less talented assistants.