What Michelangelo’s Pietà can Teach us About Woman’s Noblest Nature
The Secret of the Pietà that can Redeem the Modern Woman
“A religious symbol conveys its message even if it is no longer consciously understood in every part. For a symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion
Modern society often speaks about women’s rights. Female empowerment figures usually mention women who fought for very self-centered goals. Some of these were laudable like the right to own property and the right to go to school. However among them also was the “right” to murder a child when it is inconvenient to you, the right to vote so as to splinter the political goals of families, the right for women to lead increasingly selfish and hedonistic lives and call themselves empowered for it. Today, women celebrate prostitution, obesity, degeneracy and vanity on the internet as a form of “empowerment” and anyone who dares to criticize this behaviour is labelled a misogynist. Standards of any behaviour at all, are conflated with “dehumanization”. This toxic philosophy has brought out the worst in modern woman, and it has also made us forget how noble the nature of woman can be. This essay is about how one magnificent work of art can remind us of what this nobility in the fair sex looks like.
What does Nobility mean? What better place to learn than from one of the most sanctified women in human history: the Virgin Mary. Whether or not you are a Christian, the story is incredible and understanding its power is key to understanding the power of this work of art.
According to René Girard, sacrifice is what permits mankind to break out of mimetic cycles of violence, that is to say, it permits peace. Mankind’s religions have always included sacrifices and the greater the sacrifice, the more powerful its effects. Any parent understands that more painful than sacrificing one’s own life, is the sacrifice of one’s child, because your child’s life is infinitely more valuable to you than your own.
Michelangelo’s Pietà is enigmatic and enthralling for a simple, yet powerful reason. The sculpture portrays a deep and mature expression of grief, one that is usually found on the face of an old woman, on the face of a teenage girl. Her son has been killed and yet, she does not wail or cry out, neither is she cold and detached. She is, in some ways, still mothering as she cradles her child, as a new mother might hold a baby in her lap. The strap over her heart, bearing the name of il miglio fabbro, bunches the fabric around it to indicate its tightness, as though it is holding her heart in place lest it shatter in a million pieces at the pain.