Pietà (Jago)

Jago's Pietà is a life-size marble group carved by the Italian sculptor Jacopo Cardillo, known as Jago, in his Naples studio in the deconsecrated church of Sant'Aspreno ai Crociferi, over about sixteen months spanning 2020 and 2021. It was first shown in Rome, in the Cappella del Crocifisso of the basilica of Santa Maria in Montesanto, the "Church of the Artists" on Piazza del Popolo, from October 2021 to February 2022. It has since returned to Naples and is displayed in the Jago Museum at Sant'Aspreno, in the Rione Sanità.

What you're looking at

The sculpture rewrites the most famous image in Christian sculpture. In place of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ, as in Michelangelo's Pietà, Jago shows a man, a father, down on one knee and lifting the body of his grown son from the ground. Both are nude. The father is bald and heavily built, his chest and shoulders modeled with dense realism, and his face is not serene: it is distorted by grief, the features pulled into a grimace of pain that some viewers at first read almost as a smile. Jago has said he wanted the father's suffering to show in the face rather than to idealize it.

The son lies limp across his father's raised thigh, his head thrown back and hanging, his long hair falling toward the ground, one arm dangling. The weight of the body is palpable: the father's hand presses into the son's side, the son's legs slide off at the right. The marble is polished to a soft sheen on the skin and left slightly rougher on the base.

In the photograph shown here the sculpture is still in the studio-church, surrounded by scaffolding, a ladder and a mallet resting on the base, while a shaft of daylight cuts through the dust from a high window. It is an unusually direct view of a contemporary marble being made in a Baroque setting, the way sculptors worked for centuries.

Meaning

Jago's change of protagonist is the point. By removing the Virgin and the haloes, he turns the Pietà from a doctrinal image into a universal one: any parent mourning any child. Coming in the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and shown first in a church dedicated to artists, the work was widely read as a meditation on collective loss. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano described it simply as a father raising his son's lifeless body from the ground, a gesture anyone who has lost a child can recognize.

The choice of a father also reflects Jago's broader interest in updating classical models. His earlier Figlio Velato (Veiled Son, 2019), now in the chapel of San Severo fuori le Mura in Naples, answered Giuseppe Sanmartino's eighteenth-century Veiled Christ with a child under a marble shroud.

The artist

Jago, born in 1987, is one of the best-known Italian sculptors of his generation, partly because he documents his carving process on social media. His works include Habemus Hominem, a bust of Pope Benedict XVI that he later re-carved bare-chested after the pope's resignation, and The First Baby, a small marble sent to the International Space Station in 2019. He works almost entirely in marble, using traditional techniques alongside modern power tools, and has been compared, often by the press, to the Renaissance masters whose subjects he reworks.

Related works

For the traditions behind this sculpture, see Michelangelo's Pietà, Veiled Christ and the modern War Pieta by Max Ginsburg. More marble in Famous Sculptures.

Where to see it

The Jago Museum, in the former church of Sant'Aspreno ai Crociferi in Naples's Rione Sanità, where the sculpture was carved. Check the museum's website for opening hours and current displays, since works sometimes travel to exhibitions.