Mourning for Christ is a marble sculpture made by Michelangelo Bonarotti for St. Peter's Cathedral in 1498. It is now collected in St. Peter's Cathedral of the Vatican in Rome.
The image of the Virgin in the work is elegant and quiet, silently looking down at the dead Christ lying on her knees. She is young and beautiful, and does not give people too sad and painful feeling. The spirit of humanism rather than the atmosphere of religion is more reflected in the sculpture. It is obvious that this work has the style characteristics of the author's early sculpture. This period mainly inherited the classical style and theme, and used a steady and beautiful realism.

In the statue, the dead Christ has a scar under his side, without any painful expression on his face, lying between the knees of the Virgin Mary, his right hand drooping, his head leaning back, his body as slender as a gymnast, his waist bent, showing the weakness and weakness of death; The Virgin is young and beautiful, with a gentle image. She wears a large cloak and robe, holds the body of Christ with her right hand, and stretches her left hand back slightly, showing helpless pain; He looked down at his son's body and fell into deep sorrow; Her thick shoulders were covered by the fine folds of her clothes, but the mask set off her beautiful face.

Michelangelo was born on March 6, 1475 in Caprice, a mountain town near Florence, Italy. In the autumn of 1494, the French king led an army to invade Italy and approach Florence. Michelangelo had to leave his hometown to make a living in other places. When he returned to his hometown, the pope united with the old nobles of Florence to exclude Savonarola, a bishop who was actively engaged in religious reform, and burned him and threw his ashes into the river.
This martyrdom event deeply shocked Michelangelo: he felt that the movement led by Savonarola was correct, the sincere and simple morality he advocated was also noble, and he was a martyr who sympathized with the people. So Michelangelo began to write Mourning for Christ. He wanted to pour his deep condolences to Savonarola into this work. This work is based on the Bible story, showing the scene of grief and mourning when the Virgin Mary holds her son's body after Christ was removed from the cross.

pattern
The author breaks through the previous pattern of pale aging. The Virgin is portrayed as a dignified and beautiful girl, but it does not affect the expression of her grief over the death of Christ. Her beauty is intuitive, but her sorrow is profound. The beauty of youth, eternity and immortality embodied in her is the highest ideal of human pursuit of beauty.
Composition
Mourning for Christ (part)
The work adopts a stable pyramid style composition. The broad robe of the Virgin not only shows the shape of the Virgin's limbs, but also skillfully covers the actual proportion of the Virgin's body, solving the contradiction between the beauty of composition and the actual proportion of the human body. The fragile and naked body of Christ forms a sharp contrast with the thick sense of the fold of the Virgin and the clear face, which is unified and full of changes. The production of the statue has strong realistic skills. The author did not neglect any details, and polished the statue in detail, even used velvet for friction, until the stone surface is completely smooth and bright. All of these endow the stone with vitality and make the work look extremely brilliant. Michelangelo also engraved his name on the dress belt of the Virgin in the statue for the first time.
Character image
The Virgin, with her long scarf on her head, sat upright, and the naked, scarred Christ lay serenely on her lap. Michelangelo believed that, as a Virgin, when she saw her son do what he should do and finish her journey, although she was very sad, she should not cry bitterly, but bury her sorrow in her heart. Therefore, he sculpted the Virgin Mary to be extremely calm, and his drooping eyes made people feel how cruelly the pain of losing a child was torturing a mother. The left hand, which was slightly extended to the back, showed Maria's untold pain. The expression of the Virgin is silent and complex, not only pouring out silent grief, but also not only the mourning prayer of the Virgin, which has gone far beyond the content of the Christian faith. This is a feeling filled with the greatest and highest maternal love of mankind.

Roman Roland, a French thinker, writer and music critic, said that the Christ in his works was like eternal life, so young, and the dead body lay quietly on the Virgin's lap, as if asleep. The lines of the characters are serious in Greek style, but they are filled with an indescribable sadness. The figures in this statue are so beautiful, but they look so desolate.

Michelangelo was only 24 when he created this sculpture, which is his only signature work. In 1972, the 33 year old Austrian geographer Laszlo Tott came to St. Peter's Cathedral. He climbed over the guardrail, shouted "I am Christ", and hit the marble sculpture with a sledgehammer. After the Virgin Mary's left eyelids, neck, head and headband fell off one by one, he broke the Virgin Mary's left arm with one hand. The Vatican staff found more than 50 pieces of marble fragments after the disaster, but more were taken away by tourists. The restored sculpture is now placed in a display cabinet made of bulletproof glass.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564), a painter, sculptor, architect and poet of the Italian Renaissance, is a representative of the sculpture art of the Renaissance. Together with Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, they were called the Three Great Men after the Renaissance, and were also translated as "Michelangelo" and "Migao Angelo". He pursued the perfection of art all his life and insisted on his own artistic ideas. He died in Rome in 1564, and his style has influenced artists for almost three centuries. Asteroid 3001 was named after him to express the respect of future generations.