The most famous of four Pietàs by Michelangelo is a sculpture at Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.
1635–45; < Italian: literally, pity < Latin pietās piety; cf. pity
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The most elucidating superimposes a Pietà by Anne-Louis Girodet, David’s little-known pupil, over David’s “Marat.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 21, 2025
Last year, the local alderman threatened to downzone the church property, reducing its value to developers, and its Pietà had to be moved from the church with a police escort.
From Slate ● Jul. 13, 2023
I took all the time in the world at the Pietà.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 21, 2022
He posed them in positions that recall a Pietà or the Descent from the Cross.
From New York Times ● Oct. 28, 2022
Opposite this picture hangs, what once formed part of it, a solemn, sorrowful Pietà, as the Italians call a picture representing the dead Redeemer mourned over by the Virgin and by the other holy women.
From The Old Masters and Their Pictures For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art by Tytler, Sarah
For Taylor, this outrage from the newspapers becomes a pietà, driven by an intimacy based not on actual acquaintance but rather on personal identification.
From The New Yorker ● Jul. 23, 2018
That makes the play’s closing pietà risible when it should be moving.
From New York Times ● Feb. 14, 2011
Her expression of quiet hopeless grief was admirably suited to the high-bred cast of her features; she would have made a beautiful model for a Zenobia or a classisized type of pietà.
From The Whirligig of Time by Williams, Wayland Wells
It was painted by Moretto of Brescia, of whom Lanzi truly says that his sacred subjects express la compunzione, la pietà, la carità istessa; and this picture is an instance.
From Legends of the Madonna as Represented in the Fine Arts by Jameson, Mrs. (Anna)
Above the range of pigeon-holes and little drawers, forming the back of the writing-table, two candles burned on either side of a bronze pietà, which Julius had brought back with him from Rome.
From The History of Sir Richard Calmady A Romance by Malet, Lucas
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
