"Pieta"

A year before completing the painting Bouguereau had suffered the traumatic loss of his teenage son George to a sudden illness. Contemporary correspondence reveals the artist's overwhelming grief at the death, that also seemed to have moved him to create a number of monumental religious works. The golden urn in the foreground bears a faint Latin inscription dedicated to George, including his date of death. In stylistic terms, some art historians compare Bouguereau's religious works to the masters of the high Renaissance because Bouguereau builds compositions out of the movement of strong, well rounded bodies, whose authoritative presence fills the canvases with energy.

It is no coincidence that the position of Christ's head and shoulders echo that of Michelangelo's Vatican Pieta (1498-99) sculpture. Bouguereau also paid close attention to detail through his use of color: the rusty, drying blood on the white cloth in the foreground, the reddened eyes of the tearful Virgin, and the green tones of Christ's extremities in decay, all enhance the visual precision.