Column: A Thousand Words
The Risen Christ by Michelangelo Buonarotti
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
Perhaps the least known of Michelangelo's sculptures, the Risen Christ has had a checkered history. Metello Vari, a well-to-do Roman, in 1514 commissioned a nude standing Christ holding the cross (pretty daring for the Dominican home church at the time). Michelangelo started carving it in 1515 but discovered every sculptor's nightmare, a disfiguring flaw concealed within the block, a vein of black that would have run directly through Christ's face. The first version had to be abandoned, but a contract is a contract, and as time ran out, the final working was entrusted to an assistant so incompetent that he had to be removed and the finishing entrusted to still another. Finally completed in 1521, the sculpture is one to which the critics have not been entirely kind.
Classical Pose with Christian Resonance
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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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more on art from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
An Architectural Sign of Mere Christianity by Michael Ward
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
more from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
Maternal Body: A Theology of Incarnation from the Christian East by Carrie Frederick Frost
Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage Through Pregnancy by Laura S. Jansson by Agnes R. Howard
32.4—July/August 2019
Today's Culture Wars Are Both Ancient & Modern by Allan C. Carlson
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