Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna

Abstract

In the Pietà made by Michelangelo for Vittoria Colonna a new category of art—the drawing made as a finished work and presented as a gift—became a privileged model for a conception of religious faith and divine grace promoted in the reforming circles with which both Michelangelo and Vittoria were associated. The letters and writings of Michelangelo and Vittoria that surround this drawing articulate a series of correlations between art as a gift and divine grace as a gift and reveal important tensions in Italian artistic and religious culture on the eve of the Counter-Reformation.

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