Editing Pietà (Michelangelo) (section)

==Age of Mary==
[[File:Scan the World - Pietà (Michelangelo).stl|alt=|thumb|3-dimensional model]]
{{external media | width = 210px | float = right | headerimage = [[File:Michelangelo's Pieta 5450 cropncleaned.jpg|210px]] | video1 = [http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/michelangelo-pieta.html Michelangelo's ''Pietà''], [[Smarthistory]]}}

Mary is represented as being very young for the mother of an approximately 33-year-old son, which is not uncommon in depictions of the [[Passion of Christ]] at the time. Various explanations have been suggested for this. One is that her youth symbolizes her incorruptible purity, as Michelangelo himself said to his biographer, the compatriot and Roman sculptor [[Ascanio Condivi]]:

{{Blockquote|"Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?"<ref>{{cite book|last=Pope-Hennessy|first=John|title=An Introduction to Italian Sculpture: Italian High Renaissance and Baroque sculpture|year=1970|publisher=Phaidon|page=304|edition=3|author-link=John Pope-Hennessy}}</ref>}}

Another theory suggests that Michelangelo's treatment of the subject was influenced by his passion for [[Dante]]'s [[Divine Comedy]]: so well-acquainted was he with the work that when he went to [[Bologna]], he paid for hospitality by reciting verses from it. In ''[[Paradiso (Dante)|Paradiso]]'' (Canto XXXIII of the poem), Saint [[Bernard of Clairvaux]] in a prayer for the Virgin Mary, says: {{lang|it|"Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio"|i=no}} ("Virgin mother, daughter of your son").