Pity is a Rebel Passion. Jenny Saville’s Contemporary Pietà

This article examines six works by contemporary British artist Jenny Saville (featured in her exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice) to reflect on the iconographic motif of the Pietà. A brief tracing of the iconographic tradition reveals that this theme does not stem from a literary source, as the scene of the Virgin Mary cradling her dead son does not appear in the Gospels. The origins of the motif are, therefore, visual; it traces back to wooden sculptures that appeared in Germany in the 14th century, known as Vesperbild (“Vespers images”), a name referring to the time of day when, according to tradition, Christ was taken down from the cross. Jenny Saville plays with this iconographic tradition to reconfigure it: her Pietà figures appear faceless, bear the hieratic visage of an ancient Greek sculpture, or take the form of a man holding a dead child. She multiplies arms and erases parts of the mothers’ and children’s bodies, thereby evoking an ancient mater dolorosa: Hecuba. The persistence of the motif of the dispossessed mother, across the past and present and throughout all artistic mediums, exposes the terrible, enduring logic of war.