Pietà

After Cosimo Tura · 1475/1500

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

71.7 × 55.2 cm (28 1/4 × 21 3/4 in.); Framed: 90.9 × 79.4 × 7.7 cm (35 3/4 × 31 1/4 × 3 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

The Pietà attributed to a follower of Cosimo Tura is one of the most emotionally charged devotional panels to emerge from Renaissance Ferrara — its gaunt, angular figures rendered with a grief that feels almost physical. Cosimo Tura was the dominant painter at the Este court in Ferrara during the second half of the fifteenth century, and his influence shaped an entire generation of artists in the region. His style is immediately recognisable: hard-edged drapery that seems carved rather than folded, figures of wiry intensity, and a palette of cold blues, greens, and burnished golds that give his work a crystalline, almost metallic quality. This panel, painted by a close follower working in that tradition, carries the same taut emotional register — the Virgin's sorrow made architectural by the rigid stillness of her pose. Tura's reputation faded almost entirely after his death in 1495, and his significance was only recovered by art historians in the nineteenth century, lending his legacy a quiet irony given the raw power of works like this one. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates every detail of the original — the angular contours, the compressed grief of the figures, and the luminous depth of the tempera palette — into a lasting work you can live with.