READING THE SUFFERING: PIETA DEPICTIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF REPRESENTATION AND EXPRESSION

Abstract

There is a poignant distinction between feeling an existing suffering and being made a part of a created one. At the beginning of the 14th century, Western iconography focused on the Passion of the Christ but at the same time, it produced some new types of depiction and one of them is Pieta, an image of the sorrowing Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ on her lap. The main point of our research is the evolution of the theme of Pieta which is traced from divinity to reality or from the sacred to the profane. The created suffering and the existed suffering are argued in the context of representation and expression with sculptural images of Pieta in Western art.