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Lot Essay
Jenny Saville’s virtuosic draughtsmanship is brought to the fore in Study for Pietà IV (2019-2020), an exquisite composition in charcoal and pastel which asserts the continued relevance of one of art history’s most iconic themes. Study for Pietà IV is the largest and most fully developed within a series of works relating to Saville’s monumental Pietà I. These works on paper, together with the painting, were exhibited as part of an expansive museum survey staged across five museums in Florence in 2021, which paired works by Saville with those of Renaissance masters such as Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Giorgio Vasari. The series was inspired by Michelangelo’s Pietà Bandini, which Saville visited several times to study in person. Amid five entwined bodies, a possible self-portrait of the artist is identifiable in the left-most figure, while on the right a figure resembling the artist’s husband appears as both prop and anchor. Loose sketch-lines—earlier poses disbanded but not erased—suggest an echo or doubling of the body, offering a glimpse inside the working process of one of contemporary art’s most celebrated portraitists. Saville’s first major UK museum retrospective will open at the National Portrait Gallery, London, later this summer.
Working directly from the Pietà Bandini was pivotal for Saville. ‘I saw how the internal torque of the bodies worked’, she explains (J. Saville quoted in L. Rysman, ‘Jenny Saville’s Nudes Bring Renaissance Masters Down to Earth,’ The New York Times, 8 October 2021). In Saville’s drawing movement is evoked through the twist of bodies, anchored by the monumentality of the group. Tension is built in the artist’s visible adjustment of form, which evokes moving bodies bound together, holding and being held by one another. Phantom legs and feet in various stages of finish pepper the lower portion of the page like pentimenti. The effect recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (1452-1519, National Gallery, London). ‘I like that you don’t immediately know whose limbs belong to who in the Leonardo cartoon,’ says Saville. ‘He was trying to get to that human mass’ (J. Saville quoted in S. Risaliti, Jenny Saville, Milan 2023, p. 218). From Saville’s tangle of bodies and limbs emerges a crucifix form, a sharp horizontal in the Christ figure intersected by the carefully aligned heads of the remaining four. Saville, perhaps transposing her own family onto an archetypal composition of humanity, sacrifice and familial love, reveals its timeless and enduring power.
Michelangelo’s Pietà Bandini, carved from white Carrara marble, depicts the Deposition of Christ between the Madonna, Mary Magdalene and Nicodemus. Carved between around 1547 and 1555, the sculpture was originally conceived as the artist’s own funerary monument, but was unfinished at the time of his death. Completed by a student, the Pietà Bandini passed through several private collections in Rome prior to its acquisition by Grand Duke Cosimo III de’Medici in 1671, at which time it was brought to Florence. Initially sitting in San Lorenzo, in the eighteenth century it was placed on the main altar of the Cathedral, before being moved to the Opera Museum in the late twentieth century. It was here that Saville sought out Michelangelo’s sculpture, visiting the Pietà Bandini and speaking with restorers cleaning the marble, which enabled her to study the piece at proximity. Immersed in the city of disegno, and seeking to translate the monumentality of stone—its chiseled grooves, smooth veins and dramatic chiaroscuro—Saville chose to forego her signature medium of oil paint; she produced a series of works on paper in charcoal, of which the present work is a striking example, as well as a largescale work on canvas in charcoal and pastel.
In the Pietà Bandini, to depict the figure of Nicodemus—who in Christian tradition is believed to have been a sculptor—Michelangelo used his own features. The act of self-portraiture has defined Saville’s extraordinary career. It was two monumental self-portraits, first shown at her degree show in the early 1990s and later acquired by British art maverick Charles Saatchi, which would establish the artist as a pivotal figure in the story of contemporary British art. In the legacy of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Saville has chronicled the intervening years through her own shifting form. ‘I use me all the time because it’s really reliable, you’re there all the time’, she explains. ‘I like the idea of using yourself because it takes you into the work. I don’t like the idea of just being the person looking. I want to be the person. Because women have been so involved in being the subject-object, it’s quite important to take that on board and not be just the person looking and examining. You’re the artist but you’re also the model’ (J. Saville quoted in D. Sylvester, ‘Areas of Flesh’, The Independent on Sunday, 30 January 1994, p. 18). In the present work, Saville appears to have included a self-portrait on the far the left, arms wrapped tightly around the Christ figure; as Michelangelo substituted his own form, so Saville asserts her presence in this most timeless of compositions, and—at the same time—in the story of art.
Working directly from the Pietà Bandini was pivotal for Saville. ‘I saw how the internal torque of the bodies worked’, she explains (J. Saville quoted in L. Rysman, ‘Jenny Saville’s Nudes Bring Renaissance Masters Down to Earth,’ The New York Times, 8 October 2021). In Saville’s drawing movement is evoked through the twist of bodies, anchored by the monumentality of the group. Tension is built in the artist’s visible adjustment of form, which evokes moving bodies bound together, holding and being held by one another. Phantom legs and feet in various stages of finish pepper the lower portion of the page like pentimenti. The effect recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (1452-1519, National Gallery, London). ‘I like that you don’t immediately know whose limbs belong to who in the Leonardo cartoon,’ says Saville. ‘He was trying to get to that human mass’ (J. Saville quoted in S. Risaliti, Jenny Saville, Milan 2023, p. 218). From Saville’s tangle of bodies and limbs emerges a crucifix form, a sharp horizontal in the Christ figure intersected by the carefully aligned heads of the remaining four. Saville, perhaps transposing her own family onto an archetypal composition of humanity, sacrifice and familial love, reveals its timeless and enduring power.
Michelangelo’s Pietà Bandini, carved from white Carrara marble, depicts the Deposition of Christ between the Madonna, Mary Magdalene and Nicodemus. Carved between around 1547 and 1555, the sculpture was originally conceived as the artist’s own funerary monument, but was unfinished at the time of his death. Completed by a student, the Pietà Bandini passed through several private collections in Rome prior to its acquisition by Grand Duke Cosimo III de’Medici in 1671, at which time it was brought to Florence. Initially sitting in San Lorenzo, in the eighteenth century it was placed on the main altar of the Cathedral, before being moved to the Opera Museum in the late twentieth century. It was here that Saville sought out Michelangelo’s sculpture, visiting the Pietà Bandini and speaking with restorers cleaning the marble, which enabled her to study the piece at proximity. Immersed in the city of disegno, and seeking to translate the monumentality of stone—its chiseled grooves, smooth veins and dramatic chiaroscuro—Saville chose to forego her signature medium of oil paint; she produced a series of works on paper in charcoal, of which the present work is a striking example, as well as a largescale work on canvas in charcoal and pastel.
In the Pietà Bandini, to depict the figure of Nicodemus—who in Christian tradition is believed to have been a sculptor—Michelangelo used his own features. The act of self-portraiture has defined Saville’s extraordinary career. It was two monumental self-portraits, first shown at her degree show in the early 1990s and later acquired by British art maverick Charles Saatchi, which would establish the artist as a pivotal figure in the story of contemporary British art. In the legacy of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Saville has chronicled the intervening years through her own shifting form. ‘I use me all the time because it’s really reliable, you’re there all the time’, she explains. ‘I like the idea of using yourself because it takes you into the work. I don’t like the idea of just being the person looking. I want to be the person. Because women have been so involved in being the subject-object, it’s quite important to take that on board and not be just the person looking and examining. You’re the artist but you’re also the model’ (J. Saville quoted in D. Sylvester, ‘Areas of Flesh’, The Independent on Sunday, 30 January 1994, p. 18). In the present work, Saville appears to have included a self-portrait on the far the left, arms wrapped tightly around the Christ figure; as Michelangelo substituted his own form, so Saville asserts her presence in this most timeless of compositions, and—at the same time—in the story of art.