Apart from his lifelong lover, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, to whom Michelangelo gave some highly finished drawings in the 1530s (see lot 8 of this sale), Vittoria Colonna was the other person to receive four such presentation copies from the artist. Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547), Marchioness of Pescara, was an acclaimed poet and woman of letters, at a time when the literary world was, with few notable exceptions, dominated by men. Colonna was Michelangelo’s poetic mentor and the two were united in an intense and emotional friendship. She was deeply interested in questions of art and religion and, together with Michelangelo and the Spiritualigroup, shared and discussed ideas that, in hindsight, bordered on Protestantism.
Although the presentation drawings were private gifts, documents suggest that both Tommaso and Vittoria may have encouraged their early reproduction in engravings and their subsequent dissemination to a broader public.
The four drawings associated with Vittoria Colonna, which can be dated between 1539 and 1543, are: The Crucifixionor Cristo Vivo(see lot 41), the Madonna of Silence, Christ and the Samaritan Woman(see lot 39) and the Pietà, on which the present print is based. The drawing of the latter, now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (inv. no. 1.2.o.16), was probably the first of the four to be made into a print. Two versions are known: an earlier one by Bonasone, 1546 (B. 64) and another by Nicolas Beatrizet, 1547 (B. 25). Beatrizet changed the composition, removing the landscape and adding an elaborate frame. The author of the present version, Giovanni Battista de' Cavalieri, engraver and print publisher from Trento and active in Rome from 1559, took Beatrizet's version as a model for his engraving, but simplified the upper beam of the frame.
Another rare print by de' Cavalieri after Michelangelo - The Crucifixion of Saint Peter-, also from the collection of the late Professor Eric Stanley, was sold in these rooms on 10 December 2019 (lot 20).

See B. Barnes, Michelangelo in Print: Reproductions as Response in the Sixteenth Century, 2010, pp. 53-85.