Museum of Pietà Rondanini

The new museum, created inside the ancient Ospedale Spagnolo (Spanish Hospital) in the Castello Sforzesco, is a fascinating space that has never opened to the public before and is exclusively dedicated to Michelangelo’s last masterpiece.

The old hospital was built for the soldiers of the Castello’s Spanish garrison in the second half of the 1500s, a few years after the time that Michelangelo spent in Rome working on the Pietà Rondanini.

The Pietà, incredible masterpiece and last unfinished creation by the master, is a dramatically singular work conveying a sense that transcends beauty as it is an of human love: in a single block of marble it contains the figures of Christ and the Virgin, almost merged in a single embrace.

The sculpture is so perfectly placed in its new location that a visitor to the new Pieta Rondanini Museum could almost believe that the Pietà and the rooms of the Spanish Hospital had been waiting for each other. For centuries, however, the artist’s final masterpiece was relocated from one place to another, almost forgotten, until 1952 when the sculpture was purchased by the municipality of Milan and exhibited at the reopening of the Musei del Castello after World War II in 1956.

As one of the outstanding works by Michelangelo, the Pieta Rondanini represents the master’s spiritual testament as he was sculpturing the features until a few days before his death in 1564. The unfinished work was found in his home in Rome but all traces of it were lost for many years until it reappeared in the home of the Marquis Giuseppe Rondinini (this is the correct name) a distinguished Roman collector.

From there it underwent a long succession of changes of ownership to finally find its rightful place today with the creation of this new tailor-made museum in which its iconic and dramatic strength emerges intensely.