Vesperbild (Pietà) (c. 1515–20): Art, History and Details

Vesperbild (Pietà) (c. 1515–20) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Master of Rabenden (German).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Depicting the Virgin cradling Christ’s dead body, works like this one were known in German as vesperbilds, owing to their incorporation into the liturgy of the evening prayer (vespers) on Good Friday. The word pietà—from the Latin pietas, meaning "piety" or "compassion"—was also used to describe such works. Like other devotional image types that emerged in southern Germany in the later medieval period, vesperbilds encouraged viewers to contemplate Christ’s suffering and empathize with the Virgin’s sorrows more directly and emotively than ever before. This anonymous German artist is named after one of his most important works, the high altar of the church of Rabenden in the Chiemgau, the foothills of the Alps. The sculpture was likely placed in a secondary chapel in a Bavarian church.

Object facts

• Title: Vesperbild (Pietà)
• Date: c. 1515–20
• Creator attribution: Master of Rabenden (German)
• Culture: Germany, Upper Bavaria, 16th century
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: lindenwood, polychromed and gilded
• Dimensions: Overall: 89.1 x 78.7 x 32.4 cm (35 1/16 x 31 x 12 3/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Gothic
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1938.294

A detail from the museum

This sculpture sensitively depicts the Virgin cradling the body of Christ. This devotional image was likely placed near the altar in a German chapel. Imagine standing in a small, quiet chapel looking up at these lifelike figures with flickering candles casting dappled light onto their surface.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William. "Late German Gothic Sculpture." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 26, no. 4 (April 1939): 43-46.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.