Pieta (Michelangelo) - Madonna's sash

The sash of the eternally young Madonna in Michelangelo’s majestic Pieta states in Latin: “Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, was making (this)”. It is the one and only signed work in all of Michelangelo’s oeuvre.

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A famous story about this signature was told by none other than Vasari - Michelangelo’s first biographer and a spirited story teller. According to Vasari “one day Michelagnolo, entering the place where it was set up, found there a great number of strangers from Lombardy, who were praising it <the Pieta> highly, and one of them asked one of the others who had done it, and he answered, ‘Our Gobbo from Milan.’ Michelagnolo stood silent, but thought it something strange that his labors should be attributed to another; and one night he shut himself in there, and, having brought a little light and his chisels, carved his name upon it.”

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The “gobbo” or hunchback these admirers were referring to was a Milanese sculptor Cristofero Solari, who achieved some fame in Rome at the time. Apparently, this mistake so outraged Michelangelo, that he chiseled the famous signature into the Madonna’s sash in one night.

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But as Professor W. E. Wallace points out, the sash itself has always been a part of the marble sculpture and really, there was no other reason for Michelangelo to carve the sash on its own. An empty sash as part of the Madonna’s gown would have made little sense. It is therefore very likely that the signature was there from the start.

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And Vasari, the master of viral stories, is guilty of yet another apocryphal legend.