Pietà

Jean Fouquet's Pietà, dating to around 1460, is a work by the greatest French painter of the fifteenth century, who uniquely synthesized Italian Renaissance innovations with the refined elegance of the French court style. Fouquet had traveled to Italy around 1445-1447, where he absorbed the spatial clarity and monumental figural style of Florentine painting, which he then transformed through his own distinctive vision.

Fouquet's distinctive combination of Italian spatial rationality and Northern European surface precision creates a Pietà of crystalline clarity, with sculptural figures arranged in a composition of geometric rigor.