Michelangelo's Pieta told through Aurelio Amendola's shots

Until 9 January at the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo the exhibition of the great photographer

The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo dedicates an exhibition to Michelangelo's La Pietà. Aurelio Amendola's gaze between naturalism and abstraction. In the Sala del Paradiso from 8 September to 9 January, 32 black-and-white photos, printed in large format, tell every detail of Michelangelo's Pietà, known as the Pietà Bandini (Discover all the other unmissable autumn exhibitions in Florence here).

Having completed the restoration of the Bandini Pietà in September 2011, which is kept in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore commissioned a photographic campaign of the sculptural group to Aurelio Amendola, a great interpreter of Michelangelo's work and a world-renowned author. The fruit of this work is now presented in the Museum's Sala del Paradiso, where an exhibition is being held for the first time. A sequence of images that, on the one hand, touches the senses of anyone who observes his pictures, and on the other, helps a critical eye to discover previously unseen details.

Amendola returns to interpret the Bandini Pietà after having photographed it in 1997 and completed the delicate restoration, commissioned and directed by the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and financed by the non-profit Friends of Florence Foundation, which was able to restore beauty to one of the great artist's most intense and tormented masterpieces.

"Sculpture is everything to me, working with light I try to make it come alive, make it speak. This has always been my intention," says Amendola, who chose not to use diffuse lighting to portray the Bandini Pietà, because exhibition curator Antonio Natali says: "There is no light that can homogeneously envelop such a tormented material. And Aurelio not only second the original invention but further strengthens, indeed, the light and conversely further darkens the darks. And the shadows strike with sharp profiles on the surfaces, clear to the point of whiteness. And the heart of the relative move".

Amendola has photographed all the sculptural works of the great Renaissance artist throughout his long career. Starting with his first book in 1994, 'An Eye on Michelangelo. Le tombe dei Medici nella Sagrestia Nuova di S. Lorenzo a Firenze dopo il restauro', which won him the Oscar Goldoni prize for the best photographic book of the year, to the famous images of David photographed, as never before, in its full sensuality. With the David, Amendola 'inaugurated' a new way of recounting Michelangelo that became a point of reference for all his subsequent images.