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Saturday, January 31, 2009: Michelangelo's Pietà

Viewing and Self-printing

Click the image below (or click here) to view a larger bitmap version. To print the poster, please use only the downloadable high-resolution PDF (2.5 MB). The free Adobe Acrobat Reader program can nicely scale this PDF file to suit various paper sizes. While you can of course print it in black-and-white, my original design has many fine, subtle shades of warm and cold grays, so it looks its best when printed in color and at maximum quality settings.

Here is a freely downloadable, high-resolution PDF of my poster design of Michelangelo's Pietà (1499), which you may freely print for yourself (to the best of your and your puny printer's abilities — snicker, snicker . . . ).

I designed the poster because this Pietà is one of my all-time favorite sculptures — and because I found a pretty-decent photo of it in the Wikipedia article Michelangelo's Pietà. The photo is used courtesy of the photographer, Stanislav Traykov (CC-BY license), to whom I gladly give all due photo credit (although I have slightly retouched his file where I deemed it necessary, chiefly in the plinth, and I totally removed the actual background). If I ever make it to see the original sculpture in in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome I will certainly try to photograph it myself and then revise my poster, but the piece is placed behind bullet-proof glass and always surrounded by visitors, so it's not an easy subject to shoot well.

Prints in Excelsis

I can produce superb 61×61cm (24×24") prints on my brand-new (Jan. 2009), awesome HP Z3200 printer, using Ilford Omnijet Pearl Photo RC Paper (other media, like canvas, available on request). To make it worth my while, I have to charge US $70 per print plus $30 for world-wide shipping (the shipping rate is crazily steep, I know, I know, but that's the very cheapest rate possible with our damn Norwegian State-run Postal Office).

To order, just email me. I prefer PayPal for payments, where you can securely use your credit cards even without an account. If you order a print, rest assured that I won't be paying any tithe to the Vatican. :-)

Since I am an intransigent atheist I don't respond to the Christian aspects of this work of art — but its staggering artistic greatness and the universality of its theme are obviously independent of all religious ideas. And my Latin tagline "Gloria in Excelsis Homine" should make it clear that I am honoring Michelangelo the Creative Man — who was not yet 25 years old when he completed this amazing work! — and not any incidental superstitious beliefs held by anyone.

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