The torso of Christ overweighs the total scheme; and his legs are unnaturally attenuated.

The kneeling woman on the left side is slender, and appears too small in proportion to the other figures; though, if she stood erect, it is probable that her height would be sufficient.
The best way to study Michelangelo's last work in marble is to take the admirable photograph produced under artificial illumination by Alinari.

No sympathetic mind will fail to feel that we are in immediate contact with the sculptor's very soul, at the close of his life, when all his thoughts were weaned from earthly beauty, and he cried-- Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul, that turns to his great love on high, Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.
As a French critic has observed: "It is the most intimately personal and the most pathetic of his works.

The idea of penitence exhales from it.

The marble preaches the sufferings of the Passion; it makes us listen to an act of bitter contrition and an act of sorrowing love." Michelangelo is said to have designed the Pieta for his own monument.
In the person of Nicodemus, it is he who sustains his dead Lord in the gloom of the sombre Duomo.