NARRATOR: Carpeaux was not a regular church-goer, but he was intensely religious. At trying times he drew strength and inspiration from his Christian faith, as seen in this Pietá, showing the Virgin Mary mourning her dead son. Curator Jim Draper.

JAMES DRAPER: This particular model, was never realized in greater size or a different material. I think you could call this a model for himself. I believe that he identified his own approaching end with Christ’s Passion. And the two just become intermingled in his head.

NARRATOR: Carpeaux certainly knew Michelangelo’s famous marble Pietá in St. Peter’s in Rome. But another influence would have been the cheap crucifixes that he collected in Parisian flea markets, with their distorted limbs and agonized faces.

JAMES DRAPER: It's one of the most wonderful expressions of his own expressivity with clay: the spiraling forms that run throughout the composition, and the economy of means. He’ll just stab the clay for the eyes or the mouth. Or in the case of Christ’s nose, it's just a little slash. Lots of the clay has fallen away during the modeling, I believe, or when it was fired. But that didn't bother him.

NARRATOR: In what can be seen as an anticipation of Rodin and later modernists, Carpeaux is concerned only with distilling the essence of the composition—here, a divine love that outfaces death itself.