's
Pietà The work is perhaps the "altarpiece [with] Our Lord's sepulchre [...] and other five figures" which appear in the inventory made in 1492 at the death of
Lorenzo de' Medici, and which decorated his
Villa at Careggi since as early as 1482. The panel was thus one of the works commissioned by the
Medici to van der Weyden, including the
Medici Madonna now at
Städel of
Frankfurt, which has been also assigned to the artist's trip to Italy in 1450. Another hypothesis is that the panel was part of a lost
triptych painted for
Lionello d'Este of
Ferrara, and mentioned in 1449, or that it was the painting described by
Giorgio Vasari as
Hans Memling's. The panel adopts the same scheme in
Fra Angelico's
Pietà for the predella of the
San Marco Altarpiece (1438–1443), now at the
Alte Pinakothek, Munich, confirming that the Flemish artist visited Florence during his pilgrimage in Italy of 1449–1450, as mentioned in
De viribus illustribus by
Bartolomeo Facio (c. 1456). The work was later part of the collections of cardinal
Carlo de' Medici, being moved to the Uffizi Gallery in 1666.
Filippo Baldinucci described it as a work by
Albrecht Dürer. In 1989 it was still assigned to Hans Memling by some scholars, but in 1992 reflex photography showed the underlying drawing, which was clearly executed by van der Weyden. ==Description==