Two of the world's top museums have allowed Milan to set up a remarkable show comparing Vincent Van Gogh's 'lost' Pieta' with the Eugene Delacroix original that inspired it.
Van Gogh turned to the subject of the Madonna embracing the dead Jesus when he was admitted to a mental home after cutting off his ear.
The work, which is not at all typical of the famed Dutchman's output, disappeared from view for almost a century before an anonymous donor gave it to the Vatican.
The Vatican Museum has loaned the 1889 work for the show at the northern Italian city's Museo Diocesano, where it meets up for the first time with Delacroix's treatment of the same subject (1840), loaned by the Norwegian National Gallery in Oslo.
Commenting on the impact of the works, art critic Vittorio Sgarbi said: "Delacroix is burned up by the white heat of Van Gogh's invention".
Diocesano Director Paolo Biscottini said: "Van Gogh probably seized on the idea after getting a Delacroix print from his brother Theo, who was in Paris".
"He may have felt, in some ways, like the dead Christ".
The works are on display until January 2007.
The exhibition was organised as a flagship event to mark the Diocesano's first five years on the Milan cultural scene.
Milan Mayor Letizia Moratti, whose administration helped fund the loans, said "this show demonstrates how important the new gallery is to this city's artistic life".
Vincent Van Gogh (March 30, 1853, Zundert July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise) was a Dutch draughtsman and painter, classified as a Post-Impressionist. His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best known, most popular and most expensive pieces.
The fact that he cut off part of his left ear is very well known, as is the belief that he was driven to an early suicide by lack of recognition of his genius. Here reality and myth are intertwined, and although he certainly suffered from recurrent bouts of mental illness, his suicide was preceded by growing praise for his work from radical critics and fellow avant-garde artists - something which paradoxically caused the painter considerable anguish.
Ferdinand Victor Euge'ne Delacroix (April 26, 1798 August 13, 1863) was the most important of the French Romantic painters. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of color profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement.
