Word.ws English Dictionary

pietà

pietà noun: a sculpture or painting of the Virgin Mary holding and mourning the dead body of Jesus.

pietà: a sculpture or painting of the Virgin Mary holding and mourning the dead body of Jesus
Image: Stanislav Traykov, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

pietà (plural pietàs)

  1. A sculpture or painting of the Virgin Mary holding and mourning the dead body of Jesus.
    • Two ladies were already in the cloister chapel, with a gentleman. As Kitty and her friend entered, these persons had just finished their inspection of the damaged but most beautiful "Pietà" which hangs over the altar, and their faces were towards the entrance.1905, Mary Augusta Ward, The Marriage of William Ashe
    • Whereas Beuys's early sculptural work was consciously formed within a modernized version of the stylized Romanesque tradition of art, frequently with a Christian content such as crucifixions or pietàs, he gradually was able to free himself from this more traditional approach.1998, David Adams, “Afterword: The Artistic Alchemy of Joseph Beuys”, in Thomas Braatz, transl., Bees, Rudolf Steiner, page 195

Examples of pietà in a sentence

  • Ceremonial masks, Hindu deities, and pietàs shine down on you.2009, Pico Iyer, “5: Making Kindness Stand to Reason”, in Rajiv Mehrotra, editor, Understanding the Dalai Lama, page 61:
  • It does not show the events it depicts as static, frozen in the eternal present of historia sacra in the way many late medieval crucifixions, pietàs or annunciations do, but as a narrative.2011, Caroline van Eck, Stijn Bussels, Theatricality in Early Modern Art and Architecture, page 10:

Forms of pietà

pluralpietàs
alternative formpieta

Origin of pietà

From Italian pietà. Doublet of piety, and pity.

Questions about pietà

What does pietà mean?
Pietà means a sculpture or painting of the Virgin Mary holding and mourning the dead body of Jesus.
How do you use pietà in a sentence?
Ceremonial masks, Hindu deities, and pietàs shine down on you.
What part of speech is pietà?
Pietà is a noun.
What is the plural of pietà?
The plural of pietà is pietàs.

Words near pietà in the dictionary

  1. Piettes
  2. piety
  3. Pietz
  4. Pietzes
  5. Pietzsch
  6. pietà
  7. pietàs
  8. Pieve di Cadore
  9. pievish
  10. piewipe
  11. piewipes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pietà (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “pietà.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/piet%C3%A0. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.