Jenny Saville’s Study for Pietà IV

It is just over 30 years since Jenny Saville’s extraordinary triptych Strategy (1994), appeared on the cover of the Manic Street Preachers album The Holy Bible. It depicts a large woman in her underwear viewed from three perspectives, her colossal body rising up in an unsettlingly forthright manner. The folds and creases in her belly and the mottled skin reveal Saville’s superb gift for flesh. The paint travels across the canvas, turning from pink to purple to green and yellow, like the colours of a bruise.

By the time the album emerged, in August 1994, Saville was already known to the art world, having been featured earlier that year in Charles Saatchi’s exhibition Young British Artists III. However, the cover launched the 24-year-old into the mainstream. In the age of the body beautiful, Saville’s powerful depictions of the female form challenged the norm.

Today, Saville’s paintings are as visceral as ever. Her investigations of the human form, its scars and imperfections, remain forensically candid. Her bodies are utterly engrossing, as raw and bizarre as a close-up of your own face in the mirror. The artist has attributed her direct gaze to a love of Rembrandt, a painter who, she says, ‘never shies away from looking at real life’.

Born in Cambridge in 1970, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art, where she was spotted by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi. He commissioned her to make work for his gallery — an unprecedented opportunity for a young artist, giving her the freedom to work on a huge scale.

Saville says she learned to paint by studying Old Masters, and she continues to reference artists such as Velázquez, Titian and Rembrandt in her works. In 2021, she was awarded an extensive show in Florence, which placed her vast renderings of human figures in dialogue with the Italian Renaissance artists Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo across five museums.

One of the key works made for the exhibition was a monumental pietà inspired by Michelangelo. Saville created a nine-foot-high charcoal and pastel drawing on raw canvas, which was installed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, adjacent to Michelangelo’s unfinished marble sculpture, the Pietà Bandini (c. 1547-55). The work is due to be featured in Saville’s major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London this summer.

Michelangelo’s Pietà Bandini is carved in white Carrara marble and depicts Christ between the Madonna, Mary Magdalene and Saint Nicodemus. The work was originally conceived as the artist’s own funerary monument, but was unfinished at the time of his death. Saville visited the sculpture while it was being restored in 2019, enabling her to study it up close, which gave her the sense that ‘Michelangelo used to be over my shoulder, and now he’s under my skin.’

Offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s on 5 March 2025 is Saville’s Study for Pietà IV (2019-20), one of the works the artist made in response to her analysis of Michelangelo’s sculpture. The drawing was exhibited at the Museo Novecento in Florence in 2021-22, and depicts five bodies entwined in a tight composition.

Tension is conveyed through the twist of the figures and the way the bodies are held by one another. Loose sketch lines suggest an echo or doubling of the forms. Saville has described her process of using a vacuum cleaner to rub away lines, and the result suggests multiple realities rather than one sealed image.

Saville’s use of charcoal and pastel recalls another Renaissance work, Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist, which is held in the National Gallery in London. The sketch, Leonardo’s only surviving cartoon, is uncanny. ‘I like that you don’t immediately know whose limbs belong to who,’ says Saville. ‘He [Leonardo] was trying to get to that human mass.’

Unlike Leonardo’s paintings, which were celebrated for their soft, smoky sfumato effect, the cartoon has a raw, experimental sensibility to it. The artist takes a greater freedom in his drawings, particularly in the face of Anne, which resembles a skull, perhaps an acknowledgement of the infant Christ’s mortal fate.

The eyes of the figure resembling Saville in Study for Pietà IV have a similar hollowness, rather like a death’s head. With her arm wrapped tightly around the central figure, she has asserted her presence in the history of art.

Led by the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal on 5 March 2025, Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions take place in London and online from 26 February to 20 March. Find out more about the preview exhibition and sales