hen Michelangelo began work on the Rondanini, in 1555, he made five charcoal sketches on small paper sheets [11x28 cm (approx. 41/3 x 11 inches)] on which he can be seen imagining several solutions (one of which suggests a group of three characters rather than two). These studies are now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford ("Studies for a Pieta and entombment ").

hese silhouettes, whose search for their true form is so moving, ans so close to the unfinished quest of the Rondanini, have been reproduced in the exhibition and enlarged to the actual size of the statue and form around it as it were a company of shadows in the darkness.