Chapel 40 - The Pietà

It houses the seventeenth-century scene of the Pietà: the Virgin Mary is holding the body of Jesus just laid down from the cross by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, while the pious women help to wash the body and prepare it for burial.
This chapel already existed in 1514, and it depicted the episode of Jesus Stripped of his Garments, with the wooden statue of Jesus without his clothing in the center, tied with a rope around his neck and led to Calvary, with Mary and John at his side. On the walls Gaudenzio Ferrari painted a fresco, around 1508, depicting the ascent to Calvary with the soldiers, the two thieves, the three Mary's (Mary Magdalene, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Salome), at the bottom, and on the back wall, the soldiers who gamble for Jesus's clothes.
After 1628, following the will of Bishop Volpi, the statues of Jesus and the villain that leads him to Calvary were brought to the chapel of Jesus heading to the Praetorian Palace (chapel 32), where they are still found today; the other ones were removed and the space was completed by the scene of the Pietà , a group in terracotta by Giovanni d'Enrico made by 1640. The sixteenth-century frescoes by Gaudenzio Ferrari, instead, remained unchanged.