On the morning of 21 May 1972 (Pentecost Sunday, at roughly 11:30 a.m.) a thirty-three-year-old Hungarian-born geologist named László Tóth vaulted the marble balustrade in the first chapel on the right of St Peter’s Basilica and struck Michelangelo’s Pietà fifteen times with a geologist’s hammer. His shouted phrase, recorded by bystanders and reported the same day, was: “I am Jesus Christ — risen from the dead.” Damage, in Wikipedia’s summary of the contemporary reporting: he “removed Mary’s arm at the elbow, knocked off a chunk of her nose, and chipped one of her eyelids.” By the time he was dragged off, he had done more physical harm to a Michelangelo in ninety seconds than time had done in four hundred and seventy-three years.
Everything you see when you look at the Pietà today — the pale patched line across her nose, the seam under her eyelid, the way she sits behind a wall of glass — traces back to that Sunday.
How the attack went
Tóth had moved to Rome from Australia in June 1971, apparently obsessed with the Pietà. Contemporary accounts describe him climbing the balustrade so quickly no one intercepted him. Before the attack, the sculpture was displayed with only a low railing, and a visitor within arm’s reach could touch the marble. Fifteen blows landed before staff and other visitors pulled him off. Bystanders picked up dozens of chipped marble fragments from the chapel floor; some kept them as unwitting souvenirs, and the Vatican later issued a public appeal for their return, which recovered a startling amount of the debris.
Tóth was arrested, judged insane, and confined to a Roman psychiatric hospital by an order dated 28 January 1973. He was released roughly two years later and deported to Australia on 29 January 1975. He never returned to Italy. He died, in Australia, in 2012.
Restoration
Deoclecio Redig de Campos, then director of the Vatican Museums’ restoration lab, led the reconstruction. Roughly a hundred marble fragments were reassembled: some recovered from bystanders in the days after, some found later in the chapel, some in a bag that had gone home with a tourist and was returned weeks later after the Vatican’s appeal. Reattached pieces were joined with adhesive and finished with Carrara marble powder mixed as filler paste; where a specific piece was lost, the missing volume was rebuilt from the sculpture’s own material. Mary’s nose, most famously, was reconstructed from a block cut from the marble at her back.
Active restoration took about five months of workshop time. It was returned to public display in the Basilica in the spring of 1973, roughly ten months after the attack. It came back behind a curved bulletproof acrylic screen: the first time the Pietà had ever been physically separated from viewers by a barrier.
Jubilee glass, installed November 2024
That acrylic screen guarded the Pietà until November 2024, when it was fully replaced ahead of the 2025 Jubilee. A Fabbrica di San Pietro press release from 29 November 2024 describes the new protection with useful specificity: “The new protection is formed by 9 bullet-proof and anti-shatter glass panes of the highest quality for greater transparency.” The same release states the panes’ impact resistance, rated for “26 hammer/axe blows”, comfortably above what a determined attacker could deliver in the seconds it takes staff to intervene, and bullet resistance that “exceeds BR2/S level.”
Practical effect for a visitor: glass is measurably clearer than the fifty-year-old acrylic it replaced, so the sculpture is visible in more detail than it has been since before the attack. Reflections are managed by a low-glare coating. Chapel lighting was upgraded at the same time. Those two Jubilee-year upgrades together are the reason a visit in 2026 gives you a cleaner look at the Pietà than a visit in 2020 did.
Where to find it in the Basilica
First chapel on the right as you enter the Basilica through the main portico, formally the Cappella della Pietà (also historically the Chapel of the Crucifix). It has stood there since 1749, during the pontificate of Benedict XIV, when it was moved from an earlier location; it did not move during the 2025 Jubilee works, and only the glass and lighting were upgraded.
Viewing is from behind a low marble balustrade at some distance, through the nine-panel glass. Photography without flash is permitted throughout the Basilica, including at the Pietà, unlike the Sistine Chapel where any photography is forbidden. Flash, tripods, selfie sticks, and drones are not allowed. One strict no-photo zone inside the Basilica is the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, which is reserved for prayer and closed to non-praying visitors.
What to look at through the glass
Four things reward a slow look, and none of them are the ones a phone-snap tourist stops to see.
Signature. Michelangelo carved his name on the sash that crosses Mary’s chest, in Latin: MICHÆLANGELVS BONAROTVS FLORENTINVS FACIEBAT, “Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Florentine, was making [this].” It is the only work he ever signed. Vasari tells the story in his Lives: Michelangelo, then twenty-four and unknown outside Florence, overheard visitors attributing the Pietà to a rival sculptor, Cristoforo Solari of Milan (nicknamed “Il Gobbo,” the hunchback). He returned to the Basilica at night with a chisel and carved the inscription. He is reported to have regretted the vanity of the act and vowed never to sign another work, a vow he kept.
Mary’s youthful face. Mary appears younger than the adult Christ she holds, implausibly so if you count years. Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo’s own biographer, records his explanation directly. It was a theological argument rather than a technical one: “Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?” Whether or not one is persuaded by the theology, the sculptural point stands: a wearied, aged Mary would have unbalanced the composition.
Scale disparity. Christ is noticeably smaller in scale than his mother. If Mary were to stand up, she would be well over two metres tall; if Christ were sized proportionately to a life-sized standing Mary, he would not fit across her lap. Michelangelo’s compositional pyramid (mother’s head at the apex, drapery cascading over knees at the base) required this deliberate distortion. It is the kind of decision that no photograph reproduces well; you notice it only in person, and only if you know to look.
Drapery. Mary’s cloak falls in dense folds across her thighs and pools around Christ’s body, and every fold does two things at once: it moves your eye toward the composition’s centre, and it fills what would otherwise be an unmanageable amount of empty space between two figures. Its handling — polished translucent skin against matt textured cloth — is the reason critics from Vasari onwards have described the Pietà as Michelangelo’s technical breakthrough. Nobody had made marble drapery look like fabric in quite this way before.
A material question
It has always been described as Carrara marble. Post-restoration scholarship has raised the possibility that Michelangelo used a block from Seravezza, in the same Apuan Alps but a different quarry system, and disliked its unpredictable veining enough to leave no purchase record. No definitive answer exists. If a guide says Carrara they are on standard-reference ground; if they say Seravezza they are on modern-scholarship ground; if they say “white marble from the Apuan Alps” they are on genuinely safe ground.
It measures 174 centimetres tall by 195 wide. Its base is a low plinth that visually reads as the tomb slab Christ has just been lifted from.
Getting in for a close look
Basilica entry is free of charge. Security screening on the south hemicycle of Piazza San Pietro is the only real gatekeeper: 15 to 30 minutes at 07:15, an hour to ninety minutes at midday in peak season, then dropping again after 16:30. Pietà is one of the first things you reach after entering: the chapel is immediately to your right as you cross the threshold, which means a rushed visitor can see it without walking more than fifty metres into the Basilica.
If you want to combine the visit with a guided walk through the Basilica interior (dome climb, apse, tomb of St Peter under the confessio), our St Peter’s Basilica tickets and tours page shows the guided formats available for 2026. A guide will not get you closer to the Pietà than a solo visitor (the glass is the same distance either way), but a guide will point out the signature, the scale trick, and the drapery details that ninety per cent of self-guided visitors walk past in under a minute.
Pietà is thirty seconds of any Basilica visit and worth ten minutes of most of them. Nine-panel glass installed in 2024 is what makes the ten minutes actually pay off, because the sculpture is finally clear again through the barrier that has protected it for half a century.