I am not sure about you, but I cannot imagine the amount of talent packed into a 24 year old Michelangelo when he carved a single block of marble into the breathtaking statue that is “Madonna della Pietà” now housed in the Vatican, Rome.

I know when we visited on holiday in the mid 2010’s I stood transfixed, finding it unbelievable that it was the work of human hands. Few bits of stone are so alive, none convey so viscerally the crushing grief of a mother cradling her murdered son. Many controversaries surrounded the artwork when it was created – the Church wanted to know why the Mother looked younger than the son, many thought the pose too confronting. It is impossible to view the work and not be moved. Pictures do not seem to do it justice.

I stumbled across some re-drawn fold schemes of a very old box pleating model by Neal Elias – designed back in 1979, this proto-box pleating model is a representation of 2 human figures, one cradling the other – he named it “Michelangelo’s Pieta”:

Determined to source the original diagrams, I learned that they were published in a long since unavailable publication “Origami Without Borders QQM4” and later released in a massive collected work anthology called “The Origami World of Neal Elias
by Dave Venables and Marc Cooman” – an astonishing collection of over 1000 designs by Elias and his contemporaries in the 60’s and 70’s, the birth of modern origami. I am determined to acquire a copy if I can.

The premise of the model is simple: on a single duo sheet of paper, use one side to form Mary, the other to fold Jesus, and articulate the two figures so one can lounge on the other. In today’s terms this is challenging but entirely designable via stick figure analysis and use of one of many BP design tools (like Oriedita or BoxPleat Studio). Back in the 1970’s this was completely revolutionary – verging on witchcraft.

I chose plain Kraft paper initially to fold the model – I needed to get my head into the morphology first, as is so often the case, so folded a maquette just to see where folds are and what paper is left where. The “Elias Base” is familiar to me, having folded his Knight in Armor and Skiier, but the widget that lets you join the two figures is ingenious, and the surrounding paper then covers the join up to form Mary’s dress – genius really.

Once I had a working maquette, I then folded another and turned to identifying shaping options. For this, I cut the 2 figures apart and took my time exploring shaping options for each figure separately without the crowding of the other. When I was happy with the effects I was going for I then folded the final duo paper version, deciding to have Jesus white and Mary natural Kraft. Shaping the whole model was fiddly because everything is so close quarters, but in the end I was happy with the individual details and set about composing the final combined pose.

I will admit to a few strategic glue spots, just to hold the structure together, but most of what you see is as I folded it, dry shaped. Kraft paper is amazingly expressive when I can get my hands to cooperate.

In the end, I am very satisfied with the model, and my version of it.