Pietà (i.e. piety), the name given to a picture, the subject of which is the dead Christ in the embrace of his sorrowing mother, accompanied by sorrowing women and angels; that sculptured by Michael Angelo, in St. Peter's at Rome, representing the Virgin at the foot of the cross, and the dead Christ in her lap.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Piers Plowman, Vision of * Pietermaritzburg