It is said that Michael Angelo overheard certain Lombards ascribe the Pieta to their own sculptor, Cristoforo Solari, called "Il Gobbo." He therefore carved his name upon the belt of the Madonna's robe.

He never signed any other work.

Nothing closes the great period of the fifteenth century so fitly as the Pieta of Michael Angelo, prophesying at the same time the power of the art of the sixteenth..