This oil on canvas painting is among the largest ever painted by Patrick Hennessy, and done when he was at the height of his success. It is an important example of his work in the style of Queer Surrealism and in the mode of ‘Ironic Religiosity’. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Hennessy engaged directly with Ireland’s Catholic-dominated culture, appropriating its tropes and values while refracting them through Surrealist strategies of distortion and irrational juxtaposition. On the surface such works may appear devout, but their codes articulate a counter-narrative that destabilises the authority of Catholic ideology.

Hennessy’s Pietà overturns one of the most familiar images in Western art. Instead of the Virgin cradling the dead Christ, Christ now holds a miniature Mary. The figures resemble fourteenth-century Gothic sculpture rather than the naturalism of Michelangelo’s Pietà. This choice looks back to a form of religious art that preceded the Renaissance. It recalls a time before sectarian division and the strict enforcement of Catholic orthodoxy that accompanied the Counter-Reformation. The painting therefore imagines an alternative history of Christianity and sets it against the quasi-theocracy of mid-twentieth-century Ireland in which Hennessy worked.

Hennessy places the scene at the base of Croagh Patrick, a site of Christian pilgrimage in Ireland, but also a place of earlier pagan ritual. His alignment of the mountain with the moon points to this older cosmology. The mountain had long been a site of sacrifice and seasonal reckoning. The moon, a symbol of the Goddess, unsettles Catholic devotion to Mary and exposes its link to pre-Christian traditions. Mary herself is reduced in stature. She appears childlike, hands clasped in prayer, fully under Christ’s control. The position of the mother is replaced by that of the son, showing the shift from Goddess worship to patriarchal religion. The diminished Virgin echoes the erosion of women’s rights under Catholic law, a marked contrast to the relative freedoms of pre-Christian Ireland, described by authors such as Mary Condren in The Serpent and the Goddess. Hennessy’s Pietà encodes a critique of Catholic authority and its subordination of women.