The painting's central figure, a moustached, petrified father holding his living son, is lifted almost directly from the ominous father figure in Giorgio de Chirico's The Child's Brain of 1914^[1]. Ernst first encountered de Chirico's work in the Italian journal Valori Plastici in the summer of 1919, during a trip to visit Paul Klee in Munich, and later described the experience as a kind of deja vu, as though he had met something that had always been familiar to him^[3]. He absorbed de Chirico's work less as a stylistic model than as an alternate world he could only explore through his own art, and the hermetic, isolated spatial quality of de Chirico's Metaphysical Interiors reappears directly in this painting's sealed, enigmatic space^[4].

Ernst's title deliberately invokes Michelangelo's Pieta in St Peter's Basilica, but reverses its roles entirely: rather than a living mother grieving over her dead son, this picture shows a dead, or at least stone-like, father holding a living son on his lap^[1]. That inversion was not a passing conceit. No artist before Ernst, according to critic Robert Hughes, had addressed the conflict between generations, the struggle between father and son, quite so directly in paint^[1].

Ernst's father, Philipp Ernst, was an authoritarian, devoutly Catholic teacher at a school for the deaf in the town of Bruhl, who fathered seven children and was, in his spare time, an amateur painter of some local reputation, executing copies of old masters for diocesan churches and convents^[2]. He was a mediocre artist but a strong, dogmatic man, and Ernst's battle with him ran on in the artist's memory long after his father's death, becoming one of the obsessive, recurring themes across Ernst's body of work^[1]. Even as an adult, when Ernst's Dada activities in Cologne drew public scandal, his father wrote to him: I curse you, you have dishonoured us^[3].