The present paper aims to analyse wax reliefs that reproduce the painted image of the Pietà by Willem Key. The maker of these reliefs (whom we identify with Alessandro Abondio) managed to ingeniously transform the flat painted image into a three-dimensional ‘pageant’ or ‘tableau’, and the techniques and materials he employed have contributed to truly Mannerist masterworks, in which an effect of truth and utmost realism, of ‘unnatural naturalness’, so to speak, was achieved using untypical – ‘artificial’ and ‘artistic’ – means. These means were intended to arouse the strongest possible emotions in the viewer.