The Death of the Virgin
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (1571-1610) · c. 1601-1606
The Virgin Mary lies dead on a plank bed, her body slack, her feet bare and swollen, one arm hanging off the edge. A young woman, usually identified as Mary Magdalene, sits doubled over in grief in the foreground, her face hidden. Behind, the apostles crowd forward, some weeping openly, one pressing a cloth to his eyes. There is no choir of angels, no assumption into heaven, none of the consoling machinery that normally accompanies this subject. Above it all hangs an enormous swag of crimson drapery, the only theatrical element, and it functions less as decoration than as a curtain drawn back on something the viewer was not supposed to see.
Caravaggio works in what is called tenebrism, pushing almost everything into brown darkness and letting a single raking light pick out a forehead, a hand, a shin. The paint is applied directly and quickly, without elaborate underdrawing, and the figures are life size and pressed close to the picture plane so that the Magdalene's back is almost in the room with you. Look at the Virgin's red dress and the untidy way her hair falls; she is presented as an ordinary dead woman, which is precisely what made the picture scandalous. Look also at how few faces you actually see clearly.
Commissioned around 1601 for Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere, Rome, the painting was rejected by the Carmelite clergy, reportedly because the Virgin looked too plainly, unheroically dead, with rumours that Caravaggio had used a drowned prostitute as his model. Rubens then advised the Duke of Mantua to buy it. It passed to Charles I of England, and after his execution was sold and eventually entered the French royal collection under Louis XIV in 1671.
Did You Know? The Carmelite friars who commissioned it refused delivery, but Rubens urged the Duke of Mantua to buy the rejected canvas, and it was put on public view in Rome for a week where crowds of artists queued to see it.
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