Rejection of a Masterpiece: Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio [View all]

[CTyankee]

Death of the Virgin, 1601-03, Louvre, Paris


One of the first things the viewer notes in this large painting is the Virgin’s bare legs and feet, inelegantly jutting out from her simple red dress and a cloak thrown hastily on her. Her bodice has been loosened. There has not been time to fold her hands properly.

It was widely known that the artist’s model for the Virgin was a prostitute...

and perhaps she was just a little too dead...

not only that, her body is beginning to swell.

Needless to say, the angels and cherubs for escorting her body heavenward have not materialized.

No lute, no violin, no angel with a wreath of flowers. The only concession to the holiness of the Virgin is the thin gold circlet of her halo.

The light that rakes from left to right across the scene is not heavenly...you do not see the puffy clouds at the top of this depiction. What you see (look closely) above the blood-red drape is an ordinary -- and dreary -- back wall and ceiling.

What strikes you is the subdued mood that the artist has infused into the scene. This is what the utter grief of those attending a death is like, the artist is telling us. We are all alone in our personal struggle to deal with the sudden final shock of death. Caravaggio’s apostles are mostly all old and balding and stunned. A younger one appears to look for a door. One covers his eyes with his hand. Two in back are open mouthed at this devastating moment. One appears to have just arrived, seeming to ask she’s gone?

The Magdalen is a figure in isolation. She is hunched over, perhaps wiping her eyes on her sleeve, a cloth clutched in her hand to wash the body of the mother of Christ before burial. She appears to be younger than the dead woman who looks full-figured and middle aged. The light illuminates the bare skin of the Magdalen’s neck.

The painting is, as one art historian has put it, “the visual analogue of a muffled sob...”

This painting was commissioned by a Vatican law official for his family chapel in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome. The contract had been for a painting of the “death or transition of the blessed Virgin Mary.” But though she was mortal, Mary was believed to be conceived without sin. Her body could not be subject to decay and so was physically assumed into heaven by Christ. Caravaggio’s painting, however, was without respect to the uniqueness of Mary among ordinary morals as the mother of God. The Blessed Mother could not be pictorialized as “ordinary.” The painting would have to go and a replacement found.

Three of the disciples portrayed here are barefoot themselves, the artist’s reminder to the monks of the humble nature of their work. Ironically, the monks who rejected this work were themselves named the “discalced (meaning “barefoot&quot Carmelites.”

Most artists of that era preferred the theme of the Assumption, not the actual death, of the Virgin Mary. One of the strangest Assumption depictions is a fresco by Correggio (note the Mannerist style here that eschews linear perspective).


dome of the cathedral, Parma, 1530

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This ceiling fresco is a busy vortex of cherubs heads, rock shaped clouds, and the central figure of Christ, looking as if he is rappelling, ropeless, down a funnel to greet his mother, amidst a “frog leg stew,” as it was described by a contemporary observer. The Virgin Mary here is found in the left in the fresco, halfway to the top, somewhat buried in cherubini and flanked by a virile Adam and a sensual Eve.

detail of dome
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Another view, decidedly more radiant and celestial, is the Baroque work of Peter Paul Rubens, who had been an early admirer of Caravaggio and persuaded his own patron to buy Caravaggio’s masterpiece.

Nonetheless, Rubens, being “rubenesque,” saw it this way

Peter Paul Rubens, Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, 1625
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And this is what replaced Caravaggio’s masterpiece and is in that church today (sigh)

Death of the Virgin by Carlo Saraceni, S. Maria della Scala, Rome, 1610
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