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The Death of the Virgin was rejected by the church that commissioned it, and the reason is visible in every square centimetre of the canvas. Caravaggio was asked to paint an altarpiece for the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome, and he delivered a scene of the Virgin’s death in which Mary is a barefoot woman with a swollen body, laid out on a mattress in a dark room, surrounded by apostles who look like labourers.
The light comes from a single source above and to the left, falling on the Virgin’s pale body and on the heads of the mourners, while the rest of the room disappears into blackness. A heavy red curtain hangs above the scene, and a copper basin glints in the foreground. There is no heaven, no angels and no assumption - only grief in a poor room. The Carmelites refused the painting, and it was bought instead by the Duke of Mantua, then passed to Charles I of England and later to Louis XIV.
Caravaggio’s realism was read at the time as irreverence, and the painting’s rejection is one of the most famous episodes in the history of the Baroque. It entered the Louvre in 1671 and remains the museum’s most important work by the artist.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was born near Milan and arrived in Rome in the 1590s with nothing. He became the most famous and most dangerous painter in the city, killing a man in a brawl in 1606 and spending his last four years as a fugitive, dying of fever on a beach at Porto Ercole at thirty-eight. His use of tenebrism - extreme darkness pierced by a single light - changed European painting permanently.
The Death of the Virgin was painted in 1605-1606, at the height of Caravaggio’s Roman career and just before the murder that ended it. Its rejection by the Carmelites was a scandal, and its subsequent purchase by the Duke of Mantua turned it into a trophy. Its arrival in the French royal collection in the seventeenth century made it one of the earliest Caravaggios in France, where it influenced Georges de La Tour and the Le Nain brothers.
Denon Wing · Level 1 · Italian Paintings, 17th Century
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
Other pieces from the same artist, period or type of object.
