8. The Death of the Virgin
The Death of the Virgin is the last of Caravaggio’s great altarpieces, finished c.1605-06. It was commissioned by the Carmelite Friars for their church at Santa Maria della Scala in Rome. The painting depicts of the death of the Virgin Mary, and once again Caravaggio takes a unique approach to his subject. Customarily, the event would be depicted with a choir of angels looking on, to give some sense of the divinity of the event. However, Caravaggio opts instead for stark realism. Besides the thin, shaded halo over Mary’s head, there is nothing to indicate what is being depicted.
The drab, contemporary setting, led the art historian Roberto Longhi to call it ‘a death in a night refuge’. However, there is nothing profane in Caravaggio’s depiction. Instead, the understated setting gives the picture an almost overwhelming sense of pathos lacking in other depictions. Instead of depicting theatrical levels of grief, Caravaggio has his mourners react in a realistic manner to the death of an individual. The central, balding mourner even shields his face, giving an overall emotional rawness to proceedings. The realism is assisted, too, by the sheer scale of the painting, which makes the figures near life-sized.
Tenebrism is, again, central to the painting’s impact. Where most of the mourners are cloaked in shadow, Mary is illuminated by a stark, dazzling light. Along with the compactness of the scene, this serves to draw the beholder’s eye towards Mary, the subject of the picture itself. Although there is none of the devotional iconography of other depictions of Mary’s death, Caravaggio makes the event one of human tragedy, and as a devotional object in itself it is wildly successful. Nonetheless, the Carmelite patrons rejected it, either because of Caravaggio’s growing notoriety… or because a famous prostitute posed for Mary.