Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin, 1605-06

Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin, 1605-06, Oil on canvas, 12 feet, 10 inches x 8 feet (369 x 245 cm) (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Painted for the altar of a family chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Scala del
Trastevere, Rome.

Speakers: Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker

http://www.smarthistory.org/caravaggios-death-of-the-virgin.html

We are in the Louvre and we are looking at

Caravaggio's painting "The Death of the Virgin"

from 1605-1606, and this is a very large painting .

And it is quite dark.

Caravaggio is known for painting in the dark manner

but this is an especially dark painting and it actually might need to be cleaned.

Maybe, we see that dark tenebrous background

and the figure is very, very close to us

but we don't see anything that we might expect to see

in a painting of "The Virgin Mary's Death".

Normally we may expect to see her being sent to heaven

or angels receiving her in heaven and typicall of Caravaggio

is created a spiritual scene but totally down-to-earth

and use a very everyday language depicted.

The Virgin Mary herself looks like she could be a contemporary Roman.

She doesn't look particularly spiritual

aside from the faint halo

which we can barely make out around her head.

Her hair is undone, the front of her dress is coming up,

her feet are bare which was really indecent.

The priest of her times said that she looked like

Caravaggio had modeled her on a prostitute that had been dragged down from the river.

Hardly inappropriate model for the Virgin Mary.

In fact the Monks had rejected the painting because of that rumour.

So the painting is down-to-earth

and it is in a sense the Catholic's story brought

into our world in a most direct way,

and when you look at the scale of the painting

and the way that this young woman is mourning in the foreground,

bends down, she seems to virtually be in our space.

We can reach over to that copper basin that is just at her feet

and seems to be just at ours as well.

I think Caravaggio really intentionally

left the space open for us

in the circle of mourners who surround her.

If you look at them they are obviously the apostles.

But Caravaggio has let the light fallen

perhaps in the most unflattering aspects of their features

and the way that I think is typical of Caravaggio

and his interest in the everyday and the common and the lowly

But it is not to say that he is not a master of the composition.

If you look on that wonderful swash of red cloth above,

the way it frames beautifully and elegantly the scene,

but it also creates a kind of arcing curve that is repeated in those bold heads

which actually also sort of reverse and lead us down to the Virgin Mary.

Her body lies across a diagonal or mind that they were no longer in the Renaissance.

We are looking at the more activated composition that is very much typical of the baroque.

Her arm creates a different kind of diagonal as it moves towards us

and it has this incredible broken wrist

which then leads us down to the woman below her.

I think it is almost as if Caravaggio is suggesting

that we should be like this young woman before us

bend over in sorrow for the death of the Virgin.

I was noticing the hands, the hands of the apostle in gold

that hand blesses for sure. It's wonderful isn't it?

The figure below him has got head in his hands.

The figure next to the man in gold is weeping, is rubbing his eyes

The other figure next to him with his head up in his hands

and then down to the Virgin Mary

whose arm is for sure hand hang down but the other hand,

the right hand looks as if it was sort of flocked down on her chest.

If you sit we can really sense that this is indeed a dead body.

There is no sense of spiritual rebirth or salvation.

We almost feel rigour setting in here.

Look at the way that her right hand, the ring finger

is tucked under the middle finger in a kind of

passive way that no living person would allow to happen.

It is that Caravaggio was completetly rejecting

the elegance of the high Renaissance

to intentionally give us something difficult and almost ugly.

It's something that is off our world,

this embrace of the spiritual through our world.