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Death of the Virgin

Artist: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610)
Date: 1601–1606
Dimensions: 369 x 245 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

Death of the Virgin shows the apostles and Mary Magdalene mourning over the body of the Virgin Mary, who lies on a simple bier in a bare room. It was commissioned for a church in Rome but rejected by the friars, who found it shocking.

A closer look

Caravaggio removed every sign of glory: there are no angels, no heavenly light, only a great red curtain hanging above. The Virgin's body is that of an ordinary dead woman, her feet bare and swollen, her arm hanging limply. The apostles, grieving old men with bowed heads, crowd around in shadow, and the Magdalene weeps on a chair in the foreground with her face in her hands. Contemporaries claimed the model was a drowned woman from the Tiber, which scandalised the clergy but made the scene deeply human.

History of the painting

After the Duke of Mantua’s collection was sold to Charles I of England in the 1620s, the painting hung in the English royal collection. When Charles was executed in 1649 his pictures were sold off; this one was bought by the banker and collector Everhard Jabach, who in 1671 sold it, together with much of his collection, to Louis XIV. It has belonged to the French crown and then the Louvre ever since.

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