Der Tod Mariens

Caravaggio was paid to paint the death of the Virgin Mary for a chapel in Rome, and he gave the Carmelite friars a corpse. The finished picture, done in the mid 1600s, shows Mary laid out with her feet bare and her body swollen, her arm hanging, mourned by ordinary weeping people in a bare red room with no glory and no angels. The friars refused it. A rumour spread that he had used a drowned woman, or a prostitute he knew, as his model for the mother of Christ, and that was too much for the church that commissioned it. The painting was pulled down. Then Rubens, who was in Italy at the time, saw it and called it one of Caravaggio's finest, and on his advice the Duke of Mantua bought it. It passed through the collection of Charles the First of England before Louis the Fourteenth acquired it, which is how a rejected altarpiece ended up in the Louvre.