Carlo Saraceni

Around 1601 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint the death of the Virgin for a church in Rome, Santa Maria della Scala. The Carmelite friars there rejected it, unsettled by a Madonna who looked simply, humanly dead. The painting they turned down now hangs in the Louvre, and the job of replacing it fell to a Venetian in his late twenties, Carlo Saraceni.

Saraceni had absorbed Caravaggio's world of deep shadow and ordinary faces, enough that he is counted among the first of the Caravaggisti, the painters who followed that new naturalism. His own first version was refused too, for the same reason, so he painted a second with angels gathering to carry the Virgin up to heaven, and that one stayed on the wall. Earlier he had learned a gentler manner from Adam Elsheimer, a German painter in Rome who set tiny figures in dense, glowing landscapes.

Near the end of his short life Saraceni went home to Venice, where he died in 1620, still in his early forties.