Death of the Virgin

In the years around 1615, in Rome, Carlo Saraceni had arrived at a way of painting the Virgin's death that people wanted for themselves. This is that composition shrunk to the size of a cabinet picture, painted not on canvas but on a sheet of copper, its surface hard and slightly reflective. The apostles press close around the bed where Mary lies, following the old Byzantine idea of the Dormition, her falling asleep, an image a Venetian like Saraceni had grown up seeing in his city's churches. The invention proved so popular that his workshop repeated it again and again in these reduced formats, and his French pupil Jean Le Clerc cut it into an etching that carried the design out across Europe. It reached the Accademia in 1838 as a gift from the Venetian collector Girolamo Contarini.