Madonna of the Rosary

This is the only altarpiece Caravaggio ever painted that looks like a proper Baroque altarpiece, and it barely made it onto a church wall. Around 1607 the commission seems to have fallen through, and the picture went straight onto the art market. It drifted for years before a group of Antwerp artists and collectors clubbed together to buy it and hand it to their local Dominican church. One of the men in that group was Rubens, who by then was the most famous painter in Flanders and clearly knew what he was looking at. Watch the ragged beggars kneeling in the foreground, their bare feet turned toward you, reaching up for the rosaries. Caravaggio put ordinary poverty right at the front of a sacred scene, which is exactly the thing his patrons kept arguing about. The painting passed to Emperor Joseph II in 1780, which is how it ended up here in Vienna.