Morte della Vergine

This is thought to be the last thing Hugo van der Goes ever painted, made in Bruges not long before he died in 1482. His final years were hard. He had entered a monastery near Brussels and suffered a breakdown, a collapse into what his own community described as melancholy, and that strain seems to press right into this picture. The apostles crowd around the Virgin's deathbed, and there is nothing serene about them. Their faces are drawn, staring, undone by grief, each one caught in a different shade of shock. The colour is cold and the space is airless and tight. Above them Christ appears with open arms to receive his mother's soul, but the eyes of the living men stay fixed on the dying woman in the bed.