Смерть Марии Магдалины Караваджо: История и Революция в Искусстве

Painting by Caravaggio

Death of the Virgin (1606) is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio depicting the death of the Virgin Mary. It is part of the permanent collection of the Musée du Louvre, in Paris.

When he painted The Death of the Virgin (c. 1601–06), Caravaggio had been working in Rome for fifteen years. The depiction of the Death of the Virgin caused a contemporary stir, and was rejected as unfit by the parish. Giulio Mancini thought Caravaggio modelled a prostitute, possibly his mistress, as the Virgin. and Gian Pietro Bellori attributed the rejection to the appearance of the Virgin. The breach of decorum led to a rejection of the painting by the fathers of Santa Maria della Scala and its replacement by a picture by Carlo Saraceni, a close follower of Caravaggio. Upon the recommendation by Peter Paul Rubens, who praised it as one of Caravaggio's best works, the painting was bought by Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. Giovanni Magni, the duke's ambassador, briefly exhibited the painting in his house on the Via del Corso, between 1 and 7 April 1607. Copying was absolutely forbidden. The duke's collection was sold to Charles I of England in 1627. After his execution the English Commonwealth put his collection up for sale in 1649, and the painting was bought by Everhard Jabach, who in 1671 sold it to Louis XIV for the French Royal Collection, which after the French Revolution became the property of the state. Today it hangs in the Louvre. Prior to leaving Rome, it was shown at the Academy of Painters for under two weeks. However, Caravaggio had fled Rome by then, never to publicly return. (During one of his frequent brawls in Rome, the mercurial and impulsive Caravaggio had killed a man, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a sword fight following a tennis game.)

The painting recalls Caravaggio's Entombment in the Vatican in scope, sobriety, and the photographic naturalism. The figures are nearly life sized. Mary lies reclined, clad in a simple red dress. The lolling head, the hanging arm, the swollen, spread feet depict a raw and realistic view of the Virgin's mortal remains. Caravaggio completely abandons the iconography traditionally used to indicate the holiness of the Virgin. In this cast off body, nothing of the respectful representation found in devotional paintings remains. Caravaggio's painting is the last major Catholic work of art in which Mary is clearly dead. Caravaggio does not depict an assumption but her death. The figure, like that in nearly all Renaissance and Baroque Assumptions, looks much younger than a woman some 50 or more years old; medieval depictions of the death were often more realistic in this respect.

This painting illustrates the iconographic and formal revolution that Caravaggio instigated in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Distancing himself from the precious, affected mannerist vogue, the artist inaugurated a frank, robust, energetic style. He took on the task of translating people's reality and emotions without worrying about the conventions of representations of the sacred. His impact on the evolution of pictorial conceptions in the 17th century was considerable.