The Death of the Virgin
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
She is simply dead. Swollen, bare-footed, laid out in a red dress — no angels, no ascent, nothing but a thread of halo. The Louvre's words: Caravaggio completely abandons the iconography traditionally used to indicate the holiness of the Virgin.
The clergy refused it. Panorama de l'art finds embalming ointment in the copper basin; the Golden Legend's Virgin issues gloriously out of the tomb, needing none.
The three early biographers give three different reasons. Rubens saw it and told the Duke of Mantua to buy it. Roman painters queued for a week to see it before it left the city.
Sources: INV 54, oil on canvas, 3.69 × 2.45 m, c. 1601–1606; commissioned by Laerzio Cherubini for Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere and refused by the clergy of that church · the Louvre's reading: the swollen spread feet, ‘a raw and realistic view of the Virgin's mortal remains’, the abandoned iconography, a halo reduced to a thread, and the replacement by Carlo Saraceni · Giovanni Baglione, Le vite (Rome, 1642), 138; Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura (MS c. 1617–21); Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite (Rome, 1672), 213; and Frances Gage, ‘Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, Giulio Mancini, and the Madonna Blasphemed’, in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions (Routledge, 2017), 83–104 · Rossella Vodret and Giovanna Granata, ‘Not Only Caravaggio’, in Caravaggio's Rome 1600–1630 (Skira, 2012), 64 · Colette Féraudet, 'La Mort de la Vierge', Panorama de l'art (RMN-Grand Palais), 2023. · Jacobus de Voragine, 'Legenda aurea', 'The Assumption of the Glorious Virgin our Lady S. Mary' (Caxton's translation).
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 14,274 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.