Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [179]
The Death of the Virgin is the most bleakly mundane of Caravaggio’s sacred dramas, the deathbed scene of a poor and ordinary woman. It drew another of Longhi’s pithy metaphors: ‘a scene from a night refuge’, he called it. The Virgin’s dwelling is certainly poor and humble, with its rough plastered wall and simple ceiling of coffered wood. Her feet, bare like those of the apostles, poke out straight and stiff from the folds of her dress. There is perhaps a hint that rigor mortis has begun to set in. The copper basin on the floor of the room adds a final note of pathos. The body of the Virgin, too, is an empty vessel, and there is little hint of transcendence.
There is a stratagem behind the painting’s apparent mood of hopeless bereavement: it invites the viewer into the darkness and doubt of death. It even dares to suggest – the deepest fear of all, in an age of faith – that perhaps this meagre life is all that there is. But peer into the gloom and all is not as it seems. Just as he had done in The Supper at Emmaus, with its mystical shadowplay, Caravaggio weaves a sense of the miraculous into hard and ordinary reality. The signs of salvation have to be looked for, even if at first sight they appear to be lacking. The Virgin’s face is much younger than those of the apostles, which indicates that she has been spared by God the ravages of age. The thinnest of haloes, shining in the dark air, encircles her head. Above her a great swag of drapery hangs from the ceiling of the room. Literally, it is the canopy of the Virgin’s bed, but spiritually it is a sign from above. Its colour relates to her body, while its form tells the story of her soul. It is being drawn upwards, whirled to heaven by unseen energies.
The church of Santa Maria della Scala, for which the painting was intended, belonged to the order of the so-called Discalced Carmelites, the shoeless Carmelites. This may have encouraged Caravaggio to believe that his uncompromisingly severe depiction of the Virgin and apostles as shoeless paupers might find favour there. But he was once again disappointed. No sooner was his painting delivered than he learned that it too had been rejected.
Giulio Mancini watched the whole situation unfold and even took the trouble to talk to the Fathers of the Carmelite order about why they had rejected the picture. In his biography of Caravaggio, he baldly states that ‘the fathers of that church had it removed because Caravaggio portrayed a courtesan as the Virgin.’ Had they simply got wind of the fact that the painter had modelled his Madonna on a prostitute, and found it scandalous? Caravaggio would certainly not have publicized his method, since the practice had been explicitly condemned in Cardinal Paleotti’s Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images.114 Maybe one of the Carmelite fathers simply recognized the girl in the painting as a local streetwalker, or perhaps one of the painter’s enemies helpfully pointed it out to them. She is not Lena, who had modelled for The Madonna of Loreto and The Madonna of the Palafrenieri. Mancini seems to have known her identity, although he does not give her a name. In marginal notes to the manuscript of his life of Caravaggio, he elaborates tantalizingly on the bare bones of the story: ‘the fathers rejected it because he had painted, in the person of the Madonna, the portrait of a courtesan whom he loved – and had done so very exactly, without religious devotion.’115 It is impossible to establish the true nature of Caravaggio’s relationship with the girl – lover, pimp or simply employer.
But the model’s identity cannot