In 1601, papal lawyer Laerzio Cherubini commissioned Caravaggio to paint the altar for the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome. The subject was the death of the Virgin Mary. The expectation was the Dormition: Mary in a state of peaceful, mystical sleep before her assumption into heaven, untouched by physical decay and attended by a choir of angels.
Caravaggio delivered the canvas in 1606. The Carmelite friars took one look at it and rejected it outright.
What Caravaggio gave them was a corpse. The Mother of God is lying on a rigid wooden plank. She is visibly middle-aged. Her hair is unkempt, her bare feet are swollen, and her belly is bloated. There are no ascending angels, only a dark, grimy room filled with the physical grief of the apostles weeping over a dead woman.
The rejection was immediate, and the scandal spread quickly across Rome. Giulio Mancini, a contemporary physician and biographer, recorded the outrage. He noted the painting's complete lack of decorum and documented the rumor driving the scandal: Caravaggio had used a well-known Roman prostitute as the model for the Virgin.
The rumor mutated rapidly. Because of the bloated belly and the pallid, heavy realism of the flesh, whispers circulated that Caravaggio had not just used a living courtesan, but the actual waterlogged corpse of a prostitute recently fished out of the Tiber River.
Mancini was offended that a woman of her profession had been elevated to the holiest figure in the church. The Carmelites hastily commissioned a replacement altarpiece from Venetian Baroque painter Carlo Saraceni, demanding a version with the appropriate reverence and mystical iconography.
But the rejected canvas did not disappear. Peter Paul Rubens, then working in Italy, saw the painting. Recognizing exactly what Caravaggio had accomplished in abandoning the idealized divine for heavy, unrelenting physical reality, a shift that would influence painters from Artemisia Gentileschi to Rembrandt, Rubens wrote to his patron, Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, urging him to buy the rejected altarpiece immediately.
Gonzaga bought it. Before it was shipped out of Rome, the painters' guild organized a public exhibition so artists could see what Caravaggio had done. It later passed into the collection of Charles I of England, then to the French royal collection, and today hangs in the Louvre.
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