An Obituary for All: Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin

MADELINE JUNE HENSON 91, passed away peacefully January 5, 2008. She was born June 6, 1916 and resided in Hemet since 1994. Madeline is survived by a daughter, Patsy Friend, of Hemet, 2 Granddaughters, Michelle Haubrick of Corona, and Leeanne Adams of Hemet, 3 Great Grandsons, 1 great granddaughter, and 2 great great granddaughters.

-Riverside Press-Enterprise, January 9, 2008

 The notice of Madeline Henson’s passing in the Press-Enterprise is only one of the many thousands of obituaries which must have been printed in newspapers all over the world on January 9th. We learn nothing remarkable about Mrs. Henson save that she lived ninety-one years in which she bore a daughter and was blessed with two generations of grandchildren. As to her doubtless adventures, loves, heartbreaks, failures and triumphs, we have no knowledge.

Unlike the gallons on ink spilled over the passings of the famous, Mrs. Henson’s death, like those of the millions of us who are born, toil and die in relative anonymity, if we are officially mourned at all, was apportioned the minimum amount.

Which is why Caravaggio’s painting, The Death of the Virgin, was considered so scandalous in the early 1600’s and is so important to us now.

The painter’s name was Michelangelo Merisi. He was born in Milan in 1571, but because his family moved to the village of Caravaggio to escape the plague when he was young, he became known to the world as Caravaggio. As Lady Caroline Lamb famously said of Lord Byron, he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” A man of violent temper, Caravaggio once killed a man in an argument and was himself probably the target of attempts on his life. His work was no less volcanic, combining highly detailed realism with a dramatic, theatrical intensity. It was considered revolutionary in his time and it still has the capacity to shake us.

The Death of the Virgin was commissioned in 1601 by a wealthy patron for his private chapel in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala. The Carmelites promptly rejected it. A close look might tell us why.

The large vertical surface of the painting can be neatly divided in two. In the top half, a cloud-like drapery of cloth, the color of blood, hangs like shroud ready to drop. A blinding shaft of light illuminates the bottom half where the Virgin Mary lies dead. She wears a plain red dress, a color coding of the time symbolizing flesh and human vulnerability. The head lolls to the side, the powerless hand dangles, and the feet protrude from over the bed’s edge. Unlike in the depiction of the event by Titian before, there is no assumption into Heaven on a cloud, surrounded by choirs of angels here. Caravaggio’s Mary is as dead as any mortal ever was. Her sacred status is signified only by a thin slice of halo. The aging apostles clustered around the body are washed in shadow, their grieving faces hidden by hands. The woman in the foreground is probably Mary Magdalene in a familiar pose.

There is little suggestion of sacredness in this painting or of the celebrity of the event. This alone could have caused the Carmelites to reject it. What might have sent them over the edge was the rumor that the model for the Blessed Virgin was a Roman prostitute who had committed suicide by drowning herself in the Tiber River.

Whether or not the rumor was true, I like to think that Caravaggio wasn’t engaged in anything as juvenile as flipping off the Church. I think his purpose was deeper and more humane than that. After all, Mary remains the most popular figure in the communion of Catholic saints. In Mexico, images of her are much more numerous than those of her Son. She’s mom. Growing up Catholic, Mary was the one I always turned to if I needed something or I’d screwed up. Because of this, the death of Caravaggio’s Mary is a sacred event not because of her exalted status, but because she is a human woman. Even if that woman is a prostitute and a suicide.

When my own mother died, there were no angels in attendance that I saw, and she deserved them as much as anyone ever did. I think that Caravaggio’s Mary, in her death, became all mothers, all women and, by extension, all of us. I think Caravaggio is saying that there is no death within the wide boneyard of planet Earth that is not sacred. Not my mother’s. Not Madeline Henson’s.