BETH HARRIS: We're
in the Louvre, and we're looking at
Caravaggio's painting "The Death of the
Virgin," from 1605, 1606. This is a very large painting. STEVEN ZUCKER: And
it's quite dark. Caravaggio is known for
painting in the dark manner, but this is an
especially dark painting. And it actually might
need to be cleaned. BETH HARRIS: Maybe. We see that dark, tenebroso
background and the figures very, very close to us,
but we don't see anything that we might expect to see in
a painting of the Virgin Mary's death. Normally we might expect to see
her being assumed into heaven or angels receiving
her in heaven. And typical of Caravaggio,
he's created a spiritual scene but brought it
totally down to earth and used a very everyday
language to depict it. STEVEN ZUCKER: The
Virgin Mary herself looks like she could be
a contemporary Roman. BETH HARRIS: She doesn't look
particularly spiritual, aside from the faint halo
which we can barely make out around her head. Her hair is undone. Her front of her
dress is coming open. Her feet are bare. Which was really indecent. The priests at the time said
she looked like Caravaggio had modeled her on a prostitute
who'd been dragged out of the river, hardly
an appropriate model for the Virgin Mary. STEVEN ZUCKER: In
fact, the monks, they rejected the painting
because of that rumor. So the painting
is down to earth. It is, in a sense,
the Catholic stories brought into our world
in the most direct way. And if you look at the
scale of the painting and the way in which
that young woman who's mourning in the
foreground bends down, she seems to virtually
be in our space. We could reach over to
that copper basin that is just at her feet and seems
to be just at ours as well. BETH HARRIS: I think Caravaggio
has really intentionally left a space open for us in
the circle of mourners who surround her. If you look at them, they're
obviously the apostles. But Caravaggio has let the
light fall on perhaps the most unflattering aspects of
their features in a way that I think is very
typical of Caravaggio and his interest in the
everyday and the common and then the lowly. STEVEN ZUCKER: But
that's not to say that he's not a
master of composition. If you look at that
wonderful swash of red cloth above, the way that it frames
beautifully and elegantly the scene, but it also creates
a kind of arc and curve that is repeated in those
bald heads, which actually also sort of reverse and lead
us down to the Virgin Mary. Her body lays across
at a diagonal, a reminder that we're no
longer in the Renaissance, but we're looking at a
more activated composition that is very much
typical of the Baroque. Her arm creates a
different kind of diagonal as it moves towards us. And you have that
incredible broken wrist that then leads us down
to the woman below her. I think it's almost as if
Caravaggio is suggesting that we should be like
this young woman before us, bent over in sorrow for
the death of the Virgin. BETH HARRIS: I was
noticing the hands, the hands of the
apostle in gold, that hand that's foreshortened-- STEVEN ZUCKER: Oh, it's
wonderful, isn't it? BETH HARRIS: --the
figure below him who's got his head in his hands,
the figure next to the man in gold who's weeping,
who's rubbing his eyes, the other figure next to
him who props his head up with his hand, and then
down to the Virgin Mary, whose arm is foreshortened
and her hand hangs down. But the other hand,
her right hand, looks as though it was sort
of flopped down on her chest. And as you said,
we can really sense that this is indeed a dead body. There's no sense of spiritual
rebirth or salvation. We almost feel rigor
mortis setting here. STEVEN ZUCKER: Well, look at
the way that her right hand, the ring finger is tucked
under the middle finger in a kind of haphazard
way that no living person would allow to happen. BETH HARRIS: It's as though
Caravaggio is completely rejecting the elegance
of the High Renaissance to intentionally give us
something difficult and almost ugly. STEVEN ZUCKER:
And something that is of our world, this
embrace of the spiritual through our world.