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If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, consider becoming a member today. Already a member? Sign in here. Completed around and now at the Louvre, the oil-on-canvas painting transubstantiates Lena into a red-tunicked Virgin Mary, sprawled in a cruciform position atop a gathering of sheets and pillows while an assemblage of apostles mourns around her. The face of the Madonna β of Lena β is unmistakably of the deceased, for regardless of the peacefulness in her closed eyes and expressionless mouth, her brunette hair splayed out behind her, the purplish body and slack expression convey that this is obviously not a person asleep.
Even more scandalously at that time , Caravaggio presents this Mary as bare-footed, her soles smudged with dirt.
Upon viewing the painting, however, he rejected it. The model, perhaps, as she was known to solicit outside of the very church in which her visage hung.
Cherubini knew that; everyone in Rome knew that. But he was a painter of startling originality and brilliance as well, who could coax light from darkness in such contrast that it was as if the God of Genesis dividing the day from the night.
