Death of the Virgin

The Virgin lies dead, swollen-bellied and barefoot, sprawled like an ordinary corpse, while the apostles break down around her and the Magdalene weeps bent double in a chair; a vast blood-red curtain swags overhead. Caravaggio's brutal naturalism - the rumor ran that he used a drowned woman as his model - so offended the church that commissioned it that the painting was refused. Rubens urged the Duke of Mantua to buy it; today it is in the Louvre. Grand and unsparing, it makes holy death indistinguishable from human death.