The Assumption of Mary according to Caravaggio

Today the Church celebrates the feast of the Assumption into Heaven of Mary. Mary’s death is often described as a ‘going to sleep’. What is the idea behind this?

I have always thought it a little strange that not one of the Caravaggio critics and scholars whom I have read has remarked that Caravaggio must have seen the mega-icon of Lady of Damascus in the Greek Catholic church in Valletta next door to the Grand Master’s Palace where the artist was painting the Grand Master’s portrait.

There seems to me to be at least two quite pointed allusions to the Virgin of Tenderness motif that characterises the Damascene icon as well as the much more famous Vladimirskaya version of it in at least two of the great paintings that Caravaggio painted after his Maltese stay.

On the contrary, many of Caravaggio’s greatest critics had remarked on his obvious love of Byzantine painting and inspiration derived from it, especially his use of the Cavallini mosaic of the Dormition as the model for his own image of today’s feast.

Whether Our Lady died or not is a moot point. Before the Renaissance, her entry into heaven was not represented in art with her body carried vertically upwards by angels. Her Dormition, as the Byzantines called the feast, showed her dying surrounded by the apostles and with Christ carrying her soul, in the shape of a doll-like figure, up to heaven.

The Assumption was only defined as dogmas for the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius XII in 1950. But the feast was established officially in the eastern Empire in the year 600, and in the Roman Church some 50 years later.

The earliest images (in ivory) date back to the 11th century. Later images of Mary over the entrance and in the apse of churches were so placed as to induce the feeling in the faithful of being wholly ensconced within her presence.

The dogma of the Assumption emphasises that Mary was assumed body and soul. What is the reason for that? Maybe I should add that the Coronary Care Unit of Mater Dei is an appropriate place to reflect on this topic where we were constrained last week to record our talk.

Caravaggio is most famous for the sheer violence in some typical paintings, but some others are equally unique by their maternal tenderness, most notably some of the images of the Virgin Mary.

In order to suggest the Assumption, Caravaggio presents a mysterious transfer of energy from within the space enclosed by the red robe in which the body is clothed up to the symbolic red-draped upper sphere which looks like the curtain of a theatre raised and lowered at the beginning and end of a play.

The dynamic movement of the folds of the curtain is the exact opposite of the inertia and immobility of Mary’s body. The large drapery does not hang there as though it were a lighted veil. There is woven into its warp and woof the very power and will to see.

The stuff of the cloth is such as not to reflect the light around but rather to retain it and absorb it into its very texture. The complicated folds illustrate the many twists and turns in most of our life, as opposed to the utter simplicity of the Virgin Mary.

The idea of man of St Thomas Aquinas is that man is, strictly speaking, not a combination of two different things, body and soul. Consequently, Salvation does not consist in saving one’s soul, but rather in saving oneself as a whole, i.e. one’s body animated by a soul.

I take it that the greatest message of the feast of the Assumption is precisely to highlight the dignity of the human body.

Christians do not despise the body like many eastern ascetics but believe it to be destined to eternal glory.

In Malta, since time immemorial, the feast of the Assumption, Santa Marija, has been a focus of the religious life of Catholics, showing some kind of strong belief in both earthly as well as heavenly aspects of human life. How should a Catholic believer live this feast, especially when it is so closely linked to the other feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (as expressed even in the definition of the dogma)?

I have recently been led to stress that even the Pauline vocation of Malta seems to have been conditioned by the enduring links between Malta and the Mother Goddess, the figure whom we have used for the celebration of the fertility of the earth.

From this point of view it was natural to picture Our Lady principally as the mother who provides the background to the Nativity of Christ.

Nevertheless, to the image of the Mother of God, local iconography has propelled into an equally prominent role the image of Our Lady taken up into the heavens, where she does not appear among earth deities, but among the skygods, with the sun and the moon and the planets.

The Virgin Mary is not just the means by which the Incarnation takes place but also the icon of the eschatological appearance of the new heavens and the new earth.

She evokes not only the familiar, almost domestic, poetry of Christmas but also the apocalyptic brilliance and fireworks of the end of the earth. Mary evokes the transcendence of the divine as well as its immanence.

The feast of Santa Marija is celebrated all across both our islands, and yet each locality can be said to have its own distinctiveness and speciality. There are universal traits in Mary that perhaps hardly anyone has brought out more movingly than Caravaggio. But there are others that seem only recognisable by the natives of very particular localities who have cultivated their perspective powers over the centuries in her regard.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.