Madonna of the Rosary
Caravaggio (1571 to 1610) · about 1601
Under a great red curtain the Virgin sits on a raised throne holding the Christ child and gesturing toward Saint Dominic, who stands at the left in his black and white habit, offering rosaries to a crowd of kneeling poor. Their bare, dirty feet fill the bottom of the canvas and their hands stretch upward. On the right Saint Peter Martyr, with the wound in his head from his murder, turns to point at the child, and behind Dominic a man in a black ruff looks straight out at you: the donor who paid for the painting. It is more than three and a half metres tall, the largest Caravaggio in the museum and one of the few altarpieces he made that has survived intact.
Caravaggio worked directly from models, and it shows. The kneeling figures are Roman street people, the soles of their feet caked with grime, and the light that falls on them from the upper left is the raking beam that became his trademark. Look at the column and the curtain, which give the scene a stage, and at the way the Virgin's gesture, Dominic's rosary and the raised hands of the poor form a chain of movement across the picture. The composition is more formal than his other altarpieces, which has led some to think it was designed for a Dominican church in Rome and then rejected.
Whatever its origin, the painting was for sale in Naples by 1607, when the Flemish painter Louis Finson bought it and took it to Antwerp. There a group of artists led by Peter Paul Rubens purchased it in 1620 for the city's Dominican church, where it hung until Emperor Joseph the Second admired it on a visit in 1781 and was given it. It has been in Vienna since 1786. The donor in the ruff has never been identified, but he is the most alert person in the painting, and he has been watching visitors for four hundred years.
Did You Know? Rubens himself helped to raise the money to buy this painting for a church in Antwerp, one master collecting another.
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