The Assumption of the Virgin (Italian: L'Assunzione della Vergine) by Annibale Carracci is the altarpiece of the famous Cerasi Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome.

Both painters were important in the development of Baroque art but the contrast is striking: Carracci's Virgin glows with even light and radiates harmony, while the paintings of Caravaggio are dramatically lit and foreshortened.

The chapel in the left transept of the basilica was built by Monsignor Tiberio Cerasi, Consistorial Advocate and Treasurer-General to Pope Clement VIII.

He purchased a chapel on the same spot from the Augustinian friars on 8 July 1600 and commissioned Carlo Maderno to rebuild the small edifice in Baroque style.

Probably due to his increased workload in the palace, the three ceiling frescos in the chapel were executed by his assistant, Innocenzo Tacconi following Carracci's design.

The rather crowded composition is organized around a triad of figures: the Virgin rising from the empty tomb (surrounded by a retinue of angels) and the two apostles gazing upwards in awe.

"The stiffened forms and crowded composition [...] have been interpreted as a conscious shift to a 'hyper-idealized' manner that rejects the warmth and painterly qualities of his Bolognese period for a style indebted to ancient sculpture and to Raphael.

The dynamism, the emotional charge and the integration of the painting into real space are strongly innovative elements which make the panel unequaled among the contemporary altarpieces produced in Rome.

[11] The Assumption of the Virgin by Titian was another great Renaissance painting that may have influenced Carracci while working on the same subject, especially regarding the heads of some of the apostles in deep shadow and in profil perdu.

It seems probable that each artist "subtly altered his style of painting as a result of this direct confrontation with the other", and "Annibale's monumental saints, whose hands and feet seem to pierce the picture plane" may have influenced Caravaggio.