The breach of decorum led to a rejection of the painting by the fathers of Santa Maria della Scala and its replacement by a picture by Carlo Saraceni, a close follower of Caravaggio.

[9] Upon the recommendation by Peter Paul Rubens, who praised it as one of Caravaggio's best works, the painting was bought by Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua.

(During one of his frequent brawls in Rome, the mercurial and impulsive Caravaggio had killed a man, Ranuccio Tomassoni, in a sword fight following a tennis game.)

The lolling head, the hanging arm, the swollen, spread feet depict a raw and realistic view of the Virgin's mortal remains.

Caravaggio, master of stark and dark canvases, is not interested in a mannerist exercise that captures a range of emotions.

Suppressing all anecdotal detail, Caravaggio invests this subdued scene with extraordinary monumentality through the sole presence of these figures and the intensity of their emotions.

The theatrical drape of blood-red cloth looms in the upper portion of the canvas; a common motif in deposition painting, here used to heighten the scene's dramatic effect.

[5] This painting was completed at a time when the dogma of the Assumption of Mary was not yet formally enunciated ex cathedra by the pope, but had been gaining ground for some centuries.

However, during a General Audience on 25 June 1997, Pope John Paul II affirmed that Mary did indeed experience natural death prior to her assumption into Heaven.

The figure, like that in nearly all Renaissance and Baroque Assumptions, looks much younger than a woman some 50 or more years old;[d] medieval depictions of the death were often more realistic in this respect.