Caravaggio

Echoin' down from God's distant shore
I can hear 'em callin' for my soul…
Roger McGuinn

I can hear the brush
Whispering to the canvas:
This is life as it is lived.
The waves of colour form
As a whore lies drowned;
It’s Mary that he’s made, arms askew,
Out of that wench’s ragged, shapely bones.
It’s happenstance and misguided rule
Driven headfirst to this demise.
Why not crown her in heaven?
You have the tools
To build out of deprivation
The glory of the soul.
Your haunted eyes are cast aside,
The canvas comes gradually into view:
Everything restored, as if new.

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Caravaggio's painting, Death of the Virgin, commissioned in 1601 for a private chapel in the new Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala, was rejected by the Carmelites in 1606. Caravaggio's contemporary, Giulio Mancini, records that it was rejected because it became known that Caravaggio had used a drowned prostitute as his model for the Virgin.