Hemelvaart van Maria 1570 - 1590

Francesco Bassano II made this red and white chalk drawing, Hemelvaart van Maria, sometime in the late 16th century. Bassano was from a family of painters near Venice, at a time when the role of the Catholic Church shaped much of Italian life. The sketch depicts the Virgin Mary's bodily ascent into Heaven. The Apostles gather around her empty tomb below, looking up in awe as angels carry her into the clouds. While the male figures are firmly grounded, Mary is in motion, her arms open in an embrace of the divine. The Virgin Mary embodies the traditional ideal of womanhood and motherhood. It suggests something about how society viewed women’s roles, as both sacred and subservient to the divine will. The raw emotion captured in this sketch, from the surprise of the apostles to Mary’s willing ascent, invites us to consider the relationship between the earthly and the divine, and how gender has been used to define that boundary.