Though born in Antwerp, Calvaert travelled as a young man to Italy in 1560 and studied with Prospero Fontana in Bologna, where he settled for the rest of his career. 'Dionisio' was greatly respected in his adopted city as a conscientious, though occasionally irascible, teacher, whose studio produced some of the great names of Bolognese painting - Domenichino, Guido Reni and Francesco Albani. Calvaert's style was less admired, especially by the artistic biographers of the later seventeenth century. Malvasia considered his way of working 'too licked and mannered' (troppo leccato e manieroso). It was this mannerist aesthetic that caused all three of his famous pupils mentioned above to desert his studio in order to join the 'Carracci Academy', founded in Bologna in the 1580s by Ludovico, Annibale and Agostino Carracci.

This is one of the small-scale works on copper which, according to Malvasia, Calvaert and his pupils produced in great quantities and sold to Flemish dealers. A late work, painted when the artist was in his sixties, this must have appeared old fashioned to an Italian audience accustomed to the work of Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio. However, it is broadly in line with the style of Netherlandish mannerists working at this date in Prague, like Bartholomeus Spranger (1546-1611); in Haarlem, like Karel van Mander, Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) and Cornelis van Haarlem (1562-1638); and in Utrecht, like Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651) and Joachim Wtewael (1566-1638). The contorted postures of the Apostles demonstrate the flame-like or serpentine arrangement of the body, recommended by the contemporary Italian theorist Lomazzo as possessing maximum grace and variety. Such a form was thought to convey an expressive abandon, or what he called 'fury of the figure' (furia de la figura).

The subject comes from various early church fables collected by Jacobus de Voragine in his Golden Legend of c.1260. The Apostles were brought by angels to the Virgin's death-bed and assisted in her burial in a tomb in the Vale of Josaphat; there she was assumed (that is, 'carried up'), body and soul, into heaven, 'great multitude of angels keeping her company'. In art the empty tomb is often shown, as here, filled by flowers miraculously fallen from heaven. St John of Damascus (c.675-c.749) called the Virgin the 'font of true light' and likened her assumption to the sun appearing after an eclipse. Calvaert uses a similar metaphor, creating a heavenly glory around the Virgin in the likeness of the rising sun. This floats within a deep-blue dawn sky, which picks up the colour of the Virgin's robe and is also symbolic of her celestial nature. Each of the Apostles seems to be touched with a slight warm after-glow from this dawn light.

Catalogue entry adapted from Bruegel to Rubens: Masters of Flemish Painting, London, 2007