The painter Giovanni Baglione, a competitor who had successfully ensured Caravaggio was jailed during a libel trial, said that the unveiling of this painting "caused the common people to make a great cackle (schiamazzo) over it". The uproar was not surprising. The Virgin Mary, like her admiring pilgrims, is barefoot. The doorway or niche is not an exalted cumulus or bevy of putti, but a partly decrepit wall of flaking brick. Only a slim halo indicates her saintly status. Like many moments in Caravaggio’s oeuvre, this is a moment where an ordinary person encounters the divine, whose appearance is equally ordinary, but also divine.