The newly founded bank provides a new source of income for the Archhospital of Santo Spirito (founded 1201), whose financial difficulties had been increasing throughout the sixteenth century, and in 1607 the bank begins supervising the finances of the hospital, which owns the bank.

Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, commissioned in 1601 by a wealthy jurist for his private chapel in the new Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala, had been rejected by the Carmelites in 1606.

Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini records that it was rejected because Caravaggio had used a well-known prostitute as his model for the Virgin; Giovanni Baglione, another contemporary, tells us it was due to Mary's bare legs—a matter of decorum in either case.

Caravaggio scholar John Gash suggests that the problem for the Carmelites may have been theological rather than aesthetic, in that Caravaggio's version fails to assert the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary, the idea that the Mother of God did not die in any ordinary sense but was assumed into Heaven.