Article: Mary Magdalene in Old Master Painting
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Mary Magdalene in Old Master Painting
One sermon, preached in Rome in 591, generated more great paintings than any other text in history except the Bible itself. It was wrong, and the Church took until 1969 to say so. The Penitent Magdalene it invented became the most painted female subject in Old Master art.
The Gospels say almost nothing about Mary Magdalene. She followed Jesus, she witnessed the Crucifixion, and she was the first to see him after the Resurrection. Nothing about prostitution. Nothing about adultery. The rest came from a pope who told his congregation that three separate women of the Gospels were one person.
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| In the Gospels | After the sermon of 591 | ||||||
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The Penitent Magdalene one woman, carrying the jar, the tears, the loose hair and the sin | ||||||
| Scripture never said they were one woman. The Church corrected it in 1969. | |||||||
That merger gave painters something they could not otherwise have. A beautiful woman, hair unbound, shoulders bare, and a subject the Church would hang in a chapel. The Penitent Magdalene was sacred art, and it was often the most sensual picture in the building.
Six attributes
How to Recognise a Mary Magdalene Painting |
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| The ointment jar | The earliest attribute and the most reliable. It refers to the jar of nard used to anoint Christ's feet. In a crowd scene, at the Crucifixion or the Deposition, the woman holding the jar is always the Magdalene. | |
| The loose hair | In medieval and early modern Europe respectable women covered their hair. Unbound hair meant either virginity or shame. Hers is always loose, usually copper-red or gold, sometimes covering her body entirely. | |
| The skull | Memento mori. Beauty fades, flesh rots, only the soul lasts. It appears from the sixteenth century onward, usually next to a book, and it is the single commonest attribute on seventeenth-century canvases. | |
| The book | She reads. This marks a Renaissance shift, the Magdalene as contemplative rather than merely penitent. A thinker, not just a weeper. | |
| The tears | Guido Reni and Carlo Dolci made careers out of this one. Glistening eyes turned upward, and a single tear catching the light. | |
| The cave | Legend puts her thirty years as a hermit at Sainte-Baume in Provence. Rocky landscapes, barren settings, spiritual isolation. |
Venice, Rome, Lorraine, Toledo
The Penitent Magdalene in Old Master Painting |
| Titian1488 — 1576 | A storm of golden hair and flushed skin. He painted her obsessively across three decades, and the late canvases are the strange ones. The flesh dissolves, the hair turns into weather, and the brushwork gets rougher every time. These are paintings about ageing, about the body giving way, and they are as modern as anything in the twentieth century. |
| Caravaggio1571 — 1610 | A Roman girl who has been crying, slumped in a chair in a dark room. No cave, no skull, no ecstatic gaze. Jewellery on the floor, the ointment jar shoved into a corner. He refused the spectacle and painted a private moment, grief or perhaps just exhaustion, and made her human in a way nobody had managed before. |
| Georges de La Tour1593 — 1652 | She sits perfectly still by candlelight, one hand on a skull, staring at the flame. Almost monochrome, brown and black and the warm orange of the fire. No beauty contest and no tears for show. She is thinking, and the skull, the mirror and the flame are arranged around her like the instruments of a private ceremony nobody was meant to see. |
| El Greco1541 — 1614 | The figure stretched vertically, a stormy sky, silvery flesh, the eyes burning upward. His Magdalene is not thinking like La Tour's, not grieving like Caravaggio's, not seducing like Titian's. She is on fire, and the body is overwhelmed by faith. |
1580 — 1700
Why So Many Seventeenth-Century Magdalenes Survive |
Between about 1580 and 1700 the Penitent Magdalene was painted more often than at any other time in history. The Counter-Reformation needed her. She was living proof that even the worst sinner could come back, and every chapel, convent and private oratory wanted one.
Ribera painted her as a weather-beaten hermit, with no glamour and no idealisation. Rubens went full Flemish, abundant flesh and golden light. Simon Vouet brought Caravaggio's approach to Paris. Carlo Dolci turned her into porcelain. And Guido Reni set a formula that worked so well it became one of the most copied compositions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
That is why a great many period Magdalenes are still in circulation, in oil on canvas and oil on panel, mostly unsigned. Workshop pieces, studio replicas, followers' versions, anonymous copies. What each of those words claims about a canvas is set out in our guide to reading attribution.
Three things to check
Buying a Penitent Magdalene Oil Painting |
Count the attributes. A canvas with the jar alone is likely to be early or part of a larger scene. Skull, book and candle together place it firmly in the seventeenth century, when the penitential formula was fixed.
Expect an unsigned canvas. Devotional paintings of this subject were workshop production. School, period and quality of the face matter far more than a name, and the handling of the hair is often the quickest test of the painter's level.
Look at the face, then the hands. These went to the most skilled hand in the workshop. Drapery and background could be delegated, the expression could not, and on this subject the expression is the whole picture.
In American museums
Where to See Them |
Titian, Penitent Magdalene, circa 1555-65. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Caravaggio, Martha and Mary Magdalene, circa 1598. Detroit Institute of Arts.
Georges de La Tour, The Repentant Magdalen. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Georges de La Tour, Magdalene with the Smoking Flame. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
El Greco, The Penitent Magdalene. Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Guido Reni, Penitent Magdalene. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.
| → | The next questionWhich other Gospel woman did painters keep coming back to?Christ and the Samaritan Woman, a subject built on a single conversation by a well. |
Sources. J. Paul Getty Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, National Gallery of Art Washington, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Worcester Art Museum, Walters Art Museum.
