Magdalen

Humbly seated on the ground within a dark cave, Mary Magdalene turns her back on a mountainous landscape to meditate instead on the heavens. Her sole possessions are a blue robe, a skull, and a book. Mary Magdalene is described in the Gospels of the Bible as one of Jesus’s followers, who was present at his death and burial. It was only by later voices that Mary Magdalene came to be thought of as a prostitute who had abandoned what was considered a sinful life in the Christian tradition and returned to God. This idea of Mary Magdalene explains her depiction here – she is reminiscent of a reclining Renaissance nude, with her exposed torso and unbound hair. Her classical beauty is at odds with her status here as a hermit in the wilderness. 

This composition is a copy of the original in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, which is generally attributed to the Italian painter Annibale Carracci (1560-1609). Using Mary Magdalene to explore the idea of the sinner’s return to God, this painting defends the Catholic sacrament of penance, which was attacked by Protestant reformers during the Counter-Reformation (1545-1648), a series of reforms within the Catholic Church made in response to the Protestant Reformation which swept across Europe in the sixteenth century.