Penitent Magdalene by Caravaggio, 1597

 

 

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In the Olympian altitudes of Tuscan and Roman art it was considered quite improper to demote dignified saints and venerable apostles by depicting them in such a way that without their attributes one would take them for ordinary people. It is not surprising that the average conservative was shocked by the young painter who dared to represent Saint Mary Magdalene as a plump girl in her teens, completely indistinguishable from anybody else, except for her jewels, her fancy dress and her ointment jar.

Equally disturbing to these people, as we will see, must have been the reputation Caravaggio earned a few years later by representing the usually very formal Saint Matthew as a kind, poor, and illiterate elderly man with a Socrates head, his coarse legs crossed and exposed to the spectator. But among the younger generation quite a few were delighted by the audacity and charm of this precocious gamin, whose pugnacious wit had already revealed itself in the early paintings of secular subjects.

Caravaggio's lowering of saints from their pedestals, with a slight vulgarity, was not displeasing, even to certain members of the clergy and their adherents who had heard coarse and jocular expressions in the conversation and religious lectures of San Filippo Neri.

Here too Caravaggio is an iconographical pioneer only if one's point of view is limited to Roman art. In the North and in Caravaggio's homeland of Lombardy it was quite customary to give religious figures an ordinary, bourgeois appearance. Savoldo's Magdalene, (London and elsewhere), for instance, is identified as a saint only by the-dimunitive ointment jar in the lower left corner; otherwise she might be a romantically veiled beauty whom one could have seen in the streets of Venice. In Flemish art the Magdalene is frequently represented as a young matron or as a young nun in a simple, almost portrait-like manner.

Caravaggio's Magdalene in the Doria is comparable to the seated Magdalene in the National Gallery in London, attributed to Roger van der Weyden. Although the latter is only a fragment and its background completely overpainted, it certainly suggests the possibility that Caravaggio could have seen a composition in an Italian collection which repeated the general form of this work. From such an example Caravaggio may have received his idea of representing the Magdalene like a sitter for a photograph, in a half-formal pose, silhouetted against a neutral background. But, granted the remarkable similarities of form, the psychological impact is utterly different.

The young woman in the Flemish painting might be a beguine of patrician family; her clear-cut features are serene and gentle as she meditatively and patiently studies her illuminated missal. Caravaggio's Magdalene sits forlorn in dreamy repentance. The somnolent and sluggish posture of her body expresses her humble submission. Her plump young figure seems unsuitably garbed in the over-lavish dress with its rich damask pattern; the precious gems which had formerly adorned her peculiarly innocent-looking figure are scattered over the floor as if thrown down in disgust. It is the moment right after her conversion, and the consuming effect of this experience is shown by her exhaustion and by the painful frown which disturbs her brow.

This display of physical humility as the result of religious emotion creates a new type of Magdalene, which not only diverges from the prim spirit of Northern prototypes, but also from such openly demonstrative and excited Magdalene figures as that by Titian in the Pitti.

Print DIGG MIXX!

Caravaggio "Martha and Mary Magdalene" (1598) Institute of Arts, Detroit

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