Die büßende Maria Magdalena in Ekstase

Caravaggio painted this in the worst summer of his life. In late May 1606, in a brawl in Rome, he killed a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni and was sentenced in his absence to death, a sentence anyone was free to carry out. He fled the city and hid on the country estates of the Colonna family, and it was there, a hunted man, that he painted the Magdalen thrown back in ecstasy, or perhaps grief, her hands loosely clasped, tears on her face, everything else swallowed by darkness. He seems to have kept the picture with him as he moved from town to town. For a long time it was known only through copies made by his followers, until what looks like his own version surfaced in a private collection in 2014.