Maria Magdalena

A viewer around 1500 would have expected Mary Magdalene as a penitent in rags with a jar of ointment. Perugino gives them a calm young woman in the fashionable dress of his own day, seated against a dark ground in the manner he had picked up from Flemish pictures during his years in Florence. Without the ointment jar, though, there was nothing to say who she was, so he lettered her name across the broad collar of her gown, where you can still read it. The face is thought to be his wife, Chiara Fancelli, who sat for several of his Madonnas. The picture so impressed later owners that by 1691 a palace inventory had reassigned it to his most famous pupil, Raphael.