Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo came from Brescia, on the edge of the Venetian mainland, and spent most of his life in Venice, painting slowly and selling little. He left only a handful of pictures. What he did leave, other painters remembered.

His subject, again and again, was light: a single low sun or a lamp catching the folds of cloth and the sheen of skin against a darkening sky. His most famous figure is a Mary Magdalene, shown at dawn near Christ's empty tomb, drawing a mantle of pale silvery satin around herself. The whole painting seems built to show how that light slides across the fabric and half uncovers her face as she turns.

He was working in the 1530s, decades before a young Lombard called Caravaggio would make that kind of raking light and plain, close realism the language of a new age. Historians reach for Savoldo when they trace where Caravaggio's darkness came from. Four versions of that silvery Magdalene survive, scattered now among collections in London, Berlin, and beyond.