Assumption of Mary Magdalene

The canvas carries no signature and no date, so the museum places it by style in the painter's last years, between 1670 and 1675. The subject comes from the Golden Legend, the medieval collection of saints' lives that every Spanish painter knew. After Christ's death, it says, Mary Magdalene withdrew to a cave in Provence for 30 years, and at each of the canonical hours angels lifted her up to hear the singing of heaven. That lift is the moment painted here, a steep diagonal of deep blue, mauve and silvery white. The Prado's own catalogue reads her loose brown hair and her crossed hands as a deliberate bow to Titian, the Venetian whose Magdalens sat in the same royal collection this picture came from when it entered the museum in 1829. Antolinez returned to the subject more than once. In the versions in Bucharest and Seville the saint stays on the ground, penitent.