Assumption of Mary Magdalene

By 1636 Jusepe de Ribera had spent two decades in Naples, then ruled by Spain, where he was the city's dominant painter and known for a brutal, honest realism. Here he turns to a gentler legend. Medieval tradition held that Mary Magdalene spent her last 30 years as a hermit in a cave in Provence, and that angels carried her up into the air each day to hear the music of heaven. Ribera paints that lift: the Magdalene borne aloft on a bank of young angels, a bay glinting far below that may stand for Marseille. The strong light and deep shadow are his, but the mood is gentle rather than harsh. The canvas hung for a time in the palace of El Escorial before it came to the San Fernando academy in Madrid.