Éxtasis de la Magdalena

According to a medieval legend that every painter of the age knew, Mary Magdalene spent her last 30 years as a hermit in a cave in the hills of Provence, without food or clothing. Seven times a day, at the hours of prayer, angels lifted her up so she could hear the singing of heaven. That is the moment José Antolínez paints here, around 1670: the saint borne aloft on a cloud of angels, her hair loose, her eyes turned up, the rocky wilderness dropping away below. Antolínez worked in Madrid in the last years of the Spanish golden age of painting, and he came back to this subject again and again, drawn to its swirl of upward movement and warm colour, which he had studied in the Venetians and in Rubens. He would not have long. He died in 1675, at about 40, of a fever. The pull of the picture is all vertical, everything rising with her.