Martha Reproving her Sister Mary

Luke's Gospel tells a short domestic story. Christ visits two sisters, Martha and Mary. Martha bustles about serving while Mary sits at his feet listening, and when Martha complains, Christ answers that Mary has chosen the good part. Orazio Gentileschi leaves Christ out. Around 1620 he painted only the two women, and the museum reads their dispute the way his contemporaries did, as the active life against the contemplative one, and as virtue against vanity. That second reading comes from an old tradition that merged Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene, the sinner who gave up her finery. Orazio was not the first to paint the sisters alone. Caravaggio had done it in Rome around 1598, in a picture now in Detroit where Martha counts off her arguments on her fingers, and the museum names that painting as the inspiration here. This canvas came to Munich in 1957, a gift from the brothers Georg and Otto Schäfer of Schweinfurt for the reopening of the rebuilt Alte Pinakothek.