Mary Magdalene in the Desert (Meditation)

The story behind this figure is medieval. After the Gospels, legend sent Mary Magdalene to the south of France, where she is said to have spent about 30 years alone, withdrawn into a cave in the hills of Provence, doing penance for her old life. Puvis de Chavannes gives you the end of that long solitude. She sits on bare rock in an empty desert, her body half covered by the long hair that tradition made her only garment, and she looks at nothing in particular, lost in thought. On the ground beside her lies a skull, the object penitents kept to meditate on death. Across the dry earth, a few small lizards are the only other living things.

Puvis painted this in 1869, and it is a small canvas, barely half a metre tall, an unusual format for a man who spent most of his life covering the walls of French town halls and museums. The scale is intimate, yet the mood is the same cool, classical calm. There is no drama, no tears, no heavenly light breaking in. He keeps the sensual side of the old Magdalene, the bare shoulder and loosened hair, and then stills it completely with that steady gaze and the skull at her side.