Penitent Magdalene

This is early Caravaggio, a young painter newly arrived in Rome and still making his name in the 1590s. The subject is meant to be Mary Magdalene, the reformed sinner, at the moment she turns away from her old life. But look how ordinary he makes her. She is just a young woman sitting on a low chair, her head bowed, her hands in her lap, apparently drying her hair. Caravaggio drops the usual saintly signals. Instead her cast-off jewellery and a small bottle of oil lie discarded on the floor beside her, doing all the storytelling. People said he simply painted a girl from the street and called it a saint. That refusal to idealise, to make holiness look like a real person in a real room, is exactly what would soon make him famous and controversial across Rome.