Penitent Magdalene

In 1768 the picture gallery on the Capitoline, founded by Pope Benedict XIV some 20 years earlier, passed to a new keeper, and the paintings were checked against a list, wall by wall. Number 45 was a Saint Mary Magdalene with a cross in her hand, oval, an original by Guido Reni, three and a half palms high and two and a half wide. A Roman palm was a little over 22 centimetres, so the entry matches this oval, about 78 centimetres tall.

Reni painted it in the last decade of his life, between about 1635 and 1640. In the same list it comes straight after two pictures that are still in the collection, Pietro da Cortona's large Rape of the Sabines and Rubens's Romulus and Remus with the she-wolf.