Saint Mary Magdalene Carried to Heaven by Angels

In 1705 the grand prince of Tuscany, Ferdinando de' Medici, was buying modern pictures in Venice through an agent, the painter Niccolo Cassana. This canvas was one of them. The following year it went on public view in Florence, hung in the cloister of Santissima Annunziata for the exhibition of 1706, at a time when paintings were mostly seen where they had been installed, in a church or a private palace. Cagnacci had made it around 1650, during the Venetian years at the end of his working life. The story is medieval legend rather than Gospel. The Magdalene was said to have spent her last years in a cave in Provence, where angels carried her up into the air to hear the singing of heaven. Cagnacci painted the subject more than once, and a second version by his own hand belongs to the Bavarian state collection and hangs at Schleissheim outside Munich.