Saint Mary Magdalene

For years this painting went by the wrong name in the Rothschild family. Baron James de Rothschild acquired it in Paris in 1840, trading for it a picture by the Belgian animal painter Eugène Verboeckhoven, and his inventory called it simply a saint. His son Alphonse, who kept it at the château of Ferrières outside Paris, listed it as Pandora, because the woman is lifting the lid of a vase.

She is the Magdalene. The vase is her jar of ointment, the one she brought to anoint Christ, and she holds it behind a marble balustrade set between columns of red porphyry. Metsys painted her in Antwerp in the early 1500s. The Louvre allows, while calling the idea fragile, that this may be the Magdalene by Metsys that the Dutch traveller Johannes de Witt described in 1591 in a collection in Leuven, a few years before he sketched the inside of the Swan Theatre in London. The museum acquired it from Guy de Rothschild in 2005.