Saints Martha and Mary Magdalene

In the Western tradition Mary Magdalene was long taken to be the same woman as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha, so the two saints here are sisters. The younger, in green, holds the jar of ointment. Behind her the older Martha carries a holy-water bucket and sprinkler, the tools with which, in a legend from Provence, she tamed a dragon.

Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, a Lombard painter who made Venice his home, painted them in the first decade of the 16th century for a polyptych at the Certosa di Pavia, the great Carthusian monastery near Pavia, probably for its chapel of the Magdalen. What hangs here is a fragment. A copy kept in the Certosa's museum shows the sisters as they were first painted, standing full length. The panel later belonged to the Melzi d'Eril family in Milan and to the Veronese collector Cesare Bernasconi, and it reached the museum in 1871.