St Mary Magdalene

This panel was painted in Florence in the late 1490s, the years when the friar Savonarola had the city burning its mirrors, wigs and paintings in his bonfires of the vanities. Filippino Lippi gives Mary Magdalene none of the beauty Florentine painters usually lent her. She is drawn thin from years of desert penance and wrapped in nothing but her own grown-out hair, which the old legend said covered her once her clothes had rotted away. She stood as one of a pair of saints flanking a Madonna, with John the Baptist as her companion on the far side. Lippi was the son of a painter-friar, Fra Filippo, and had grown up inside exactly the religious world this figure belongs to. The gold jar in her hand is the ointment she carried to Christ's tomb.