The Last Moments of Saint Mary Magdalene

This small panel is one piece of a larger work Botticelli made in Florence around 1490 for the church of the Convertite, a refuge for women leaving prostitution, who took the penitent Mary Magdalene as their patron. It ran along the base of the altarpiece, one of four scenes from her life painted across a single plank of wood. It shows the Magdalene near the end of her life, receiving communion as a hermit in her long hair. In the 1800s the altarpiece was broken up and the plank sawn into four, which is how these little scenes came to be scattered. This one and its neighbours ended up in Philadelphia, in the collection of the lawyer John G. Johnson.