The Magdalen

The penitent Magdalen was one of the favourite private devotions of Catholic Europe in the 1700s. A woman who had left a worldly life to weep and pray in the wilderness, she offered an image of repentance to keep close at hand, in a study or a bedchamber rather than a church. This is a small canvas, made for exactly that kind of intimate use rather than an altar. Pittoni painted it in 1745 in the soft, warm manner that made his religious pictures so easy to live with, tender rather than harsh about her sorrow. It hangs today in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, in a room of the 18th-century Venetian painters among whom he spent his whole career.