The Penitent Magdalen

Georges de La Tour spent his life in Lorraine, a duchy that spent the 1630s being torn apart by the Thirty Years' War, by plague and famine. Out of that he made some of the quietest paintings in Europe. Here Mary Magdalene, the follower of Christ who left a worldly life for penance, sits by a single candle. Her hand rests on a skull, the old reminder of death, and a mirror doubles the flame and throws the light back at her. There is almost no incident, just a young woman thinking, the geometry pared down to a face, a hand, a jar. La Tour was famous in his own day, then forgotten for nearly three centuries, and only pieced back together by scholars in the 1900s from a handful of these night scenes.