The Penitent Magdalene

From 1623 to 1627 Charles Mellin was the first assistant in the Roman workshop of Simon Vouet, a French painter who worked for the circle of the Barberini, the family of the reigning pope. This canvas, almost two and a half metres tall, comes from the last months of that partnership, around 1626 or 1627, before Vouet left for Paris. The penitent Magdalene was a subject the Barberini especially liked. Mellin sets her in front of a stretch of sea, which the museum reads as a hint at Provence, where legend placed the hermitage she withdrew to after Christ's death. She looks up to heaven in the studied pose painters used for melancholy, meditating on death and sin. The museum points to a contradiction the period enjoyed. Her clothes have slipped, and her pale body shows little sign of fasting, so the picture stirs the very desires her penance was meant to punish. It stayed with the family until the Italian state bought it from the Barberini collection in 1952.