The Penitent Magdalene

Guido Reni painted this Magdalene around 1631 or 1632 for Antonio Santacroce, a churchman from an old Roman noble family whom Pope Urban VIII had made a cardinal in 1629, and it was in the cardinal's hands by 1633. It is a big canvas, well over two metres tall. The young woman sits in a bare cave with her eyes raised, one hand resting on a skull and the other under her head, and Reni sets around her the signs of penance, of fasting and of meditation on death, and the cross. Two small angels hover in the air above her. A commentator of the time, seeing it when it first appeared, called it sacred beauty.

Santacroce died in 1641, and the picture was then given to the Barberini, the pope's own family. In 1812 it passed to the Sciarra, a branch of the same family. After a spell in the Corsini collection in Florence it was bought by the Italian state in 1897, for the national gallery housed in the Barberini palace.