The Penitent Magdalene

In the lower left corner the painter wrote OPUS DOMINICI TINTORETTI, the work of Domenico Tintoretto. That line has spared this picture a confusion that three others in the collection went through. Domenico was the eldest son of Jacopo Tintoretto, and the Capitoline owns three more canvases by him from the collection of the Pio family, a Baptism, a Flagellation and a Crowning with Thorns, which were long catalogued as the father's work before scholars gave them back to the son. The Magdalene is dated to around 1599. Legend said that Mary Magdalene ended her life as a penitent in the wilderness, and Domenico sets her at night, her face raised in rapture toward a light from heaven. The museum draws attention to what lies around her, painted with a still-life painter's precision, the rough mat she is wrapped in and the woven straw she leans on.