The Repentant Magdalen

Georges de La Tour worked in Lorraine, a small duchy that in the 1630s was being torn apart by the Thirty Years' War, by French invasion, by plague and famine. You would never guess it from this. A single candle lights the whole picture. Mary Magdalen sits in the dark, one hand resting on a skull, a plain mirror throwing the flame back at her. The skull is death, the mirror the vanity she is giving up, the candle her turn toward a spiritual life. La Tour strips everything else away: no landscape, no crowd, no incident, just a young woman thinking her way toward a hard decision by a flame that leaves half the canvas black.