La Magdalena penitente

The story behind Titian's Magdalene starts with a request. Around 1531 the poet Vittoria Colonna, a devout noblewoman and a close friend of Michelangelo, asked through the Duke of Mantua for a picture of Mary Magdalene that was to be both tearful and beautiful at once. Titian answered with a repentant saint who is unmistakably both, eyes lifted and wet, her body barely veiled by her own loosened hair. He returned to this composition more than once over the following years. The version now in the Pitti Palace in Florence dates to the mid-1530s and came to the city much later, in 1631, with the inheritance of Vittoria della Rovere. Vasari saw an early version of it at the court of Urbino in 1548 and called it, simply, a rare thing.