Santa María Magdalena en éxtasis

Rubens painted this around 1619 for a Franciscan friary in Ghent, in the middle of the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church was answering Protestant plainness with images meant to move the body as much as the mind. Mary Magdalene had by then become the model of the repentant sinner, and legend held that she spent her last years as a hermit in a cave in Provence. Rubens shows her there at the mouth of the rock, half-fainting in religious rapture, held up by two angels so she will not fall. Her eyes have rolled back and her mouth is open. French troops seized the picture in 1794, and it has hung in Lille ever since.