La Magdalena leyendo

This calm woman reading in a corner is only a scrap of something much larger. Rogier van der Weyden painted her around 1435 as the lower right corner of a big altarpiece for a church in Brussels, a Virgin and Child surrounded by saints. At some point the altarpiece was cut into pieces. Two other fragments survive in Lisbon, a head of Saint Joseph and part of Saint Catherine, and we know the whole thing only from an old drawing. The bare foot at the upper left of this panel belongs to another figure who is now missing entirely. For centuries the background here was hidden under brown overpaint, until a cleaning in 1955 uncovered the landscape and the window you can see behind her.