La Madeleine à la flamme filante

Georges de La Tour worked in Lorraine, a duchy that in the 1640s was being ground down by war, plague and famine as French and imperial armies fought back and forth across it. His answer to all that was to paint quiet rooms lit by a single flame. Here Mary Magdalene sits in the dark with a skull resting in her lap, her hand at her chin, watching a candle. That flame is the real subject. It smokes, it wavers, it will burn down, and everything in the picture, the skull, the scourge and cross on the table, turns on the same thought about how briefly a life lasts. La Tour had learned the trick of the single candle from followers of Caravaggio, but he stripped it down to something plainer and more still than anything they made.