La Madeleine pénitente

El Greco signed this Magdalene in Greek around 1585, but its most curious moment came three centuries later. In the 1890s he was nearly forgotten, dismissed as a strange provincial oddity. Then the Catalan painter Santiago Rusinol bought this canvas in Paris in 1894 and brought it home to the seaside town of Sitges. That autumn he installed it in his house and studio, the Cau Ferrat, and made a public celebration of it, part of a wider push by young Spanish artists to drag El Greco back into view. The painting shows Mary Magdalene as a penitent, young and beautiful still, one hand near a skull that marks how short life is, wrapped in a thick red cloak built up in heavy strokes. Within a generation El Greco had become a hero to modern painters, Picasso among them.