Maddalena come Malinconia

Artemisia Gentileschi painted this in the early 1620s, at a point when she was doing something almost no woman of her time managed: running her own workshop and winning her own commissions across Italy. She gives Mary Magdalene the pose long used for Melancholy itself, the body slumped, one hand pressed to a cheek, the eyes swollen and red from crying. It is a close autograph version of a Magdalene she painted for Seville, and scholars have often noticed how much the tired, rounded face resembles the artist's own, known from her signed pictures of Judith and of Cleopatra. The deep shadow and the single fall of light on the yellow silk come straight out of the Caravaggesque manner of Rome, where she trained as a young painter.