Maria Maddalena

Savoldo came from Brescia but painted like a Venetian, and around 1535 he settled on a single image and repeated it at least four times. A woman kneels at dawn, wrapped in a shawl of silver-grey satin, and turns to look straight out at us. She is Mary Magdalene, on the morning she came to Christ's tomb and found it empty. The small jar of ointment beside her is the clue, the oil she had brought to anoint his body. Savoldo spends most of his skill on that shawl, on the cold early light sliding across the satin while, far behind her, dawn breaks over the Venetian lagoon. It is a quiet, almost private picture for a subject others painted as high drama. Of his four versions, this one is thought to be among the last.