La conversione della Maddalena

Veronese was about 18 when he painted this, still in his home town of Verona and years away from the vast, crowded feast scenes that would make his name in Venice. It shows Mary Magdalene at the moment she turns from her old life toward Christ, a subject drawn from a popular retelling of the Gospels that Italians were reading in those years. The colours are the surprising part. Instead of the warm Venetian tones you might expect, he reaches for the sharp, shifting hues of Florentine painting, an approach almost no one in Venice was trying yet. The light rakes in from the right, which tells us the panel was probably made for the side wall of a chapel, lit as if by a real window nearby.