マグダラのマリア

Simon Vouet was a young Frenchman making his way in Rome when he painted this, around 1614. He was in his early twenties, newly arrived in a city where Caravaggio's dark, dramatic lighting was reshaping how painters worked, and you can feel that pull here. It is a small, close picture of Mary Magdalene, her head bowed and turned, reddish hair loose about her shoulders. Beside her is the jar of perfumed oil that identifies her, the ointment she was said to have used on Christ. Vouet would spend more than a decade in Italy, become respected enough to be elected head of Rome's painters' academy, and eventually return to France as the king's leading painter. This quiet early panel hangs now in the Quirinal Palace.