Madalena Penitente

By 1641 Ribera, a Spaniard who had settled in Naples and signed himself the little Spaniard, was changing the way he painted. His early work had come straight out of Caravaggio: bodies dragged from deep black shadow by a single harsh light. Here the darkness is loosening. A warmer, golden light comes across the Magdalene and catches in her loose hair and on the metal jar in front of her, the jar of ointment that identifies her. She rests her cheek against a skull, the reminder that life is short, and looks up and away in thought. This was exactly the sort of saint the Counter-Reformation church wanted people to see, a great sinner who wept and repented, proof that anyone at all could be forgiven. Ribera gives her no drama and no tears, only a quiet woman in rough cloth in the rising light.