Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [82]
Neither for the first nor the last time in his life of Caravaggio, Bellori’s criticism was mitigated by grudging admiration. Compelled by his own academic dogma to dismiss the work, he none the less responded instinctively to its vivid style and unusual composition.
Mary Magdalen was one of the most popular saints of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, which placed a heavy emphasis on the moral responsibilities of each and every believer. She was held up as a shining example of penance and conversion, a beacon for all those languishing in darkness and sin. According to the most prominent part of her legend, she was a prostitute who repented, and ‘the woman whom Jesus loved’. The biblical Mary Magdalen was the woman from whose mouth ‘seven devils’ were exorcised in the gospel of St Luke. But tradition also identified her with Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus of Bethany, and with the unnamed repentant sinner blessed by Christ for washing his feet with her tears, drying them with her hair and anointing them with oil (Luke 7:37–50). In the Eastern Church these figures were regarded as separate individuals, but in the West all three were merged into Mary Magdalen. Her fable was further embroidered during the Middle Ages, when she was said to have travelled from the holy land to the South of France, where she ‘went into the desert and dwelt there thirty years without knowing of any man or woman’.
In the mid fifteenth century the Florentine sculptor Donatello had carved a harrowingly ascetic sculpture of Mary Magdalen in the wilderness, portraying her as a gap-toothed hermit with withered flesh, wasting away in a hair shirt. But by Caravaggio’s time, Donatello’s raw immediacy of imagining had fallen out of fashion. The image of Mary Magdalen, epitome of the repentant prostitute, had become fossilized by convention into two basic types: either she appeared as a beautiful nude in a landscape, decorously draped by tresses of her own luxuriant hair, praying before a crucifix and skull; or she appeared as a demure aristocrat reading a book indoors.
Caravaggio rejected both of those stereotypes to create his own, highly distinctive image of Mary Magdalen. The hands of the figure are boneless and the anatomy of her chest and neck unconvincing, but the painter’s conception of the subject is impressively original and characteristically dramatic. Caravaggio placed the girl who modelled for the painting on a chair so low that her knees must have been only inches off the ground. As a result, she is seen from above, almost as in a compressed version of a bird’s-eye view, so that at first sight it is not quite clear whether she is sitting or lying outflung on the ground. It may have been this extremely unusual perspective, so alien to the pictorial conventions of the time, that led Bellori to think of the work as a perverse exercise in purely optical painting. But it has a poetic point to it. By seating Mary Magdalen so low, Caravaggio emphasizes her humility – the etymology of which, derived from the Latin humus, or ‘ground’, itself expresses the idea of abasement.
Caravaggio’s Magdalen is no emblem, but a person in turmoil. She sits in darkness, but above her an abstract wedge of light intrudes, as if to dramatize the light of Christ entering her soul. The painter depicts her in the immediate aftermath of her conversion – the moment just after Christ says, ‘Thy faith has saved thee; go in peace.’ A single tear trickles down the side of her nose. She has torn off her gold and her jewels and scattered them on the ground. The glass