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By Root 1322 0

jar beside her, three quarters full, contains the same unguent with which she anointed Christ’s feet. It is echoed by the shape of a vase in the damask of her dress, a visual pun that may have its own significance. She is herself like a vessel that has been filled with the spirit of the Lord. Her closed eyes suggest the idea that she is looking within, perhaps even experiencing the transports of mystic vision. She looks as though she is cradling an imaginary child. Perhaps she is thinking about her namesake, the Virgin Mary, and reflecting on the mystery of the mother whose divine child is foredoomed to die.

When Caravaggio reimagined the Magdalen in this way, when he thought about the heart of her story and asked himself how to bring that story to life, he was doing just what Carlo Borromeo had urged the preachers of post-Tridentine Milan to do. The true precedent for his painting lay in images formed from words, rather than paint or stone. There is nothing like his Penitent Magdalen in the visual art of late sixteenth-century Italy, but turn to the sermons of the time and close parallels can be found. The following, for example, is a description of Mary Magdalen in the passionate transports of her conversion given in a sermon by Francesco Panigarola, a preacher closely associated with Borromeo: ‘now she retraces her steps, her legs stagger, now she starts to take off all her vain ornaments, now to utter cruel invectives against indecent womankind, now to disparage the beauty of the eyes, now to groan, exclaiming, “Oh roof, why don’t you fall down and crush me?” Casting down her necklaces and jewels, shaking her tresses, violently wringing her hands, she trembled …’34 Caravaggio’s picture is like a still image pulled from the flow of such thoughts. It would always be his practice as a religious painter to rethink sacred story as living drama. Perhaps, when he did so, he often began by remembering the images conjured up in the sermons of his childhood.

The Rest on the Flight to Egypt, always closely associated with The Penitent Magdalen, must have been painted at around the same time. Caravaggio employed the same young model, a redhead, in both cases. In the second picture she has metamorphosed from distraught courtesan to exhausted Madonna. She sits cross-legged on the ground, cradling the infant Christ in her lap. The baby sleeps peacefully but the mother’s rest is more fitful; Mary’s head lolls, her cheek resting on the crown of the infant Christ’s head. Her brow is furrowed. There is some hesitancy in Caravaggio’s painting here. He has trouble articulating the junctures of chin and neck, neck and shoulder, and her limp hands are only a little more convincing than those of the Penitent Magdalen. But there is great tenderness, none the less, in the artist’s idea of mother and child. The heavy-headed Mary is a refugee huddled with her baby, snatching a moment of rest while she can. Bellori, that keen if reluctant admirer of Caravaggio’s humanity, noted the poignancy of ‘the Madonna who, with her head inclined, sleeps with her baby at her breast’.

On the other side of the painting sits a wizened, greybeard St Joseph. Wrapped in folds of heavy brown cloth, he has the weather-worn face of a working man. He rubs one of his bare feet with the other in a way that suggests he is feeling the cold. His head is placed almost disconcertingly close to that of the ass, which stands patiently behind him. The objects beside him, a bundle wrapped in green striped cloth and a flagon of wine sealed with a twist of paper, speak of the family’s hurried displacement. Caravaggio’s Holy Family is very much in hiding. They nestle close together, within a bower sheltered by undergrowth. Like illegal immigrants seeking to avoid detection, they have made themselves small and unobtrusive.

The painter’s biblical source was the Book of Matthew, 2:12–15, which recounts the events immediately preceding Herod’s massacre of the innocents: ‘the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and