The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Quite contrary – but utterly ravishing
‘They must be the most magnificent shoes in all of Baroque art,” says the National Gallery’s Francesca Whitlum-Cooper of Mary Magdalene’s sandals in Guido Cagnacci’s The Repentant Magdalene. And looking at their tapering square-cut toes, all gilded and bejewelled, you can believe it. The shoes lie in the foreground of the spectacular 8ft-wide 17th-century painting, spotlit and so lustrously hyperreal they could almost be plucked from the canvas and put on by some passing fashionista.
Yet they’re just one of many extraordinary elements in this strange and hypnotic masterpiece, which is making its first appearance in this country in 35 years. The eponymous Magdalene lies sprawled, halfnaked across the floor, deep in conversation with her sister Martha, apparently oblivious to the towering angel behind her, the embodiment of Virtue, who beats the shadowy figure of Vice from the room, as a couple of terrified servants look on from a doorway.
At first sight, the apparent realism and powerful chiaroscuro – the stark contrast of light and dark – bring to mind the slightly earlier master Caravaggio, who was still a hugely influential figure in Cagnacci’s mid-17th century heyday. But there’s a greater warmth and sensuality to Cagnacci’s painterly touch and his approach to the juxtaposition of the human and the divine is far more eccentric.
To modern eyes it’s the bizarre disjunction between the various elements that is most startling. While the allegorical figures – Virtue and Vice – seem to exist in a classical monumental dimension, the conversation between the two sisters feels disconcertingly modern in its intimacy and naturalness.
“This is Mary Magdalene as you’ve never seen her before,” says Whitlum-Cooper. “Generally the penitent Magdalene was seen as an isolated figure sitting quietly contemplating her past sins, as in the works of Cagnacci’s French contemporary Georges de La Tour, or in a state of ecstatic repentance as in many of Cagnacci’s own works. Here, however, she lies with her face in shadow, so our attention is drawn to the golden voluptuousness of her naked back and legs, while her fine clothes and jewels lie scattered over the floor, as though she has torn them off in a state of furious renunciation.”
In other words, we have the chance to reflect on Mary’s renunciation of sin, while being drawn into the sensuality that engendered it. That might be thought of as hypocrisy or simply as a fine exposition of the nature of art: its aims may be moral, but its means are inevitably sensual.
Mary Magdalene is a shadowy and contested figure in the history of Christianity. All four gospels refer to a Mary of Magdala, who was present at the Crucifixion, to whom the Resurrection was first revealed, and who had, we are told, a former life of sin. It wasn’t until the Middle Ages, and the appearance of Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, a hugely influential book about the lives of the saints, that it became generally understood that Mary had been a courtesan.
She was to become conflated with a completely different figure, Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Martha, whom Jesus praised for listening to his parables, while the more prosaic Martha went about her household tasks. It isn’t immediately obvious today why a woman who was more interested in spiritual truth than in sweeping the floor should come to be embodied as a prostitute, but that’s the medieval mind for you.
That is the figure we see here: lectured, once again, by Martha who points rather vaguely up at Virtue and Vice, though this time Mary is really taking it all in.
In Britain for the first time in decades, Cagnacci’s sensual masterpiece shows Mary Magdalene as never before Behind Mary, Virtue beats the shadowy figure of Vice from the room Her fine jewels and clothes lie over the floor as if she has torn them off
From the little we know about him, Cagnacci (1601-1663) comes across as a dinstinctly disreputable nonconformist. Born near Rimini, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, he is understood to have been a follower of the Bolognese school, whose masters, such as Guido Reni and the Carracci family, were influential throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. While there are whole eras of his life about which nothing is known, he steps