ORAZIO GENTILESCHI

Pisa 1563 - London 1639

Mary Magdalen

Oil on canvas

82.3 x 68.5 cm

PROVENANCE

Private Collection, New York

LITERATURE

R. Ward Bissell, Andria Derstine & Dwight Miller, Masters of Italian Baroque Painting, The Detroit Institute of Arts, 2005, p.91, fig 3;

K. Christiansen & J.W. Mann (eds.), Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, exh.cat. New York 2001, p.192

This painting is an important example of Gentileschi’s repertory. Like other Caravaggesque painters, he was thought of as working without disegno, whereas in fact he worked a sophisticated variety of designs that are employed for quite different subjects, and with entirely separate clothes and attributes. The basic pose of this Magdalen is used again in the Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Allegory of Music at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It is obvious that a cartoon was used for all three paintings, and they were all three probably painted within the same period, which Mann dates to the visit to Genoa in 1621-24. The brilliant handling of the drapery and colours is the mark of a moment of maturity in Gentileschi’s career, and the use of the cartoon is not as different to the two versions of the Danae (New York, private collection and Cleveland Museum of Art).