6. Guido, regarded as the painter of Magdalenes par excellence, has carried this mistake yet farther; he had ever the classical Niobe in his mind, and his saintly penitents, with all their exceeding loveliness, appear to me utterly devoid of that beauty which has been called ‘the beauty of holiness;’ the reproachful grandeur of the Niobe is diluted into voluptuous feebleness; the tearful face, with the loose golden hair and uplifted eyes, of which he has given us at least ten repetitions, however charming as art—as painting, are unsatisfactory as religious representations. I cannot except even the beautiful study in our National Gallery, nor the admired full-length in the Sciarra Palace, at Rome; the latter, when I saw it last, appeared to me poor and mannered, and the pale colouring not merely delicate, but vapid. A head of Mary Magdalene reading, apparently a study from life, is, however, in a grand style.[301]
7. Murillo’s Magdalene, in the Louvre, kneeling, with hands crossed on her bosom, eyes upraised, and parted lips, has eager devout hope as well as sorrow in the countenance. 8. But turn to the Magdalene of Alonzo Cano, which hangs near: drooping, negligent of self; the very hands are nerveless, languid, dead.[302] Nothing but woe, guilt, and misery are in the face and attitude: she has not yet looked into the face of Christ, nor sat at his feet, nor heard from his lips, ‘Woman, thy sins be forgiven thee,’ nor dared to hope; it is the penitent only: the whole head is faint, and the whole heart sick. 9. But the beautiful Magdalene of Annibal Caracci has heard the words of mercy; she has memories which are not of sin only; angelic visions have already come to her in that wild solitude: she is seated at the foot of a tree; she leans her cheek on her right hand, the other rests on a skull; she is in deep contemplation; but her thoughts are not of death: the upward ardent look is full of hope, and faith, and love. The fault of this beautiful little picture lies in the sacrifice of the truth of the situation to the artistic feeling of beauty—the common fault of the school; the forms are large, round, full, untouched by grief and penance.
95 Mary Magdalene (Annibal Caracci)
10. Vandyck’s Magdalenes have the same fault as his Madonnas; they are not feeble nor voluptuous, but they are too elegant and ladylike. I remember, for example, a Deposition by Vandyck, and one of his finest pictures, in which Mary Magdalene kisses the hand of the Saviour quite with the air of a princess. The most beautiful of his penitent Magdalenes is the half-length figure with the face in profile, bending with clasped hands over the crucifix; the skull and knotted scourge lie on a shelf of rock behind; underneath is the inscription, ‘Fallit gratia, et vana est pulchritudo; mulier timens Dominum ipsa laudabitur.’ (Prov. xxxi. 30.) 11. Rubens has given us thirteen Magdalenes, more or less coarse; in one picture[303] she is tearing her hair like a disappointed virago; in another, the expression of grief is overpowering, but it is that of a woman in the house of correction. From this sweeping condemnation I must make one exception; it is the picture known as ‘The Four Penitents.’[304] In front the Magdalene bows down her head on her clasped hands with such an expression of profound humility as Rubens only, when painting out of nature and his own heart, could give. Christ, with an air of tender yet sublime compassion, looks down upon her:—‘Thy sins be forgiven thee!’ Behind Christ and the Magdalene stand Peter, David, and Didymus, the penitent thief; the faces of these three, thrown into shadow to relieve the two principal figures, have a self-abased, mournful expression. I have never seen anything from the hand of Rubens at once so pure and pathetic in sentiment as this picture, while the force and truth of the painting are, as usual, wonderful. No one should judge Rubens who has not studied him in the Munich Gallery.
The Historical Subjects from the life of Mary Magdalene are either scriptural or legendary; and the character of the Magdalene, as conceived by the greatest painters, is more distinctly expressed in those scriptural scenes in which she is an important figure, than in the single and ideal representations. The illuminated Gospels of the ninth century furnish the oldest type of Mary, the penitent and the sister of Lazarus, but it differs from the modern conception of the Magdalene. She is in such subjects a secondary scriptural personage, one of the accessories in the history of Christ, and nothing more: no attempt was made to give her importance, either by beauty, or dignity, or prominence of place, till the end of the thirteenth century.
The sacred subjects in which she is introduced are the following:—