Workshop of the Master of 1518, The Magdalen

Saint Mary Magdalene stands behind a stone ledge and holds her attribute – the pot of oil with which she anointed Christ’s feet. An open book, decorated in the style of the fifteenth century, rests on the ledge; the layout of the text shows that it is a prayer book. Behind the saint, a window opens onto a landscape – the cliffs and buildings on the left are a fairly accurate view of La Sainte-Baume, east of Marseille, where, according to legend, Mary Magdalene spent the last years of her life (also shown in The Magdalen in a Landscape).

While the white cross and the bridge just beyond it are probably inventions, the group of buildings further up the hill may be the hospice and convent at the entrance to the cave where Mary Magdalene meditated. The church-like building on top of the rock in the upper left hand corner is the chapel at ‘Saint Pilon’, to which angels carried Mary Magdalene seven times a day, and from which she heard the music of paradise. The coastal town on the right is perhaps Marseille, where Mary, her sister Martha and their brother Lazarus landed from a ship without a pilot or rudder – it had been miraculously guided there from the Holy Land.

The composition is based on Saint Mary Magdalene by Quinten Massys (Louvre, Paris). The Master of 1518 seems to have made an effort to suggest that Mary Magdalene lived in an exotic past: her clothes are extravagantly rich and present a strange assortment of elements of historic, German, Italian, oriental and fancy dress. Her luxuriant hair has been braided into two heavy plaits crossed at the back of her neck and brought forward over her shoulders to meet behind her pot. This style is reminiscent of Venus in Botticelli’s Venus and Mars; the painter of the Magdalen may have seen a print by one of Botticelli’s Florentine contemporaries.